Lovely Human,

Every week, I watch something fascinating happen inside the client’s offices we advise at CEO level.

The leaders talking the most are rarely the ones moving the fastest.

It's not because the quiet ones have nothing to say. It's because they've learned something the talkers haven't yet: the most valuable thing a leader can do in a room is create the conditions for someone else's best thinking to emerge.

It is a fact that the higher you climb, the more your answers can crowd out other people's thinking. When you speak first, you set a ceiling. When you speak loudest, you narrow the room. And when your team gets used to waiting for your answer, and they will, you have built a dependency you don't even know you're feeding.

My greatest leadership act are the questions I refuse to answer for my team.

Not because I don't know. But because the team knowing is worth more than I knowing. This is how you get ownership of the answer that will outlast any directive you issue.

There's a principle in coaching called "staying curious longer than is comfortable." It means sitting with the silence after you ask a question. Not filling it. Not softening it. Letting the discomfort do its work.

Most leaders bail on the silence within four seconds. And I get it …impatience seems to be baked into our DNA.

So here's the challenge this week: track your tell-to-ask ratio in every meeting.

Every time you state, inform, advise, or direct, that's a tell. Every time you ask, probe, wonder aloud, or genuinely sit with "I don't know, what do you think?" that's an ask.

If your ratio is above 2:1, you're not leading at your best yet.

Religious Focus this month- Quakerism

We explore a unusual religion each month not to convert anyone to change believe , but to open up our vision board on how we all of us process joy, suffering, peace and this incredible journey called life.

The slides were all wrong.

Amara had known it at midnight, when she finally stopped scrolling through her forty-three-slide deck and sat back in her chair. The pitch was tomorrow morning. A major consultancy. A contract that could change the trajectory of her small firm. And the deck felt like armor i.e every slide another layer of protection between her and the client's judgment.

She closed her laptop. Made a cup of tea. And sat in the dark in the way she'd been taught.

Amara had been a Quaker since her late twenties, joining a meeting in East London after years of feeling that every institution she belonged to was either too loud or too certain. What drew her wasn't the silence itself, it was what the silence was for. Not emptiness. Readiness. The difference, her first meeting had taught her, is everything.

She opened her laptop again and started deleting.

By 2am, the deck was eight slides. By 3am, it was six. Each cut felt like a small loss and then, a few seconds later, a relief , like putting down something she hadn't realised she'd been carrying.

The Quaker testimony of simplicity is often misunderstood as an aesthetic preference. Fewer things. Quieter rooms. But that's the surface of it. What the testimony actually asks is: what are you holding onto that is not true? Not what is unnecessary but what is untrue. Because in Quaker understanding, complexity is often fear in disguise. The extra slide is the hedge. The lengthy caveat is the dread of being wrong.

Simplicity, in this tradition, is the practice of removing what you've added to protect yourself so that what is true can be seen.

The next morning, Amara walked into the presentation room with her six slides and said to the room: "I'm going to show you what I actually think, not everything I know."

The pitch took eighteen minutes. The client said yes.

She texted her meeting friend afterwards: "Used the testimony today." The reply came back: "How did it feel?" Amara thought about it for a moment.

"Like being honest."

In Quaker tradition, the testimony of simplicity (or "testimonies" SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship) is one of the lived values that Friends are asked to embody not just in worship but in commerce, speech, and daily decision-making. The question it asks is never "how little can I have?" but "what am I adding that doesn't serve the truth?"

Guiding Question

Where are you adding complexity to protect yourself and what would happen if you strip back to what’s simply true?

The higher you climb, the more dangerous your answers become.

Your team doesn't need your answer. They need your best question.

If you're the smartest person in every room, you are in the wrong rooms.