(Photo by Bedford Photography)
It was Easter, I was twelve, and my grandparents’ house in Denmark, Western Australia, was very, very quiet. Something had caught my eye — my grandparents’ names, right there on the spine of a cream-coloured book on the top bookshelf. The swivel chair wobbled beneath my feet as I stretched toward the shelf, but my fingertips finally reached it, and I pulled the book down to look at the cover. It’s not really snooping if it’s right there on a shelf, right? Then my eyes popped out of my head. “Sexual Joy in Marriage: An Illustrated Guide to Sexual Communication by Michael and Dorothy Clarke”. I stared at the words. My grandparents had written a sex book. I turned it over in my hands like I was playing ‘Operation’… delicately, heart in my throat, terrified that one wrong move would set the buzzer off. Then I held my breath and opened to page one.
Understandably, my grandparents’ writing career, and what turned out to be a bestselling sex manual published in three languages and with incredibly descriptive imagery (to be clear: not of my grandparents!), hadn’t come up in conversation before I was 12. But it was something we talked about a lot in the years that followed. The idea for the book, my clinical psychiatrist Grandpa told me, started when he noticed a pattern in the conversations his patients weren’t having with him.
From all walks of life, they came in to discuss anxiety, depression, or stress, but very often their symptoms had the same root cause: the thing they actually needed help with was their inability to talk about what they needed from the person lying next to them every night. As he would say to me, “Sometimes the most important conversation is the one we keep finding reasons not to have”.
That idea — sometimes we avoid what we most need to say — has been a guiding light and a motivational force for me at every stage of my life since. And this week, I had the joy of hosting a conversation with Esther Perel, who has also devoted her extraordinary career to helping people say what they most need to say. Psychotherapist, author of Mating in Captivity, and one of the world’s most influential voices on relationships, Perel has also built a career out of challenging taboos. It struck me when we spoke that for both my grandparents and for Perel, the work is never really just about sex, it is about human connection — and our confounding ability to avoid the words that might give us more of it. Interviewing Esther Perel at Growth Faculty’s LeaderShift Event, Sydney
I regularly see the same pattern in the workplace. We spend around a third of our lives there, more than a decade if you add all the minutes up, and yet the conversations we most need to have sometimes don’t make it into the room. But if the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives, then paying attention to our conversations – even at work – is one of the most important investments we will ever make.
Here are three reflections that are paramount for effective relationships of any kind.
#1: Listening intently to the stories of others allows us to see ourselves
When we truly listen to another person’s story — even one that bears no resemblance to our own — we find ourselves in it. There is neuroscience to back this up: our brains release oxytocin when we listen to stories, the same hormone released when we’re with people we love and trust. As I wrote in The Leading Edge, “story is fundamental to connection, trust, and ultimately relationship-building.”; The leaders who understand this don’t just tell better stories. They create the conditions for others to feel less alone in theirs.
#2: Friction is not the enemy — it’s oxygen
We are living in an era increasingly allergic to discomfort. AI promises perfect, predictable, frictionless outcomes — and the temptation to opt in is entirely understandable. But friction is the critical second act of every hero’s journey. It’s the productive heat that transforms an embryonic idea into a genuine game-changer. It’s what keeps the spark alive in relationships. I think about this constantly in my work in conversational design — a well-curated collision of unlike minds can generate extraordinary energy and innovation. Importantly, these conversations that matter most are rarely the easy ones. As we increasingly outsource difficulty to technology, our ability to deliberately lean into tension will become one of the most critical leadership skills of our time.
#3: The conversations we’re not having are the ones that matter most
One of the most striking patterns I observe in facilitating executive forums is how often it’s clear that we are not having the right conversation. Not because people don’t know what the real issue is — they almost always do. But because somewhere along the way, they’ve been given ample proof their leader cannot handle it. So, we have ‘performative conversations’ – the safe ones instead of the necessary.My Grandpa saw this in his psychiatric practice fifty years ago. Esther sees it in relationships every day. I see it in boardrooms. The speed at which a leader can create the conditions for real conversation — not performative, but productive — can be the difference between identifying an issue early and being thrown headlong into crisis.
Every organisation has the conversation it needs. Not every leader creates the conditions to have it. What’s yours?