The most expensive lesson I have ever learned took years to fully understand.
I confused words with truth.
Someone would tell me exactly what I wanted to hear and I would believe them, because I wanted to believe them. I overlooked the inconsistencies. I rationalized the red flags. I told myself I was being too sensitive or too suspicious, and I kept giving the benefit of the doubt long after the evidence had stopped supporting it.
After 29 years in one of the most high stakes industries in the world, this is what I know now.
Words are stories. Behavior is truth.
People will tell you who they want you to think they are. Their actions will eventually tell you who they actually are. These two things are not always the same. The gap between them is where every bad hire, every broken partnership, every misplaced trust lives.
I learned this the hardest possible way.
For years, I had been part of the leadership of a company. I had given everything to it. My time. My reputation. My relationships. My loyalty. The words coming back at me from the people I had built that company alongside were the right words. Encouragement. Appreciation. Promises about the future. Reassurances when I asked direct questions.
The behavior was telling a different story.
Decisions were being made without me. Conversations were happening that I was not part of. Information that should have come to me first was reaching me last, or not at all. My instincts kept telling me something was wrong. I kept overriding them, because the words said everything was fine.
By the time I finally stopped listening to the words and started reading the behavior, the damage was already done. A campaign of false allegations had been quietly assembled against me over months. People I had trusted with everything had been sitting across the table from me, telling me one story while building another one in the dark.
The worst part was not the betrayal.
The worst part was realizing how many times my own body had told me the truth before I was willing to listen to it. The tightness in my chest before certain meetings. The exhaustion that came from being around certain people. The way I would replay conversations afterward, trying to figure out what had felt off about them. My nervous system had been tracking the gap between their words and their behavior for a long time. I just had not been brave enough to trust what it was tracking.
You do not need to become suspicious of everyone. You need to become a student of patterns.
Does what they say match what they do? Does their behavior stay consistent when no one is watching? Do their actions align with their stated intentions over time? If yes, trust is earned. If not, you already have your answer no matter how convincing the words are.
This is true in business. It is true in marriage. It is true in friendships. It is true with the contractor in your home, the agent representing you on the biggest financial decision of your life, the family member asking you for one more chance.
It is also true with yourself.
When you tell yourself you are fine and your body is telling you something different, your body is the truth. When you tell yourself this relationship is good and you wake up every morning feeling smaller than you did the day before, the morning is the truth. When you tell yourself this is the right decision and your sleep has not been steady for weeks, your sleep is the truth.
Intuition is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition happening faster than your conscious mind can explain. Your body knows. It has always known. The work is to slow down long enough to listen to it.
When something feels off, slow down. Watch. Let time do what pressure cannot.
The truth always shows itself eventually. Your only job is to be paying attention when it does.
I learned this lesson at the cost of a 29 year career, a reputation, and almost everything I had built. I would not wish that learning curve on anyone. But I will tell you what I tell every person who comes into a Clarity Call carrying the same nagging feeling about a person, a situation, or a decision they cannot quite name.
The feeling is information. Treat it that way.
If something in your life feels off and you cannot put your finger on it, this is where you start.
Always,
Lorri
I feel like you just described the history of my engagement and marriage.😔 I wish I could have booked a clarity call with you when I was Twenty. Oh well. Never too late?
Hi the podcast will air tonight. I will link it here in my substack. Stay tuned 😉