I have facilitated four hundred workshops in eight years. I cannot answer my mother when she asks how my day was

A management consultant reflects on how years of highly structured client workshops weakened her ability to handle an ordinary unstructured conversation

I AM THIRTY eight years old and I have worked as a management consultant, first as a manager at Deloitte and then, for the last four years, as an independent, out of a two-desk office on the mezzanine of an old textile mill in NoDa on the north side of Charlotte, North Carolina. Most of my clients are regional banks headquartered in the Carolinas or the Southeast, which means the work is the specific kind of financial services consulting that involves quarterly regulatory adjustments, digital transformation roadmaps that got delayed twice, and the particular way you talk to a chief operating officer who has been told for three years that his core banking system is on the verge of being replaced and has learned to distrust the phrase. I run three to four client workshops a week, and by rough count I have facilitated close to four hundred of them over eight years.

The workshop has a shape. Not written down in any single book I could hand you, though there are books, but as internalized in me now as the muscle memory for typing my own social security number. I open with a reframe of what the client thinks the meeting is about, because in nine cases out of ten the room has arrived with three different assumptions about the purpose and it is my job in the first four minutes to make the purpose one. I probe with the specific taxonomy I learned during three years of internal training and have polished since, situation then problem then implication then need-payoff, because a badly ordered question in a discovery session with a bank executive gets you a very polite non-answer that eats twenty minutes of a rented conference room. I synthesize with a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive breakdown of what actually came out of the room, because the alternative is a list of eighteen bullet points the client will forget by Friday. I close with named next actions, each with an owner and a due date, because a workshop that ends without a name attached to a task is a workshop the room walks out of and never re-enters. I have run some version of this shape close to four hundred times, in downtown Greenville hotel meeting rooms with broken projectors and in Charlotte high-rises with the coffee thermos still sealed, and I could run it in my sleep.

The way I found out that the shape had been quietly eating the rest of my talking life was that my mother called me on a Tuesday evening in early April, at about ten past eight, from her small brick house in Winston-Salem where she has lived since my father died in 2014. My mother, whose name is Renee, is seventy nine and retired from thirty two years of school nursing in Forsyth County, and she calls me twice a month for no reason more specific than to hear my voice. She asked me how my day had been, which is a question I have been answering for her since I was in the seventh grade. I said it was fine. Then the line went a little quiet on her end, the way lines go quiet when a mother has offered an ordinary opening and is waiting to find out whether her grown daughter is going to hand her anything at all. I did not hand her anything. I could not locate the sentence a normal person would have located next. She said, gently, that she would let me go, that she loved me, and that she would call again this weekend. I hung up and sat at my kitchen island for what turned out to be forty minutes, working out that I had gone almost a full calendar year without telling my own mother a single true thing about the shape of a working day outside a client-facing tone.

What had happened, once I could look at it, was less dramatic than it had felt at the kitchen island. I had not become a person who did not love my mother or a person who could not be present in a room. I have a husband named Ryan who is an environmental engineer with the state agency and we still talk over the second glass of wine on the porch about the small politics of what is being built where in our neighborhood. I have a book club that meets on Third Wednesdays at a wine bar in South End. I have a running group that puts in ten miles most Sunday mornings along the greenway that used to be a rail spur. I hold my own in those rooms without any trouble. What every one of those rooms had that my mother’s Tuesday-night call did not have, without my noticing the pattern, was an axis to spin around. The book club has a book. The running group has a pace and a route and the mile marker where we stop for water. Ryan and I have six years of the same address. My mother’s call had none of that. Her call was, in the plainest sense, unstructured, and the muscle for the unstructured call had been going quiet on me for years while I was training the other muscle to a professional edge.

Miriam, a former senior partner at McKinsey who left the firm about a decade before I left Deloitte and who now runs a small executive coaching practice out of a co-working space on Trade Street, was the person who put me on to it. I do a monthly reflection call with her, mostly because I decided a few years ago that I did not want to become the specific kind of independent consultant who forgets to look up. On the call after the Tuesday with my mother I told her, in a slightly edited version, that I had not been able to answer a simple family question at eight in the evening without being useless. She said she had gone through the same thing in her early forties, and that her surprisingly practical fix had been a twenty-minute habit she kept between her morning meditation and her first coaching call, on an online conversation platform called Knotchat where you get connected to one stranger at a time in a random one-on-one exchange you can keep to text or video, and that closes when either of you decides it is done. It was not, she said, therapy, and she knew the difference. But for the specific problem I had described, she thought it was worth trying.

The first person I met on Knotchat was a fishing boat captain in Stavanger, who was on his phone in the small hours of a wet Norwegian morning waiting for his crew to finish loading and wanted to talk to somebody who was not going to make a face at what he was about to say, which was that after fifteen years of running the same longline route out of the same berth he was seriously considering selling the boat and going back to work at the salmon processing plant onshore, purely because he had gotten tired of not sleeping the same eight hours two nights in a row. I did not have a preexisting view on the economics of Norwegian small-boat fishing. What I discovered, at my kitchen island in Charlotte with a cup of tea getting cold, was that I could ask him the kind of question that helped him hear his own thinking, which was the skill I had spent eight years pointing at bank executives, and that I could ask it without immediately offering a hypothesis or a next action, which was the part that had gone stiff. We talked for twenty five minutes. He thanked me in a tone I do not think I could have earned from a colleague, and closed the tab. The reflex had not been erased. Eight years of workshop protocol had crowded it out.

I have kept at it in the small self-conscious way you keep at anything that has started giving you back a piece of yourself. On a Thursday evening after a long project debrief I matched with an oolong tea farmer outside Kaohsiung who wanted to explain, in careful English, why the three-day fermentation window his grandfather had taught him was not the four-day window that had become the local standard, and why he thought the difference of a day made the difference between a tea he could sell to hotels and a tea he could sell to his own uncle. Two weeks later a weaver in Cusco, up early in a workshop on the second floor of a courtyard above the Plaza San Blas, walked me through the specific pattern her grandmother had designed in the nineteen sixties for an alpaca blanket that had been in her family longer than she had, and why the modern collectors got it wrong. On a Sunday night when I had already told myself I would not open the laptop again, a handcrafted eyewear maker in Lyon walked me through the specific reasons he preferred the cellulose acetate frames he sourced from a small factory outside Milan to the titanium frames the rest of the market had gone to, and lost patience with me only once, in a way I found charming, when I called titanium a lazy metal. None of them knew I was a consultant. Two of them told me small unexpected things I have not been able to repeat to anyone since, which turned out to be the part of the arrangement I could not have seen from the outside.

Knotchat’s shape is the whole reason it has been useful. One person at a time, in an exchange that starts wherever the two of you want it to and ends when either of you decides it is done. I would not describe it, to a colleague at a client debrief or to my husband on the porch on Central Avenue, as a stand-in for the slow work of knowing people whose names you learn over years, and I have kept the distinction in front of me. What it has been, honestly, is a small stationary bike for a muscle I had let go quiet while the professional muscle was doing all the walking. I use it twice a week, in the evening between dinner and reading, for about twenty minutes at a time, and most of the conversations are, in a way I did not expect to appreciate, forgettable.

My mother called me back on a Tuesday about six weeks ago, at close to the same eight-ten in the evening, from the same house on the same street in Winston-Salem where the redbud in her side yard had just come into bloom. She asked me how my day had been. I asked her, before she could get any further, how the crossword was going this week, because I remembered she had told me on a call two months earlier that Wednesday’s puzzle in the paper had started to feel harder to her since she turned seventy nine and she had been trying to work out whether that was the puzzle or her. She said Wednesday’s had held her for twenty minutes on a single clue about a Broadway show she had not seen since 1974, and then she started telling me about the clue and the way she had finally gotten it. We talked about her puzzle and then about a neighbor’s beagle and then about a memory of my father she had been sitting with, and when I finally looked at the microwave clock we had been on the phone for close to fifty minutes. Near the end she said, without any special weight on it, that she liked it when I told her about things like this. I said I had noticed I liked telling her, and we stayed on the line another minute in the small quiet way we used to when I was a child on the kitchen phone.