The Five Phrases Quietly Undermining Your Requests

Patricia runs a 12-person advocacy organization, and she has one sentence to send in an email.

Her program coordinator keeps submitting grant reports 24 hours or less before they're due, and they should take Patricia about 30 minutes to review them, but every one of these from this coordinator has been taking about three hours of rewrites because whole sections are thin or missing.

So Patricia opens her email, and types the following, I need grant reports 48 hours before the deadline.

She looks at the sentence sitting there on its own and thinks it looks so bare.

And she's thinking, that sounds cold.

She's juggling a lot.

So Patricia adds, when you get a chance.

So now it says, I need grant reports 48 hours before the deadline when you get a chance.

Then she adds, if it's not too much trouble.

And then at the end, she adds again, I know you're juggling a lot, so no worries if that doesn't work.

She reads it back and sees what she's done.

In three edits, she's turned a requirement into a suggestion and written her coordinator a polite way out of it.

So she deletes the whole thing and starts over.

And then she starts over five more times.

Patricia told me all of this in one of her coaching sessions.

She never sent that email.

And the day before, her coordinator's latest grant report had landed 18 hours before the deadline.

And Patricia stayed up until midnight fixing it.

Patricia knew exactly what she needed and she had every bit of authority to ask for it.

What stopped her was the moment the clear sentence showed up on her screen.

You know that sentence that said right at the very beginning, I need grant reports 48 hours before the deadline.

And her conditioning read it back to her as it was too demanding and too controlling and not to offend her coordinator.

And so she softened it until there was nothing left to send.

Now, Patricia has plenty of company.

Let me tell you about Jennifer.