The cost of veiled communication

and the freedom of saying things outright

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

I grew up in a family where big feelings were rarely said directly. Meaning lived in the pauses, tones, hesitations, and slight detours in a sentence. What was spoken aloud was often not what was actually meant, so the only way to understand anything was to learn to read underneath the words.

That shaped me, not entirely in a negative way mind you. It trained me to become exquisitely attuned to the emotional subtext in any room.

It also made me work far too hard to decipher people who weren’t actually hiding anything.

As an adult, and as someone who now works with leaders, founders, and complex systems, I’ve noticed how much this pattern still runs in the background. When someone speaks with care, I often scan for subtext. When someone adds context, I wonder what they are trying not to say. When someone reassures, part of me listens for the warning beneath it.

And it’s not because I’m anxious (although it certainly sounds that way), but because I was trained to ‘survive’ by reading the invisible layers. But here’s an insight that landed for me recently, one that now feels like a cornerstone of my own leadership practice:

Directness is not danger.
Context is not critique.
Clarity is not a redirection.

Sometimes people are simply telling you what they mean.

And the more I let myself receive communication at face value, spoken cleanly without decoding, the more coherent my own system became. There is less friction, more trust, more presence, and more space.

This is the leadership lesson:

When we speak with transparency and clean lines, we free the other person’s nervous system from the burden of deciphering us and create relational coherence.

And when we allow ourselves to be spoken to that way, without bracing for the unsaid, something shifts internally. The body stops preparing for threat. The field opens and communication becomes a direct, present exchange, rather than a puzzle to solve.

In a world saturated with ambiguity and half-signals, the simple act of saying the thing kindly, clearly and without veils is a profound form of integrity and care.

Journal Prompt: In your relationships right now, where are you bracing for subtext and where might you be speaking in it?