The Real Reason You Can't Name Your Work (It's a Good Thing!)

I always learn something new about my life when friends come over.

We sit around the table for dinner. Or lean on the back of the couch. Or stand on the sidewalk as the kids run up and down the front hill. Or we sip coffee in a coffee shop. Or we zoom video call. Or put them on speaker. Or go visit their town for a weekend. Or pass through for quick visit.

No matter the context or reason, I learn something new. They’ll ask a question and I’ll answer it. Or they’ll ask a question and Robbie will answer it. And how we answer surprises us. Some new detail sneaks in. A flavor of how we’ve been feeling. The way the recent season connects to some past event in our lives. The summary and details changes with each person we talk to, because friendship changes with each friend, each unique human soul drawing out something different in us. And I get to hear myself and Robbie in a totally new way.

When we’re off on our own, little time for friends or connection, I tend to miss pretty key facts about my family, my spouse, myself. Even though I tend towards regular self-reflection, nothing quite brings it all to light like someone who loves me being curious and inviting me to say things.

There’s a good reason for this.

and that has to do with the nature of language. When we’re naming ourselves, we’re using words and we’re tapping into the language part of our brains, and there are some very specific ways that language is structured. It is both incredibly magical—and sometimes limiting.

Language forms in dialogue. Language only forms and evolves when we are interacting with other people. When we are in conversation. It’s a part of language that can actually feel lovely. But it can also feel like a barrier because we have, at least in America, so many stories about individual genius that we think we’re supposed to be off on our own in a cabin in the woods, generating new possibilities or coming up with our own name. Or we’re great communicators—we can talk to anyone about anything—but we still have a hard time naming ourselves. That’s because language is about dialogue.

Think about how you learn how to speak in the first place. As a baby, you learned how to speak when an adult got in your face and made sounds back and forth with you. That is how language developed in your brain. You figured out that the sounds you were making back and forth meant something and could cause changes if you combined certain sounds. The sounds started to have meaning.

But the other piece is that language is uniquely wired in our brains. When you figured out what a tree was, it was at a very specific moment in time, connected to a particular person who was helping you make that connection to a particular tree. So when you think about trees, you draw on a whole lifetime of experiences, specific to that idea, specific to you.  I can say to my sister, “You remember Grammy’s table?” and we both think of the idea of tables in general, the specific table Grammy used to feed us at, and all the family drama about who would get the table when she passed on. Our minds are able to attach complex realities and sensory experiences to the abstract structure of words spoken or read. We can say “Grammy’s table” and know the specificity and complexity of that phrase. Our minds fire networks of meaning, which have been knit and woven across our lifetimes. No two people have the exact same pattern.

This is why it’s hard to name our work. It’s why “branding” as an inside project can be wasted effort. If naming were easy, we would have done it already. Instead, it’s an elusive thing. I’ve found it ridiculously difficult for myself and only really came to clarity around it through years of conversations with friends, therapists, mentors, and most of all Robbie.

Language doesn’t form when we’re off on our own. We need someone to invite us to speak. We need to be heard. We need their reflections back to us. We need the wonder of seeing someone we know better than anyone in the whole world suddenly become new to us in what a friend brings out of them. We need conversation.

So it doesn’t surprise me that the people I’ve worked with, Unboxable Leaders each and every one, are phenomenal communicators in their own right. They are great listeners and often hold the container for their communities/clients/students to discover their own voices and words. But they can’t do the same for themselves.

My Unboxable Leaders often make the joke “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” but I don’t think that’s the problem here. It’s just how language is wired into our brains. Once you know that, all the guilt and slog goes away. It’s not that something is wrong with them or even that we’ve been trained to put ourselves last (though that can play a role). It’s mostly that we were told we had to be independently brilliant and in charge of all parts of our lives and work. And it’s not true. We only get words when we are in conversation.

The Ground Truth Process book won’t be same as being listened to by a real person. But I hope that it can instigate the dialogue. Be a friendly presence and structure as you go about naming your work. If you go through the steps and find it hasn’t quite worked, it probably just means it’s time to bring in another voice. Like tea, it’s often best when shared with a friend.