Profiles in Being Seen: Everyone else was walking on eggshells. He wasn’t.

Cary had just come back to work.

She’d taken an extended leave to get treatment for an eating disorder.

Now she was ready to reengage in her professional life working as an organizational psychologist working with patent attorneys. But while her colleagues and boss were glad she was back, they didn’t know quite how to interact with her. Without asking Cary what she wanted or needed, they gave her the work that everyone viewed as less challenging and time intensive. They wanted to protect her.

While Cary understood their instinct, she wanted to use her doctorate and experience and be intellectually challenged again. She wasn’t being challenged at all. 

Then one day, a few weeks after her return to work, Doug called her into his office. Doug was from a different business unit and he wasn’t her boss. He’d been assigned to her as a mentor through an organizational mentoring program. They had talked a lot and he knew what she’d been through, but he’d never seen her work. 

He got right to the point.

We have this opportunity. It’s incredibly challenging. You’d be really good for it.

The work involved facilitating a highly contentious process with a group of senior partners who were patent attorneys. They did not want to be in conversation and they did not want to cooperate.  

Cary was 25.

The organization was full of senior consultants in their 40s and 50s who could have done that work. Doug chose her.

She was stunned.

Why would you choose ME for that?

She said it out loud. What she felt underneath was something quieter: Do you know what I just came back from? Do you know where I’ve been?

He did know. That’s exactly why he chose her.

When Doug looked at Cary, he didn't see a person who needed to be protected. He saw a woman who had faced incredibly difficult challenges head-on — and wasn't afraid to talk about them.

That, he understood, was not fragility. That was exactly the quality you'd want in the room with a group of people who didn't want to be challenged.

So, Doug put her in the room.

Cary facilitated a hard conversation using her skills, experience, and grit. And, it worked.  The attorneys came to an agreement. 

This was just one of many times that Cary demonstrated her ability to do difficult things. 

And a few years later, when Doug moved to a new organization, he asked Cary to come with him — to lead executive development for senior leaders in positions of significant organizational authority. It was a position that, on paper, required more experience than Cary had. Doug didn’t seem to care about what made sense on paper.

He kept pitching her for projects that more experienced consultants would typically take. Each time, she’d feel that same flash of why me? — and then something else underneath it, something steadier. Yeah. I could do that.

Her career opportunities continued to grow. 

Cary told me that what moved her most wasn’t just that Doug saw something in her. It was that he acted on it. He took a risk. There was no data to back up his instinct. There was just a feeling — she can do this — and the willingness to put his own reputation behind it.

People see things in people all the time, she said. But they don’t do anything with it. They don’t say it. They get distracted and move on. It’s just a whole bunch of missed opportunities.

She’s right. But why?

Sometimes we’re afraid of being wrong. Intuition without evidence feels risky, especially in environments that prize what can be measured. Sometimes we tell ourselves we’ll say something later, when the moment is better. And sometimes we convince ourselves that protecting someone is seeing them — that softening the ask, shielding them from the hard thing, holding back the challenge is an act of care.

It can be. But not always.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can see in someone is that they don’t need to be protected. That they’re ready for the hard thing — even before they know it themselves.

Cary now has her own company and does similar work professionally. She goes into organizations, sits with leaders, and has the conversations nobody else wants to have. She also speaks openly about her own journey — about mental health. She does that, in part, because of people like Doug. People who didn’t see her eating disorder as the most important thing about her.

I asked her how she’d describe what she does now.

Hard conversations heal, she said.

She learned that from a man who looked at her when she was at her most uncertain — and gave her something hard to do.

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I’ve been doing a deep dive into what it means to truly see someone — and what happens when you do. Stories have been coming to me from all directions, and Cary’s is one that stays with me.

Have you been seen the way Cary was — at a moment when you most needed someone to look past what you were going through to what you were still capable of? Or have you been the Doug in someone’s story — the one who saw something and decided to act on it?

I’d love to hear from you. DM me if you have a story you’d like to share.

Lori    

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