Hi Reader,

This note is a day late. I'll tell you what got in the way, because it turned out to matter more than being on time.

Yesterday, an unexpected email landed in my inbox.

It came from someone who helps run a book club. He wrote to say they had chosen my book as their next read. That alone would have made my day. But it was not the news that undid me. It was the paragraph underneath: that people I had met over the past year had walked away talking about the work, that it had made a real difference to them, that it was rippling further than I could see.

It landed at the end of a long launch week (I happily launched a new program about coaching-led leadership, and we started our live sessions). And when I opened the email, I read it twice. And then I sat at my desk and, I will admit it, got a little teary.

Here is what struck me once I had collected myself.

Nothing about my week had actually changed. The to-do list was the same length. The tiredness was just as real. All that changed was that one person spent ten minutes telling me the work mattered.

We do not talk enough about how much that matters, especially for the people whose work is mostly giving. You get used to sending things out into the world and rarely hearing where they land. You keep going without the confirmation, because the confirmation was never the deal you signed up for. And then a note like this one arrives, and you notice how much you had quietly been going without.

There is a strange asymmetry underneath all of this, and the research has caught it well.

​Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley ran a simple experiment. They had people write letters of genuine thanks, then asked both the senders and the receivers how it would go. The senders were wrong, over and over. They underestimated how surprised and how moved the recipient would be, and overestimated how awkward and clumsy they themselves would seem.

We hold back the kind words because we assume, wrongly, that they will matter less and land more strangely than they truly do. The person who wrote to me had no idea he was rescuing a hard week. He thought he was passing on some nice news.

And on the receiving end, the effect runs deeper than we let ourselves believe. A 2025 study in the journal Educational Studies looked at teachers, in one of the most quietly depleting jobs there is, and found that feeling genuinely appreciated was tied to higher job satisfaction and noticeably lower emotional exhaustion. Not more pay. Not a lighter load. Simply the sense that the work was seen.

I think about the leaders I coach, many of them holding responsibility that most people around them will never see. The ones who last are not the ones who never get tired. They are the ones who, every so often, get told that it mattered and let themselves believe it.

I spent an entire book, Clarity in Chaos: Lead with Purpose in Disruptive Times, making the case that steadiness in hard seasons is built from big, deliberate things. I still believe that. This week just reminded me how much of it can also arrive in two unremarkable paragraphs from someone who took the time.

So, with this in mind, here are two small things you might try this week:

Option A: Send the one you have been meaning to send. Someone crossed your mind this week: a mentor, a colleague, a person whose work made your life easier. Tell them. Be specific about what it was and what it changed for you. Do not polish it for an hour or wait for a better moment. The research could not be clearer: you are almost certainly underestimating how much it will land.

Option B: Let the next one in. This is the harder one for the givers among us. The next time someone tells you that you made a difference, resist the reflex to wave it away, to say "oh, it was nothing," to move the conversation on. Just take it. Let it reach the tired part of you it was meant for. You are allowed to be filled up too.

I have already written back to the person who made my day, and told them that he made it. The other emails, the ones I have been meaning to send for far too long, go out this week too.

You just thought of someone, didn't you? Send it before the thought passes.

- Megan