She Said 'I believe in you.' That's When I Knew Something Was Wrong.
This is week three of the Isolation at Altitude Series. Last week we sat with the Backstory Tax. This week, we turn to a different kind of gap. One that did not used to be there.
You may remember the moment.
You took something difficult to one of your trusted thought partners. Someone whose pushback had sharpened your thinking for years. You expected what you had always gotten. Instead, she listened, she tried, and when it was her turn to push back, she could not. Not because she did not care. The thinking you were now doing had outpaced the experience she could draw on. So she did the only thing she had left to do. She encouraged you.
That moment is the Cheerleader Problem. And once it has happened with one thought partner, you start to recognize it happening with others.
Perhaps it was a mentor who had been your north star, or the colleague you grew up with in the business whose career had taken a different turn. Or maybe it was the closest friend you had in the industry, the one you always called first, whose voice was still familiar but whose work had gone in a different direction than yours.
For me, it was my youngest sister.
And then I reached the C-suite.
The first time I brought her a real strategic question and the pushback did not come, I knew something had changed. She listened, thought carefully, and said: “If anyone can figure it out, you can. I believe in you.” She meant every word. And she was not wrong. But that was not what I needed or expected.
I needed someone who had sat in a seat like the one I was now in to look me in the eye and say, I think you are missing something here. She could not do that. Not because she was not brilliant. Because she had not yet stood where I was now standing.
That was the moment I understood that one of my most important thought partnerships had quietly changed shape. The relationship was still real. The function inside it was no longer applicable in the way it had been.
It is different from the Backstory Tax in a way worth naming. The Backstory Tax is paid with people who never had the lived experience to engage with your altitude. The Cheerleader Problem is the opposite. These were the people who could engage. The thought partnership was real. Then your work took you somewhere their experience could not follow.
You may have felt it as disappointment, or as a loneliness you could not quite place. That feeling has a structural explanation. The relationship is intact. The function inside it has quietly disappeared. You can love her completely and still need something she cannot give. Both can be true.
The cost is not only emotional. It is operational. The strategy that does not get stress-tested. The blind spot that no one names. The decision you make alone.
Encouragement and thought partnership are not the same thing.
🔜 The Proximity Trap comes next.
🤏TINY TWEEK Challenge
Identify one person in your current circle who used to challenge you and now mostly encourages you. You do not have to do anything about it. Just name the shift. That is the tweak.
