They never got back to me.
The surprise isn’t in the silence anymore. It’s in the rare reply. I sent a note, after hours, to a business about a disappointing purchase, and one of their staff members responded with a thoughtful reply that included a solution. The surprise of receiving such a reply landed more than I expected, and that feeling pointed to something worth pausing on. The surprise itself comes from years of experiencing customer service that has consistently disappointed, alongside the incessant “please rate me at the end of the call” requests that have made rating into a chore rather than a meaningful acknowledgment. When there is something genuine to acknowledge, I am glad to rate. Otherwise, no, and this does not mean I will rate every time to please an algorithm.
One newsletter for your whole life ecosystem
Our life is an ecosystem. The way we work, lead, parent, partner and show up online is all connected, and there is no separate “professional self” running one program while the “personal self” runs another. Every unanswered message, every promise dropped, every “let me circle back” that never circles back, lives somewhere within the whole and shapes what we hand back to the people in our world. Issue 1 explored your relationship with time. This issue continues the conversation by looking at how that time is spent or invested, and specifically, the You who shows up in your time.
Develop Your Ideal Presence™
The work I do with clients lives within the Develop Your Ideal Presence™ model, which maps eight elements of how a professional shows up: Prepare, Health and Attitude, Style, Brand, Actions and Body Language, Conversation and Relationships, Skills, and Contribution. At the centre of the eight sits your WHY, your intention, the reason you are doing what you are doing. Eight elements is a lot to cover in one newsletter, so today we focus on one of them.
The Actions element of the Develop Your Ideal Presence™ model, holding engagement, accountability and responsiveness.
Actions: where intention meets evidence
Actions is the element where what you mean to do meets what you actually do, and where others come to know your intention through your behaviour rather than through the words you may have shared with them earlier. Inside Actions, three threads return often in my work with clients: engagement, accountability and responsiveness. Mark Colgate, in The Science of Service, frames a parallel idea as the three Rs of reliability, responsiveness and relationships, with accountability running underneath all three. Engagement looks like showing up for the people you work with, being willing to do the work; accountability means owning what you said you would do, on time and in full; and responsiveness is closing the loop, even when you do not have the full answer yet. None of this is revolutionary, and yet it has become rare in practice.
Why this matters now
Inboxes are noisier, and calendars are tighter than they have ever been, and the cultural permission to ghost a request or leave a thread half-finished is now widely available and often silently accepted. When someone does come back to us with care and follow-through, it serves as a signal that we matter to them rather than a transaction to be completed. This is presence in its everyday form, the kind that builds trust one returned message at a time.
One action for this week
Open your email or your messages this week, find three people you have been meaning to get back to, and reply to them. A short reply counts: “Got your note. I’ll have something for you by Friday” is a complete act of responsiveness, and it does not need to be eloquent, only honest and timely. Notice what happens in your body when you send it, and notice what shifts in your day after.
A Closing Thought
We are not as separate as we behave, and the person waiting for your reply is part of your ecosystem, whether you intended them to be or not.
