"Leave it with me"

Someone left a note on our car this week. And it disturbed me more than it should have.

It had been parked on a public road near the kids' school - legally, no painted bays, no signs, no obstruction. My wife dropped the kids in the morning. I collected them in the afternoon and I didn't even notice the note until we got home.

It read:

"Don't park here all day. Your pathetic little car does not need two car parks. Next time we will get you towed."

I read it twice because I honestly thought I'd misread it the first time. And then, I just sat there - shocked.

Not because of the parking feedback. If someone had a genuine concern, a civil note would have done the job. Even a knock on a door. But that's not what this was.

What this was - was someone choosing aggression as their tool for discomfort. And it stayed with me all week. Not because it was devastating. Because it was unnecessary. And because, as the week unfolded, I kept seeing the same pattern showing up in very different places.

The wrong tool
Here's what I mean.

The note-writer had a problem - real or perceived - and, instead of reaching out with decency and civility, they reached for hostility. Threats. Language designed to diminish. And the kicker? It didn't solve anything. It didn't improve a parking situation - in fact, the 8-year old in me so wants to go park back there tomorrow in the worst legal way I possibly can. All it really left was a bad taste and a whole blog about their tool of choice. 

Jokes aside, the impulse is more common than we'd like to admit. We reach for the wrong tool all the time.

We reach for aggression when we need curiosity.
We reach for avoidance when we need honesty.
We reach for another credential when we need to do the internal work.
We reach for busyness when we need to sit with something uncomfortable.

The tool feels like action. It looks like a response. But it doesn't actually address what's underneath.

The trophy
This week, our football team collected the league winner's trophy. Our sixth in seven seasons. 

Last season, we went the entire year unbeaten - not a single loss, a couple of draws, but never defeated. And we still didn't win the league (because of goal difference). In the final game, we beat the team that took the title! We won the match and still lost the season.

That hurt in a specific way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it. The injustice of doing everything right and still not getting the outcome.

We had a choice about how to respond to that.

We could have reached for bitterness. For blame. For the comfortable story that the system was unfair and we were robbed and all the other teams were out to get us. All of those things had some truth in them.

Instead, we came back this season and played for glory.

That's the right tool for that kind of hurt. Not the satisfying one. The right one.

Two conversations
This week I also had two coaching conversations that stayed with me.

In the first, a young person was trying to find their way out of a funk. We went deep - deeper than either of us expected.

And what became clear was that the thing keeping them stuck wasn't what they thought it was. The funk had a root. And the root was older, more personal and more uncomfortable than anything on the surface.

The most efficient path out wasn't a strategy or a system or a new habit. It was an honest reckoning with something that had been sitting beneath the surface for a long time. The right tool, in that case, was the hardest one to pick up.

In the second conversation, someone was considering another qualification. Another credential to add to an already impressive resume. The hope, I believe, was that eventually the accumulation would silence the doubt.

I said it as kindly as I could: you've proven through your current and past roles that your credentials were not what got you the accolades, the kudos. Another credential is not going to fix the feeling. You're not going to achieve the confidence from the paper, you’re going to find it with The Source. 

The right tool for that problem isn't more paper. It's more work - on you.\ 

"Don't worry. Leave it with me."
This week I also attended the funeral service of a friend.

She was the kind of person who noticed when something needed doing - and did it. Quietly, actually often it was pretty loud but not in a fanfare kind of way. But never needing to be asked twice.

One of her former managers spoke at the service and quoted something she used to say. Something that I immediately recognised:

"Don't worry. Leave it with me."

I could almost hear her voice saying it: "Don't worry Niyaaz. Leave it with me."

And sitting there, I realised: that line "Leave it with me" didn't always mean the same response. Sometimes it was a tough conversation, at other times it was a wooing one. Sometimes it was roll-up the sleeves and burn the midnight oil and at others, it was let's find the right people to help us with this. And so, for almost everything in this blog, I saw "Leave it with me".

The parking frustration? "Leave it with me" looks like a civil note, not a threat.
The season that hurt? "Leave it with me" looks like coming back and playing for glory instead of bitterness.
The funk? "Leave it with me" means going to the root, not the surface.
The credential loop? "Leave it with me" means doing the internal work, not reaching for more paperwork.

My friend didn't respond to other people's problems with aggression, or avoidance, or shortcuts. She responded with presence. With appropriate action. With the willingness to take something on and see it through. 

And somehow, even at her own service, she was still doing it - bringing people together one last time, as if she'd planned it that way.

Maybe she had.

Final thought
So here are the questions I'm sitting with this week - and I'd invite you to sit with them too:

• Where in your life are you reaching for the wrong tool - the aggressive response, the avoidance, the extra credential - when something harder and more honest is what's actually needed?

• What would it look like to respond to your current discomfort with the right "Leave it with me"?

• What version of yourself shows up when things get uncomfortable - the one who reaches for the wrong tool, or the one who says "Leave it with me" and means it?

Because the right tool is rarely the easiest one to pick up.

But it's always the one that actually works.

"Don't worry. Leave it with me."

Go on. Take the Next Step.