Articles
On communication.
Guides on difficult conversations, emotional tone, workplace conflict, and how to say hard things without making them worse.
Signs your message sounds more aggressive than you intended
The gap between what you meant to communicate and what the other person reads is almost never random. There are specific, recurring patterns in how messages sound more aggressive than intended — and most of them are invisible to the writer.
How to write a professional email when you're angry
Anger changes how we write in specific, documentable ways. The same frustrated person will choose different words, different sentence lengths, and different levels of directness depending on their emotional state. Understanding what anger does to professional language is the first step to managing it.
How to respond to the silent treatment
The silent treatment works because it creates exactly the anxiety it appears to be responding to. Understanding what it communicates — and what it does not — is the starting point for responding to it without making the dynamic worse.
How to have a difficult conversation over text
Text is a poor medium for emotional nuance — there is no tone of voice, no facial expression, and no ability to course-correct in real time. But sometimes a difficult thing needs to be said in writing. Here is how.
What passive aggressive actually means in a text message
Passive aggression in texts operates through a specific mechanism: it communicates hostility or frustration while maintaining the surface appearance of neutrality or politeness. The deniability is the point.
How to set a limit with a parent without starting a fight
The problem with most attempts to set a limit with a parent is that they invite an argument about whether the limit is warranted, rather than simply creating the space you need.
How to follow up on an email without sounding desperate
The anxiety around professional follow-ups produces exactly the behaviour that makes them feel desperate — the excessive softening, the pre-emptive apologies, the signals that you do not believe your request is worth their time.
How to respond to a passive aggressive coworker
Passive aggressive behaviour at work operates precisely because it hides behind plausible deniability. The challenge is not recognising it — it is responding in a way that does not make things worse.