Waiting Is the Work

There’s a particular frustration I feel when I see something I reported months ago show up again, cited as if it just landed. Someone else’s byline, someone else’s moment, built on ground I already walked. It’s a rock in my shoe. Small, but I feel every step until I get it out. For a second, something in me wants credit, to be seen as first. Sitting with this is not comfortable, as we were taught to just do the work and not worry about who gets credit. I hold the space as long as I am able, and start to reflect on the system I am now a part of. Journalism.

We have created a world where we reward speed and 140-character soundbites, and journalism has adapted. Being early carries its own currency, even when early means incomplete and half right. The correction can always come later, offered in the shadows, and the damage or the reward — depending on where you are in the story — is collected. The inflamed version is the one that travels. The careful version arrives after the algorithm has already moved on. I sit with this too. How can we create a thirst for the truth, however complicated and messy? I remind myself I am a part of the system too.

Most of my career in leadership and communications has rewarded me for speed, innovation, wit, and my pattern recognition. Journalism is a different kind of teacher. A refining in some of my own shadows around identity and value. They are falling away, with some resistance for sure, but falling away.

Right now I’m sitting in exactly that kind of wait. A records request is out, filed weeks ago. By the time I get it back the story will feel stale to many. Does it become less relevant? Not worth the time and space? I certainly can publish now and fill in the details later, but does the devil live in those details?

I know I am not alone in this inner stillness, the request for quiet reflection and dare I say boredom? In my leadership world the same current runs. A leader waiting on real sales data before declaring a strategy has worked faces the pull toward the story that flatters the plan. A doctor waiting on a full panel before naming a diagnosis feels the pressure to offer certainty before the picture is complete. The manager sitting with an unclear reference check feels the itch to decide now rather than sit inside not-yet-knowing. Wherever your work rewards decisiveness recognizes this ache. The answer isn’t complete, and everyone around you wants one anyway. You included.

What I’m learning, slowly, is that limbo counts as work. Real work. The waiting is where the rigor lives, the commitment to truth, however inconvenient it may feel. Holding the incomplete story loosely, resisting the urge to fill the gap with speculation dressed up as confidence. Resisting to declare the end of the story, because you have seen the plot so many times. Call it a different kind of rigor, harder than the alternative because it offers no immediate reward. Even when you are first, someone with more followers or reach gets the credit and doesn’t cite your work. Then, like out of nowhere, you get a message from someone grateful for the precision and the no-villain methodology, because they didn’t have time to do the research and trusted my work to help them make decisions they could have otherwise gotten wrong. That is enough.

I know the power of the pause. I coach to it and practice it daily. This is deeper — it invites our shadows to the table for a visit. Suspending a conclusion when the outcome feels obvious can feel like torture, and it’s the rigor I have chosen to sharpen my saw on. I think this has gotten easier as I have seen the harm in the alternative. I also remember my Gram sharing with me that to rush life is to waste it.

That’s the trade I’m choosing, over and over, even when it’s uncomfortable. This is what is calling me. We all have something wanting to come alive through us. The act of honoring it is a refining and a joy.

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