In partnership with
Welcome back to The Human Leader Project. It has been three weeks since we last connected. I traveled, and the time away did the thing time away sometimes does — it changed what I came home to think about. The essay I had planned for today isn't the essay I am writing. This one came back with me from Istanbul.
We start here.
Our second afternoon in Istanbul, Jonathan and I got into a cab to ride to the historic part of the city. The ride was about thirty-five minutes and the cab was hot — muggy in the way a closed car gets hot in early summer. The driver had his windows up. The air conditioning was running — I could hear it — but no cool air was coming through the vents.
I tried Google Translate. Would you mind making the AC cooler? I read the Turkish out loud the best I could. The driver glanced once, did not understand, kept driving. I tried again. I tried a third time, slower. He did not understand. I could not hand him the phone to read because he was driving. The traffic was heavy and stop-and-go and his eyes were on the road and the road was not giving him much room to look anywhere else.
I gave up.
I told myself the car was old. I told myself the AC might not work at all. I told myself the driver did not care. Somewhere in the middle of the third story, the driver cracked his window and lit a cigarette, and the smoke joined the heat in the cab, and I rolled my own window down too.
The air outside was not moving. We were in traffic. What came through the window was the exhaust of the cars idling next to us. It was not better, exactly. It was differently bad. I looked at the map on my phone. Twenty-five more minutes.
I turned to Jonathan. Sorry baby. He reached over and took my hand. We're in it now, Alexis, he said. We chuckled. We let it be what it was. We looked out the windows for the rest of the ride. The buildings were a mix of very old and not old at all. There were flags everywhere — the Turkish flag, banners with the president's face — and we took it in. We had stopped trying to fix the cab. We were just in it now, looking at the city.
The cab was one of many small versions of the same situation.
We went to a coffee shop. The barista spoke Turkish and Spanish, both fluently. I have a baseline Spanish, enough to get by in most situations. Sugar substitute was not in it. Jonathan uses sweetener instead of sugar. I tried to ask for it. I worked through the words I had. The barista nodded patiently and made the drink. Jonathan got sugar.
We walked past a banner with a man's face on it. I noted that it was not the president — the president was on a different set of banners — but I did not know who this man was. I would learn later that he was Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. In the moment he was a face I could not read, on a sign I could not read, in a city whose history was operating all around me on a frequency I could not pick up.
None of which is to say I wasn't loving it. I was. The walking, the food, the call to prayer five times a day from a hundred mosques at once, the way the light hit the water in the late afternoon — the city was extraordinary, and I knew I was in the middle of something I would carry for a long time. The disorientation was not unpleasant. It was just real.
I had a phone in my pocket that could translate any of it, and I used it constantly, and the phone was not the same as understanding. There is a difference between getting through something and being in it. I had been getting through.
I have traveled most of my adult life. I have worked in rooms where I was the most senior person and rooms where I was the most junior. I have been in countries where I could not speak the language and have always managed, somehow, to feel oriented enough. Istanbul did not give me that. For most of a week I was a man who could not read the room he was in. Not the figurative one. The literal one.
I mentioned the Basilica Cistern in the dispatch I sent two weeks ago. I'm returning to it today because something happened there that I didn't know how to say at the time.
The Cistern sits underneath one of the busiest streets in the historic city. Above ground there are shops and traffic and ruins, all of it crowded with people moving in every direction. You buy a ticket at a small entrance, and then you walk down a stone staircase into a different world entirely. The temperature drops. The air is cooler and damp and carries the smell of stone that has been wet for a very long time. What opens up at the bottom is enormous — rows of columns rising out of shallow water, vaulted ceilings sixteen hundred years old, the kind of accuracy in the masonry that you do not expect from something built by hand that long ago. I had read about the place before we went. None of the reading prepared me for standing in it. I have not often felt the kind of awe that does not have words attached to it yet — the kind you feel when something has outlasted everything around it for reasons you cannot fully understand. The space around that awe was lit for it. Dim and warm and theatrical, the way a serious museum lights its best room. Every so often a drop of water falls from the ceiling and you feel it on your shoulder. The place is also loud. We were among hundreds of people speaking countless languages, all of us lifting our heads to take in the grandeur in the same way.
A Roman emperor had it built to keep the city alive during a siege. It was a water system, an essential piece of infrastructure for an empire that knew what it was doing and what it was willing to do to keep doing it. It doesn't hold the city's water anymore. It is a museum now. But it still stands, and people still come down into it to look at what was made there.
Jonathan and I were walking through it together. Somewhere in the middle of it, he turned to me and asked how they did this that long ago. It was an honest question.
I told him I truly didn't know, but I guaranteed a lot of people lost their lives while doing it.
I said it without thinking, and then I heard myself say it. I meant it. The answer was honest in a way I had not planned to be honest, and I have been sitting with it ever since.
The line is in the dispatch some of you read. What I didn't say there, and what I have been thinking about since, is why the answer came out of me the way it did. Jonathan is my husband. He gets the unfiltered version of me most of the time anyway. The question wasn't the unusual thing. The unusual thing was that the answer came out of me in a crowd of strangers, in a room I didn't fully understand, in a country where I had been off-balance for days. I usually have a more careful version of myself available for that kind of audience. By the time the question came, the careful version was not at hand. What was underneath was what came out.
I have been thinking about why this matters, and I think it is this.
Most of us, most of the time, are fluent. We know the language of the rooms we are in. We know who is in them, what those people expect of us, what we are supposed to say and what we are supposed to leave unsaid. Fluency is what makes us functional. It is also what makes performance possible. We become very good at offering the version of ourselves that the room asks for, and after enough years of doing it, that version is most of what we offer.
I do not want to call this dishonest. It is the cost of being a person who shows up in many rooms over many years. The careful version of yourself is not a betrayal of the real one. It is just selected. You are choosing, sometimes consciously and more often not, which parts of you to bring forward and which to keep back. And the longer you do it, the more the choosing happens without you.
What Istanbul did, I think, was take fluency away from me for long enough that the choosing stopped happening. When Jonathan asked his question in the Cistern, I did not have the careful version ready. I had only what I actually thought. The honest answer was not braver than my usual answers. It was just the only one available.
I am still thinking about what that means for the rooms I am fluent in. I have started to notice how often the careful version is the only version I bring. I am not sure that is enough.
I came home from Istanbul. The signs are in English again. The conversations are mine to follow. I can walk into any room and know within seconds what is being asked of me and how to answer. The relief of fluency is real, and I felt it the moment I landed.
I also miss the place. I would go back tomorrow. Some of what I am still carrying from Istanbul is awe — the call to prayer at sunset, the way the Bosphorus splits the city in two, the centuries layered into every street. And some of what I am still carrying is harder to name. It has to do with what happened to me when fluency was not available, and what I am noticing now that it is.
I have not stopped noticing, for instance, how often the answer arrives before I do.
The careful version of me has years of practice. It is ready before I am ready. It knows what the room wants. It speaks with the tone the moment calls for. It does its job.
But the careful version was not what I gave Jonathan in the Cistern. The careful version was not what was underneath when the question came. I have been wondering, since I came home, what the people in my rooms would hear if I let the careful version arrive a beat later than usual. If I gave the unfiltered answer a half-second to surface before the polished one took over.
I do not know yet. I am trying it in small ways. A meeting where I say I do not know instead of finding a graceful bridge. A conversation where I say what I actually think before I say what I am supposed to think. The small inversions of habit that let something more honest come through.
What I am learning — what Istanbul left me with — is that fluency is a gift and also a kind of cover. The careful version of me is real. So is what is underneath it. The question I am sitting with now is whether the people who work with me get to hear from both, or only from one.
That is the question, I think, that matters.
— Matthew
"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB
The best HR advice comes from people who’ve been in the trenches.
That’s what this newsletter delivers.
I Hate it Here is your insider’s guide to surviving and thriving in HR, from someone who’s been there. It’s not about theory or buzzwords — it’s about practical, real-world advice for navigating everything from tricky managers to messy policies.
Every newsletter is written by Hebba Youssef — a Chief People Officer who’s seen it all and is here to share what actually works (and what doesn’t). We’re talking real talk, real strategies, and real support — all with a side of humor to keep you sane.
Because HR shouldn’t feel like a thankless job. And you shouldn’t feel alone in it.