The child who never stopped talking
My father said it when I was four years old.
I was the child who never stopped talking — asking endless questions, offering commentary on absolutely everything, telling stories before I had the words to tell them properly. One evening, my father came home from work to find me waiting at the door with yet another barrage of questions. He looked at me and said: “Clearly, you’re going to be a lawyer.”
He was right.
I qualified as both a solicitor and a barrister in the UK. I spent the next thirty-five years in some of the highest-stakes professional environments that exist — boardrooms, negotiating tables, courtrooms, and client meetings where everything hung on what was said and how it was said.
And then came the moment that changed everything.
It was a cold Tuesday afternoon in London, in one of those glass towers where the walls are lined with boardrooms and the coffee is always strong. We were negotiating the final terms of a contract that had taken months to get to this point. Two teams of lawyers and their clients around a long, shiny table. Millions of dollars riding on the outcome.
We went through the contract clause by clause. Compromise here, a concession there. Things were progressing. And then we reached Clause 153.
Back and forth we went. No progress. Coffee was refilled endlessly. And then Jeremy — our head of department, leading the negotiation — stood up.
“This clause is non-negotiable. The time has come. You either take it or leave it.”
The room froze. Across the table, I watched helplessly as the lawyers began gathering their papers, sliding them into briefcases. The clicks as they snapped the locks echoed around the room like gunshots — sharp, final, impossible to take back.
Months of work, gone in an instant.
That was the day I understood how fragile communication is. How one sentence can torpedo trust and possibility. How the gap between what we mean to say and what we actually communicate can cost everything.
That moment sent me on a quest.