Three Words in the Break Room

This was long before I had any thought of retiring. A junior colleague was about to take a project to the president of the company for final approval. We were in the break room getting coffee, and he was tense.

I gave him three words: “Just be yourself.”

The advice worked. Later he told me the president had asked questions he hadn’t expected, that he remembered the line, and that he handled them. The project was approved and finished well. I have been uneasy about that conversation ever since, and it is the first entry in a series I’m calling Ian Got It Wrong.

If you came here asking whether “just be yourself” is bad advice, my answer is no. It is usually correct. The trouble is what it leaves out. It tells a nervous person what to do, and says nothing about how you see them or whether you’ll be there afterward. What follows is what I left out, why I left it out, and the three sentences I would give him now.

A Sentence Small Enough for a Sugar Packet

Look at the three words on their own. They are an instruction, and they hand the whole job back to the person who already has the whole job. “Be yourself” assumes that the self in question is in good shape that day, which is exactly what a nervous person is unsure about.

It is a sentence that would fit on a sugar packet. I suspect a few sugar packets already carry it.

There is nothing false in it, and that was part of why it came out so easily. A true sentence that costs nothing to say is the easiest thing in the world to hand someone who is about to do something hard. In an earlier essay I wrote about advice that quietly goes out of date. This is a different problem: advice that was current and correct, and still too small for the moment.

Questions Nobody Had Warned Him About

What happened in the room I know only from what he told me later. The president asked questions he had not expected. He remembered the line. He answered them, the approval came through, and the project went on to finish successfully.

It would be easy to tell that as the story of a good piece of advice. The truer version is about a man who walked into a hard meeting by himself and handled it. The three words were something to hold on to when the questions turned. He did the lifting.

I have written before about the question nobody asked at my retirement party. This is the same problem from the other side of the table: the sentence I didn’t say when it was my turn to say something.

Why I Gave Him the Usual Advice

Here is the part I have to say plainly, because it is the reason this series exists. I still regret that I didn’t comfort him, or encourage him, more warmly. And I feel some guilt about why. It wasn’t my meeting. I wasn’t the one walking in, so I gave him the usual advice.

People who are calm tend to underestimate how much fear is shaping the choices of someone who isn’t. Psychologists call this an empathy gap. Leaf Van Boven, George Loewenstein and David Dunning tested one version of it in a 2005 study. Students in a large lecture class were offered $5 to perform a mime in front of the class. One of the mimes on the list was a stapler.

Of the students who actually faced that choice, about 15 percent agreed. Classmates who were only asked to imagine it predicted that about 43 percent would. Even the students facing the real choice guessed that others would be braver than they were, at about 39 percent. The authors describe “an enduring intuitive belief that others experience fear of embarrassment less than the self.”

That study doesn’t prove anything about one conversation in a break room, and I won’t pretend it does. It does describe the distance I was standing at: near enough to see that he was tense, with a meeting that wasn’t mine.

Warm Words Are Worth More Than They Feel

There is a second finding I recognize myself in. Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley ran nine experiments on why people hold back genuine compliments (2021). People who wrote a compliment for someone consistently underestimated how good it would make the other person feel, and overestimated how awkward it would be. Part of the reason was that they underestimated how well their compliment would come across. When the researchers asked people to focus on the warmth of what they had written, they became more interested in actually saying it.

Their studies were about compliments, not about encouragement before a big meeting, so I hold the comparison loosely. Still, the shape is familiar. A warm sentence feels riskier to say out loud than a correct one, and on their evidence it is worth more to the person hearing it than the speaker expects.

What Someone Will Say in My Defense

“It worked. He got his approval. There is nothing here to regret.”

That is true as far as the outcome goes, and the outcome belongs to him. But the result doesn’t grade the sentence. I can’t know what a warmer word would have changed, and I am not claiming it would have changed the approval. What it might have changed is how alone he felt walking in. Nobody keeps score of that, which is why it is so easy to skip.

“Before a big meeting, a short line is kinder than a speech. He didn’t need a pep talk.”

Agreed, and I would still keep it short today. Length was never the problem. Three words can be warm. These three were about the task, and none of them were about him.

What I Would Say in the Break Room Now

If I had the same minute again, I would say something close to this:

“This is a big one. I’d be nervous too.”

“You know this work better than anyone who’ll be in that room.”

“Come find me after. I want to hear how it went.”

Then, if there was time, the three words.

The first sentence tells him his nerves make sense. The second tells him what I see in him, which is the thing “be yourself” quietly assumes and never says. The third tells him somebody will be waiting on the other side of the door. It is the same order I use for much harder conversations: the other person’s side first, then mine, then one small next step. None of it takes longer than the coffee.

Elsewhere on this site, the advice for the meeting where you tell your own boss you’re retiring starts with the date, because the date is what a boss needs first. A nervous colleague needs something else first. He needs to hear that somebody sees him.

This is the fourteenth stop on The Second Half Path: finding purpose after 40 → why high achievers lose purpose → the midlife reset → identity crisis after success → designing your ideal day → reinventing yourself after 50 → feeling useless after retirement → the retirement party question → what Peter Drucker understood → the call I expected to be urgent → halfway through my career advice → returning to Seoul → the last time they needed me → you are here.

Why This Painting

Wilhelm Bendz painted his friend Ditlev Blunck in 1826, holding a sketch up to a mirror. According to the museum’s notes, it is an old painter’s trick: look at your work reversed and you see whether it works, the way a stranger would. The studio is full of his tools, a palette, an easel, a skull. There is no one else in the room with him.

The Part That Was Always His

Here is why the story still bothers me, now that it is on the page. The advice worked because he made it work. My part was three words I could have said to anyone, and I said them because the meeting wasn’t mine.

I don’t think I owed him a speech. I owed him one sentence about him and one about afterward. Being the person someone checks in with before a big meeting is one of the quieter things a career gives you, and one of the things that ends when the job does.

When someone else is about to walk into the hard room, the usual advice is the easiest thing to give, and it is rarely all they need.

Correct advice can still be the smallest thing you had to give.

There is probably a sentence you once gave someone that was right and too short. Write the longer version on the Ask Ian page. I would like to read it.

Read next → Halfway through my career advice, I stopped believing it

About the author

Ian Hwang writes Freebound Life. Born in Seoul, raised outside London, educated in New York, then three decades in financial services across the United States and Asia. He retired in 2025. He now studies how people over 40 rebuild their careers, their money, and their sense of purpose.
Nothing here is personalized advice. More about Ian →