In this article series, I explore how Relationship Friction (RF) and Relationship Wisdom (RW) shape career satisfaction and progression through apparently innocuous, yet critical, workplace moments.
A number of you have reached out to discuss how to more precisely recognise RF.
This article is therefore a brief departure. Having defined RF and RW in earlier pieces, I wanted to offer something more immediate: not a framework, nor a career-stage analysis, but a set of recognisable signs. The kind you may have been noticing — and perhaps dismissing.
The next article will resume looking at a specific career moment at a given career stage.
The Trap of Plausibility
RF is insidious precisely because its early signs look reasonable.
They look like conscientiousness.
Like diligence.
Like appropriate professional caution.
That is what makes them so easy to dismiss.
Each of the five signs below has a legitimate version — a healthy, functional behaviour that it closely resembles.
The problem is not the behaviour itself.
It is what is driving it.
Read each one and ask yourself honestly: does this sound familiar?
Sign 1: You Are Preparing for Conversations You Should Be Able to Have Spontaneously
Preparation is good professional practice.
You think through what you want to say.
You anticipate questions.
You arrive ready.
That is not what this is.
This is the Sunday evening rehearsal of a Monday morning exchange with a colleague you dread.
This is reworking a three-line email to your manager four times before you send it.
This is arriving at a meeting feeling defensive. Or nervous. Or both
It looks like thoroughness. It is, in fact, anxiety.
The distinction matters because the driver is different.
Healthy preparation comes from wanting to communicate well.
In your case, what you want is to avoid something — a reaction, a dismissal, a confrontation.
And what happens in the meeting itself?
The very rehearsal that was meant to protect you works against you.
You are so focused on managing the interaction that you cannot be fully present in it.
You come across as wooden, unnatural, overformal. If not, downright awkward.
The colleague who makes you nervous picks up on it.
The dynamic between you two only intensifies.
It’s barely visible at first: RF has started to cost you your natural authority in a room.
Sign 2: You Are Working Harder Than Ever but Feeling Increasingly Invisible
Hard work is a virtue — until it becomes a strategy.
There was this moment, which you didn’t notice and will struggle to recall, when you changed.
You stopped working hard because you are engaged and ambitious.
You started working hard because you are trying to be seen.
Recognition is eluding you and you are pushing harder to try and get it.
It looks like dedication. It is, in fact, compensation.
The tragedy is that it rarely works.
Visibility at work is not a function of output volume.
Rather, it is a function of relational presence.
Soon you are like the proverbial hamster running on its wheel.
Exerting yourself and yet going nowhere. Fast.
You end up with two jobs: your actual one and the constant scanning for how you are perceived.
That’s a heavy cognitive load so the quality of your thinking – reasoning, deciding – may drop.
Concentration may also become harder.
And still the recognition does not come. The interesting project goes to someone else.
You are not the one being known, trusted, and thought of when opportunities arise.
You are working at full capacity and treading water.
That is not a workload problem: that is RF costing you your next promotion.
Sign 3: You Have Started Editing Yourself Out of Conversations
Self-editing is a mark of social intelligence.
Not everything that crosses your mind needs to be said.
Professional judgment includes knowing when to hold back.
You have an opinion in the meeting, but you don’t voice it.
You tell yourself the timing wasn’t right.
You tell yourself that other colleague said it anyway.
In fact, you are unsure how you will come across.
You worry you might be misunderstood.
Judged. Dismissed.
You worry about offending. Or sounding stupid.
Better safe than sorry: that’s the version of self-editing that is about fear.
It looks like judgement. It is, in fact, self-erasure.
You become a wallflower – and perhaps surprisingly, everyone notices.
Less surprisingly, since you never offer an opinion, people conclude you don’t have one.
They no longer consult you.
They talk as though you weren’t around.
They stop inviting you.
You have become invisible.
Invisibility really hurts self-confidence.
It makes people even more cautious. The proverbial vicious circle.
You wish to be agreeable, appreciated again.
But because you wait for sign of approval before proceeding, you only appear more uninteresting.
RF is now costing you a piece of your relationship with yourself.
Sign 4: You Are Always on the Defensive — And You Cannot Seem to Stop
RF shrinks people. Most of the time, it’s visible as such.
At other times, the exact opposite happens.
You feel yourself bristling at every turn.
Every sentence is a slight.
You no longer welcome feedback.
A comment made in passing must be a critique about you.
People are obviously talking behind your back all the time.
You even sometimes snap — and spend the rest of the day regretting it.
It looks like pushback. It is, in fact, self-implosion.
Your self-confidence is now in tatters.
Even ordinary skirmishes feel like an insult to your competence, a threat to your standing, or both.
This is only self-protection. Legitimate. Necessary even.
That’s on the inside.
From the outside, it looks like someone constantly arguing,
Someone struggling.
Someone difficult.
Opportunities flow to others who seem easier to deal and collaborate with.
RF is about to cost you the rest of your career.
Sign 5: You Are No Longer Yourself
One of my pet peeves is the expression ‘work-life balance’.
Yes you can compartmentalize. But only up to a point.
Because there’s, after all, only one of you.
The stressed-out work-you will start leaking into the personal-you.
You are possibly on the verge of a breakdown.
But you probably can’t really tell because you have lost quite a bit of perspective by now.
Others can tell.
Your partner no longer asks how your day was.
Your children stare at you with concern.
Your friends have stopped asking how you are doing.
You tell yourself you don’t want to burden anyone.
What others experience is distance.
You are less warm, less interested, less present.
Less.
It looks like stoicism. It is, in fact, ‘less-ness’.
(If you prefer real words: self-diminishment, depletion, erosion, shrinkage work well too)
Your sleep has changed. You struggle to fall asleep. Or to stay asleep. Maybe even both.
You probably don’t go to the gym anymore.
You don’t remember the movie you just watched five minutes after the end credits.
And you feel tired. Of course, it’s the lack of proper sleep.
But not just, right?
In your heart of hearts, you know it:
RF is now costing you the version of yourself you (and everyone else) like best.
Why We Dismiss the Signs
Each of these five signs has a plausible face.
Rehearsing looks like preparation.
Working hard looks like ambition.
Self-editing looks like political savvy.
Defensiveness looks like strength.
And losing yourself can look, for a surprisingly long time, like reasonableness in a demanding world.
This is why RF snowballs unchecked.
Each sign on its own is rationally explicable. Astute even.
And yet.
Psychology calls it ‘normalisation’: we talk ourselves into rationale-sounding traps.
And like the frog cooking to death, because the signs are varied and dispersed, we don’t notice.
We allow them to accumulate. We explain each away.
We endure bravely.
We are only hurting ourselves (and a few others as collateral damage).
Often, clients will admit they felt something was off.
There was this nagging feeling.
Sadly, too vague to articulate.
The Relationship Wisdom Pivot
Clients tease me because I repeat that “Relationship Friction is endemic”.
I counter that repetition can be a virtue.
Our banter concludes that RF is indeed everywhere.
Which raises the question: if it is everywhere, how is it we fail to spot it?
Logical answer: RF hides.
This article revealed where RF hides:
In plain view
Masquerading as something plausible.
Sensible.
Astute.
It tricks us.
We think it helps us.
So we tolerate its discomfort.
RF recruits our cooperation by offering a plausible misunderstanding.
And so we allow RF to thrive.
Left unaddressed, it compounds.
The price ends up being far greater than the benefit we thought we were getting.
RF stops you thriving in the here and now as well as stalls your career progress.
Thankfully, even when well-entrenched, it is not permanent.
It is also not a verdict on your capability or your character.
Like any pain, it is a signal that something needs attention.
The antidote to Relationship Friction is Relationship Wisdom.
Not charm, not political manoeuvring, not performative agreeableness.
RW is the learnable set of relationship skills that allows you to read what is happening around you, respond with precision and poise, and bolster both your professional standing and your sense of self.
The professionals who navigate RF successfully are not the ones who experience less of it.
They are the ones who learn to see it clearly and have equipped themselves to defeat it.
To explore how Relationship Wisdom can transform your career trajectory, feel free to get in touch.