7 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
My grandmother, my aunts, and my mother said it the same way, as far back as I can remember. This is a big, close family that is always together. New Year’s, Halloween, the Super Bowl, somebody’s anniversary, an elderly relative’s birthday. Any reason to gather was reason enough. The Stambaugh men were right there in the middle of all of it. And the women said it in front of them without hesitation, and the men would nod or smile as if to say yep and I’m proud of it.
The Stambaugh men don’t communicate.
I was already hopeless in their eyes. I was male and I was a Stambaugh. I hadn’t earned the label. I’d inherited it. The stubbornness in me decided I was not going to be that statistic. You were not going to tell me what I was going to be.
The irony is that my father handed me the standard I’d eventually hold myself to.
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
He said it constantly. Not as a life lesson. As a frustration. When a story was vague or a point was buried, that phrase came out. His way of saying give it to me straight, I don’t have time to dig for it. I inherited that need for the full picture. In my head it feels wrong to start in the middle. You need the context to understand why something unfolded the way it did. I took that phrase further than he ever intended. Say what you mean, mean what you say. Don’t sugarcoat it. Don’t manage the message. Give it to me straight. The irony of it still makes me smile, because the man who demanded straight talk is the same man who wears lack of communication on his arm like a badge of courage. He asked for clarity from everyone around him and lived that standard in every story he told. What he never turned that same clarity on was what lived inside him. That’s not a failing so much as how his generation was raised. Say what needs to be said, leave the rest alone. That part he left dormant, and somehow, without meaning to, he handed all of it to me.
He’s a loving man, and my mother has a tremendous amount of patience. They’ve been married 57 years. When it comes to working on deep communication, he believes he’s too old to change. Maybe he’s even earned the right to feel that way. I say that with a smile, but communication is a choice you make every day. You wake up and decide. He just stopped deciding a long time ago.
Regardless of what was going on in my dad’s head, I took that saying literally. I thought communication was about saying what you mean. What I learned is that it’s something much deeper.
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What I learned, not from a book but from patterns I kept living through, is that communication isn’t just about talking. Most people think it is. They think if they can just say the right thing clearly enough, they’ve done it. But talking is the last step. Everything before it is what determines whether the talking means anything at all.
I started seeing these patterns in my early twenties. Something would come up, we’d move past it without real resolution, and weeks or months later a completely different argument would surface. Different conversation, same root issue. The real shift happened when I stopped just recognizing the patterns and started searching for what they kept leading back to. Where did the root cause live? I understood I was the controlling variable in the equation. If I wanted this to get better I needed to face it head on.
Kehaulani and I come to the table every time something surfaces. We find the root cause and do the work to move past it. Not once. Every time.
Let me give you an example. If I’m going to the store and she tells me we need broccoli and I come home without it, the real problem isn’t that I forgot the broccoli. It’s that I wasn’t fully listening. I didn’t register what she said. I didn’t write it down. I didn’t check my notes before I left the store. The broccoli is the presenting issue. The real issue is that I wasn’t present when it mattered. We don’t argue about broccoli in our house. We strip it down and look for what’s underneath it all.
We even have a safe word. Gelato. It came from an argument that went too far, far enough that we both looked at each other, in the heat of the moment, and questioned whether we wanted to be together if this is how we were going to act. We knew this wasn’t who we were, but we recognized we were both caught up in the moment. We wanted a way out if we ever ended up back there again. A safe exit before things went too far. So we created a word. Not as a joke. As a reminder and as an act of respect to one another. When one of us has had enough, or when the conversation is going in circles with nowhere to go, one of us knows it’s time for Gelato. We stop. Gelato means we are done with the moment. It doesn’t always mean we’re done for good. When the emotions settle and the level heads return, we come back and finish it. The resolution still happens. It just happens when we’re both actually capable of getting there. I don’t know many people who have a safe word. We use it once or twice a year. The fact that it’s rarely needed is its own kind of proof.
Kehaulani and I are wired differently when something needs to be worked through. I want to get to the problem immediately. I need to be heard, I need to know where we both stand, and I can live with agreeing to disagree as long as we’ve gotten there honestly. She needs time. She steps away, forms her thoughts, makes sure she’s saying what she actually means before she says it. That used to be extremely hard for me to give her. My mind was racing looking for closure and she was the source keeping me from it. If I push for instant resolution I don’t get the truth. I get whatever she can produce under pressure. That’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to the conversation. The space I gave her worked its magic on me too. I can now step away, reflect, and say I’m sorry, you were right, when I’m wrong. I’m not certain I would have gotten there on my own.
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I carried all of this into the teams I’ve led.
I can’t tell you how many times I walked into a new program and found a team of people who had learned to tell their leader what he, she, or they wanted to hear. Not because they were dishonest. They’d been trained, slowly and without anyone naming it, that the truth had consequences. So they gave the safe version and eventually someone ended up standing in front of a client with bad information and no idea how it got there.
I had one message in every kickoff meeting: do not tell me what you think I need to hear. Tell me the truth. I cannot work with anything less. Not because I had a low tolerance for discomfort. It was because I understood what happened downstream when the communication was managed instead of honest. The lies compound. The problems don’t get fixed, they get swept under the rug. Eventually you’re standing in the wreckage of something that could have been handled six months ago if someone wasn’t managing the message.
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My dad still says it. I still hear his voice when I catch myself saying it.
Most people think they know how they communicate. What they actually know is how they talk when everything is fine.