Your Daily Boost – Episode 673

The Meetings That Could’ve Been Feelings

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many meetings I’ve attended that had absolutely no business being meetings.

Not because they were inefficient—although many were.

Not because they lacked an agenda—although that too.

But because, at their core, they weren’t meetings at all. They were feelings wearing business casual. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You’ll be sitting there, notebook open, coffee cooling, calendar blocked for sixty minutes, and about three minutes in you’ll realize: Oh. This isn’t operational. This is emotional. This isn’t about alignment or deliverables or next steps. This is someone needing reassurance, validation, permission, or—on especially bold days—therapy with a whiteboard.

And look, I’m not judging. I’ve scheduled a few of these myself. Some accidentally. Some very intentionally. It turns out feelings don’t disappear just because you promote someone, give them a title, or put them in charge of a budget. They just get better at disguising themselves as “touch base” invites.

One of the more impressive skills you develop in adult professional life is the ability to translate emotions into calendar language.

“I feel overwhelmed” becomes “Can we sync real quick?”

“I don’t feel seen” becomes “I just wanted to circle back.”

“I’m anxious about my performance” becomes “I was hoping to get some feedback.”

“I don’t trust you” becomes “Let’s align on expectations.”

And my personal favorite:

“I’m spiraling” becomes “Do you have fifteen minutes?”

The genius of it is that everyone plays along. We all nod. We all open our laptops. We all pretend this is about process when it’s really about pressure. Because naming the feeling directly would feel…unprofessional. And nothing says professionalism like spending an hour pretending you’re not human.

What’s wild is how normal this has become. We don’t even flinch anymore. We just accept the invite and think, Okay, what flavor of emotional unpacking is this going to be? Here’s the thing that makes this funny instead of tragic: most of us are actually pretty good at spotting it.

We know when a meeting could’ve been an email. And we definitely know when a meeting could’ve been a feeling. You can feel it in your body. There’s a subtle difference. Operational meetings have momentum. Emotional meetings have tension. One moves things forward. The other moves things around. You’ll hear phrases like:

“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

“This isn’t a big deal, I just wanted to talk it through.”

“I don’t want this to come across the wrong way…”

Nothing bad ever follows that last one.

These meetings usually end with vague relief and no clear outcome, except that everyone feels slightly more tired and moderately less certain than when they walked in. The action item is emotional regulation, but it’s assigned to no one and due immediately. And somehow, despite all that, we keep scheduling them. Because it feels productive to do something with the feeling, even if that something is just sitting in a room acknowledging its existence indirectly.

The Cost of Not Naming It

What makes this pattern stick isn’t inefficiency—it’s avoidance.

Feelings are inconvenient. They don’t fit neatly into bullet points. They don’t respect time blocks. They don’t care how senior you are. And in professional environments, especially high-functioning ones, feelings can feel like liabilities. So we route around them.

We replace vulnerability with vocabulary. We replace honesty with structure. We replace discomfort with agendas. And again, I say this with love: it works… until it doesn’t.

Because the feeling doesn’t actually go away. It just waits. It shows up again later as frustration, resentment, burnout, or that low-grade irritation you can’t quite trace back to a single cause. Eventually, it schedules another meeting.

The humor here (at least for me) is realizing how elaborate we’ve made this dance. We’re grown adults with mortgages, responsibilities, and opinions on olive oil, and we’re still afraid to say things like:

“I’m insecure about this.”

“I don’t feel confident right now.”

“I’m overwhelmed and don’t know what to do next.”

So instead, we book Conference Room B.

There’s something almost admirable about it. We’ll do anything except sit with the feeling for five uninterrupted minutes. We’ll invite five people, prepare slides, and burn an hour of collective time just to avoid saying one honest sentence out loud. Efficiency kings. Emotional cowards. All of us.

A Small, Quiet Reframe

I’m not suggesting we eliminate meetings. Some feelings genuinely benefit from conversation. Some things do need space, witnesses, and back-and-forth. But I do wonder what would change if we got just a little more honest with ourselves before hitting “Send.” Not with others. With ourselves. What if, before scheduling the meeting, we asked: Is this a logistics problem… or an internal one?

What if sometimes the most professional move was to name the feeling privately, deal with it directly, and then schedule the meeting that actually needs to happen afterward? Imagine how many calendar invites would evaporate on contact.

The next time you’re about to accept—or schedule—a meeting, pause for half a second and ask yourself a simple question:

Is this a meeting…or is this a feeling wearing a lanyard?

Either answer is fine. Just know which one you’re walking into.