Check Your Beans.

I had only been in my role about six months when I arrived at the offsite and found two red Solo shot cups at my place setting—one marked with a plus, one with a minus. For a state agency, this was racier than expected.

I thought: oh good, something to add to the coffee.

For the record, I was not the only one who said this out loud.

Then my boss explained.

There's a PBS murder mystery series called Astrid—which, as a devoted consumer of murder mysteries in all their forms, I am embarrassed to admit I had not discovered yet. But I digress. In the show, Astrid is an autistic detective who carries beans in her pocket as a way to track capacity when the world starts becoming too much. The beans make overwhelm visible before it becomes collapse.

Our version worked like this: there were ten beans in the plus cup. We were to move them to the minus cup as the day's demands accumulated. When the beans were gone, you were done. Not difficult. Not unwilling. Done.

He understood that the work we were doing was hard, the conversations were sometimes harder, and this was a way to make it safe to be honest before anyone had to fall apart.

The concept was genuinely brilliant. (I will also admit, in the spirit of everything I keep writing about, that I did experience a flicker of disappointment.)

At one point during a particularly loaded conversation, our CFO picked up her plus cup and poured every single bean into the minus cup. Then, without breaking eye contact with the team, she reached over, took the beans from the person next to her, and poured those in too.

The room went quiet for exactly one second. And then everyone laughed.

And then we slowed down.

Because she had just told us something important. Early, clearly, and without a single word—before the conversation went somewhere it couldn't easily come back from. She shifted left on all of us with a handful of dried beans. Somewhere between the laughter and the recalibration, I realized it was one of the most elegant acts of early communication I had ever witnessed.

I keep the cups on my desk now. I move beans most days. Some conversations cost more than others. Some mornings I start with fewer than ten and know it before I even open my laptop.

The beans don't change that. But naming it honestly to myself, early—before I am running on empty and pretending otherwise—changes how I show up. Not just for the hard conversations, but for the moments right before them, when the temptation to delay is strongest.

Think about the conversation you have been circling. The relationship that needs tending. The initiative that keeps getting pushed to next quarter, next month, next week, when the timing is better and you feel more ready and the conditions are finally right.

Check your beans.

Ask yourself what is actually available to you right now. Not in some ideal version of your life where you are rested, centered, fully resourced, emotionally regulated, and surrounded by people who respond beautifully to every vulnerable thing you say. Right now. Today. With the energy you have, the history you carry, the uncertainty still sitting there, unresolved.

Because the point of checking your beans is not to decide whether the thing matters. It does. The point is to make the beginning safe enough to attempt.

Maybe you have ten beans today. Maybe you have three. Maybe the conversation you have been avoiding cannot happen all at once, because all at once would cost more than you have. That does not mean you wait until you are overflowing with capacity. It means you start smaller. You send the text that says, "I'd like to talk about something when we both have space." You ask the question you have been assuming you already know the answer to. You say, "I don't have this fully figured out yet, but I want to bring you in before it gets farther along."

That counts.