What Happens When a CEO Has Nowhere Safe to Tell the Truth
I build safe spaces for a living.
Every month I sit with CEOs and create the conditions for honest conversation — the kind where masks come off, where the real questions get asked, where leaders can finally say the thing they've been carrying alone.
It's sacred work. I believe that with everything I have.
And for six months, I was performing okayness to everyone around me while something important was quietly falling apart inside.
Here's what happened.
My daughter fell in love with a woman and announced their engagement. I was overjoyed. When I told my parents — devout Catholics, products of a different generation and a different world — it was met with judgment, disappointment, and a declaration that they would not be attending the wedding. They couldn't support it.
We exchanged harsh words. I left that visit fairly certain we would never speak again.
And for six months, we didn't.
I told myself I was fine with it. I told the people around me I was fine with it. They had made their choice. I had made mine. I wasn't going to compromise my beliefs or my daughter's joy for their approval. I was okay. I had moved on.
I had not moved on.
Here's the thing about being someone who creates safe space for others: you get very good at performing steadiness. It's almost professional. You know exactly what okayness looks like because you've watched people perform it for years — and you've learned to gently dismantle it in others.
What's harder to see is when you're doing it yourself.
One of my fellow Vistage Chairs didn't believe me.
She said so. Not cruelly — but clearly. She had watched me tell my story with the practiced composure of someone who has decided what they feel and is no longer available for further questioning. And she wasn't buying it.
So in our monthly Colorado Chairs meeting — my own Vistage group, the room where the people who hold space for everyone else get to finally be held — she stepped into my story with me.
Not to fix it. Not to tell me what to do. But to create enough safety that I could stop performing long enough to find out what was actually true.
What was actually true was this:
I wasn't okay with losing my parents. I was terrified of it. And I had wrapped that terror in righteousness because righteousness is easier to carry than grief.
I had told myself they were judging me and my daughter. What I hadn't been willing to see was that I was judging them too. That I was holding them to a standard of immediate acceptance I hadn't given them time or space to reach. That I loved them and missed them and didn't know how to stay in relationship with people whose beliefs differed so fundamentally from mine — without losing myself in the process.
That was the real question. Not who was right.
How do you love someone across a difference that feels unlovable?
Because my chairs were willing to step into that with me — because they held the space steady while I found my way to what was real — I was able to go back to that relationship with a completely different posture.
Not to agree. Not to pretend the difference didn't exist.
But to choose them. And to give them the chance to choose me back.
Today I have a relationship with my parents built on mutual love and mutual respect. We don't share the same beliefs. We don't have to. What we share is the decision to stay — to keep showing up for each other across the distance of those differences.
That Vistage room gave me my parents back.
I think about this every single time I sit with a CEO who is performing okayness. Every time I watch someone tell their story with just a little too much composure. Every time I sense the practiced steadiness of someone who has decided what they feel and closed the door on further investigation.
I know that place.
I know what it costs.
And I know what becomes possible when one person in the room decides not to believe you — and loves you enough to say so.
That's what a safe room does.
Not comfortable. Not easy.
Just true.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She creates safe spaces for leaders to tell the truth. Her own Vistage room once gave her back her family. She doesn't take that lightly.