The Unsaid Is The Tell

You know the feeling. You sent the message. It got read. No reply.

The little "Read 3:42 PM" sits there doing absolutely nothing, and saying everything. You're checking your phone every fifteen minutes. You're rereading your last text, wondering if it landed weird. You're wondering whether you're being quietly ignored, if they haven’t seen it yet, or if you’re just going crazy.

Welcome to the unsaid expectation.

We all deal with said expectations from leaders, friends, and family. Said expectations are the easy ones. You meet them, or you ignore them. You write them down and check them off. But the unsaid ones gnaw at your soul. The passive-aggressive, never-quite-spelled-out, you-should-just-know variety. At least for an overthinker like me, they linger in my mind.

Sometimes the unsaid thing is a phantom you invented. It was never actually said because it was never actually there. Sometimes it's something everyone in the room already knows about that person, because it's just how they are and how they lean into people to get stuff. It's their wake as a leader and a person. Perform, or you're out of a job or no longer their friend. Or they don't officially remove you. They just stop including you in important conversations. Stop @-ing you in the Slack channel or inviting you to a family gathering. The drift starts feeling pretty intentional after a while.

The reality is unsaid expectations reveal your own insecurity, and sometimes the person's, all at once.

I learned a hard lesson about expectations and those in charge when I was younger. The scars are still visible on me today. Here it is: the adults in the room don't always know what they're doing. They're figuring it out like the rest of us. That's where the unsaid expectations are born. They can't say "I don't know" out loud, so they let the silence do the talking instead. You've had that moment with a leader, a friend, or a family member where you realized they had no idea what they were doing or talking about, but they sure were acting as if they did. The unsaid thing was behind their eyes but not coming out of their mouth. They were just making a decision because they had to, but you knew it was a shot in the dark if it was the right decision. Often, in those moments of being squeezed, their deepest insecurity leaks out. It's the same way somebody's real tone shows up in a 1 a.m. Teams message they never would've sent at noon.

That doesn't mean their insecurity is your job to fix. It just helps to remember they're human, and a lot more is happening under the skin than what shows up in the meeting invite or the “casual question” that clearly has an unpinning point. Like a father asking how their son’s day went, even though they already know their son ditched school that day. I can always tell when someone is trying to say something without saying it. The unsaid lingers above their head like a number that glows above the soon-to-be-dead victim in The Frighteners.

Two questions I ask when I feel an unsaid expectation pressing on me:

1. My insecurity. Why do I feel this way?

Is there something deeper here? Something unresolved I need to handle on my own? Everyone gets nervous. That's normal. But if the nervousness paralyzes you, if you're punching your pillow at night about a text that didn't get sent or a notification that never came, you have to dig into what's going on inside you. The pillow-punching is the tell. Don't ignore the tell.

2. Their insecurity. Why do they make people feel this way?

Is there a pattern in how they interact with others? Is there something unresolved in them? You can't answer these questions for them, and you shouldn't try to diagnose it too deeply. Your job isn't to be their therapist unless they explicitly invite you in. But naming it yourself helps you avoid internalizing it. Super helpful when it happens again, which it will if you work closely with them. For example, when someone in a meeting feels unseen, it's usually because they already feel overlooked. When you don't immediately take someone's advice, and they get defensive, it's because they're carrying a wound that says people don't respect them enough. You causally don’t bend to their way, and unknowingly poked the childhood trauma button. The same goes for the leader who fires off a passive-aggressive Slack thread at 11 p.m. The thread isn't really about the project. The project is the surface; the wound is underneath. Assuming you aren’t a slacker, of course.

I find unsaid expectations fairly easy to navigate myself because I have a strong sense of who I am. I know my role and responsibility to my wife, my kids, and my God. So when someone tries to influence me sideways through silence, it's easy to redirect back to my path. I’ve grown to listen less to the unsaid and care more about what is clearly said. That doesn't mean I'm not in the shower the next morning, talking to myself about it. I am. There are times the unsaid thing reveals something I genuinely hadn't considered, and I want to catch that, not dismiss it. I’m trying to see what others see in me and getting out of my own box.

I respect people more when they just say what they mean. Send the email or message. Make the expectation a sentence that is clear and not vague. But you won't always get leaders, friends, and family members who operate that way. You'll get the ones who go quiet and let you guess.

So, embrace the unsaid stuff and build a pipeline to process it. The silences. The read receipts. The ignored emails. The meeting you didn't get invited to. The channel you got dropped from. That's part of doing life with other humans, online and off. The quicker you build a strategy for processing the unsaid, the better your life gets.

Next time someone lets the silence do the talking, remember whose insecurity is in the room. It's theirs, not yours. At least, if you can move on quickly.