The Invisible Actions Inside Every Conversation
Six Small Actions that Quietly Shape the Future You End Up Living
Do you ever wish people just listened better? Do the things you hope for tend to happen the way you pictured them — or is there often a gap between what you expected and what actually happens? Is life running as smoothly as you'd like, or is there some room for improvement?
I'd love to tell you I have a magic wand that makes everyone do exactly what you'd like them to. Unfortunately, I don't. Wouldn't life be fun if I did? But of course, here's the uncomfortable truth we all already know: try as we might, we can't make other people do anything.
But there's something we can do, and it's far more powerful than most people realise. We can look at the part we're playing in what happens around us. When our needs aren't met, or people disappoint us, it's easy to put the blame elsewhere, but if we dial things back a bit, we might just see that things started with us. The good news is that by examining our own contribution and experimenting with it, we can start to generate genuinely different outcomes.
And the place to start is somewhere so ordinary you've probably never thought to look there.
The Water We're Swimming In
I'm talking about conversation.
Think about it for a second. Conversation is how we coordinate action, build relationships, and make meaning together. It's how anything gets done — a project delivered, a team aligned, a date proposed, a family disagreement resolved, a decision made. It's a kind of technology we're born into and use every single day, in every culture, at every level of society. Even you, reading these words, are in a conversation with me right now.
This is true for all of us. But it's true twice over if you're a leader. A leader's work is done almost entirely in conversation — setting direction, asking things of other people, holding them to what they've agreed, naming what's working and what isn't. So much of leading happens in conversation that it's hard to picture the role without it. Which means the quality of a leader's conversations and the quality of their leadership are very nearly the same thing.
The trouble is that we swim in conversation the way fish swim in water. We're so completely surrounded by it that we stop noticing it altogether. And like the fish, we rarely pause to check the quality of the water — even when it isn't doing us much good.
That unnoticed water is where the notion of conversational waste lives. It's the to-ing and fro-ing when things don't happen as they should. The energy spent untangling a misunderstanding. The worry over how to handle a task a colleague didn't quite deliver. The quiet hope that someone will remember to do the thing, the way you like it, without being asked — and the flat disappointment when they don't.
Here's the part that changes everything: unlike the fish, once we notice the water, we can change its quality. And to do that, we need to see what's actually going on inside our conversations.
So what is a conversation? At one level, we're simply talking, listening and extracting meaning. At another level, we're doing things. But what are we actually doing?
The Six Actions Hiding In Your Words
When we speak, we're not only describing the world. We're acting on it. Saying “I promise” doesn't report a promise — it makes one. Saying “you're hired” doesn't describe a new reality; it creates one.
It turns out that almost everything we say falls into one of just six basic actions — known in the tradition they come from as the basic linguistic acts (or basic language acts). They're invisible until someone points them out — and then, like most useful things, you start seeing them everywhere.
Assertions — statements about the world, offered as fact and open to being checked. “The report is on your desk.” True or false, and something we can point to and verify. These are also called facts: the objective statements about our world.
Assessments — our judgements and opinions. “That report is thorough.” Not true or false, but valid or invalid; grounded (or ungrounded) in standards and experience — and very easily mistaken for fact. These are the subjective statements about our world.
Declarations — words that create a new reality simply by being spoken, backed by the authority to say them. “I declare you husband and wife.” “I will run the NY Marathon.” “This meeting is closed.” “You're hired.” Leaders live and die by their declarations.
Requests — asking someone to do something, and in doing so opening the door to a future that doesn't yet exist. “Could you come to dinner on Friday? I'd love you to meet my family.” “Could you send that to me by Friday?”
Offers — proposing to do something for someone else, which they're free to accept, decline, or counter. “I could review that for you, if it's useful.”
Promises / commitments — binding yourself to a future action. “I'll have it to you by Friday.” The one that builds trust — or erodes it, every time it's made loosely and kept loosely.
Notice something about the last four. Declarations, requests, offers and promises don't describe the present at all — they build the future. Every intention you declare, commitment you make and request you land is a small act of construction, quietly shaping what comes next. This is why the way you talk today has so much to do with the future you find yourself living tomorrow. For a leader, this isn't a nice-to-have; it's the heart of the role. You're rarely doing the work with your own hands — you're building the team's future through the requests you make, the commitments you gather, and the declarations only you have the authority to make.
An important part of being a leader is taking responsibility for the language you use, and noticing the language happening around you. By paying attention to the actions playing out (or not) in everyday conversation, a leader can improve their own capacity and that of their team — even if it's by just a little. Conversation isn't rocket science — it's completely natural to us — but seeing it objectively opens up the possibility of being a little more effective, avoiding conversational waste, and being more mindful of what we're generating.
Two Distinctions Worth Dwelling On
Most of these acts are straightforward once you can see them. But two of them do an outsized amount of the damage when we get them muddled — and an outsized amount of good when we use them well.
Telling an Assessment from an Assertion
Learning to tell an assessment apart from an assertion is probably one of the most useful distinctions you can make. (And notice — that is an assessment.)
So why do I hold it? Because when we blindly accept other people's assessments as assertions — as the truth — we hand them enormous authority over our lives. The moment we start to recognise the difference, we put ourselves back in the driver's seat. That's not to say someone's assessment isn't valid; maybe it is. But we get to decide whether it's something to learn from, or not.
And if you lead, there's a second edge to this. Your assessments carry extra weight. When a leader says a piece of work “isn't good enough,” or that someone “isn't ready for a promotion,” it tends to land in the room as fact rather than opinion — and people organise themselves around it. Owning it as an assessment — yours, grounded in particular standards and assertions (or facts), open to being talked about — is often the difference between feedback someone can actually work with and a quiet verdict they carry around for years.
The Sloppy Request
A surprising amount of everyday frustration turns out to be a request that was quietly hoped for but never actually made. And a good deal more turns out to be caused by what's known as a sloppy request.
Take “Could you send that to me by Friday?” What exactly do we mean by “it”? By when on Friday, specifically? And, just as important, why do we want it?
Importantly, a request carries information in both directions: even if the answer is no, paying attention to the response tells us a great deal about what the other person is willing or able to do — which lets us move forward in an informed way, rather than being in the dark.
Asking well makes us far more likely to get what we're after. And again, it's easy to blame others when we don't — but when we dial it back, we're often the ones at fault, because we've been sloppy and made assumptions about how the other person would interpret our request. If you manage people, this is where a great deal of “they didn't do what I asked” quietly begins — not with them, but with a request that was never clear enough to act on in the first place.
Why Seeing These Invisible Actions Objectively is the Real Gift
Here's what I've found, both in my own life and in my clients'. Seeing these six actions gives you a great deal more objectivity. Most breakdowns in conversation come from people not being clear on what action they’re taking (and slip-sliding around in a muddle of vagueness), or quietly confusing one action for another. We mistake an assessment for an assertion and defend our opinion as though it were a fact. We treat a hope as though it were a commitment, then feel let down when reality disagrees. We complain — when what we actually needed to do was make a clean request.
When you can see the actions, you stop being swept along by the conversation and start being able to look at it. That small shift from inside the churn to observing it changes everything. It lets you stay calm when things get overwhelming, because you can name what's happening: that's an opinion, not a fact. That was a hope, never a request. No one here has actually promised anything.
And from that calmer, clearer place, you can do the most useful thing of all — respectfully seek clarity. What's your honest assessment here? Can you help me understand what's driving that view? Could I ask you for something specific? What's the one thing that would most help you right now?
That's not a magic wand. But for the people I work with — leaders in particular, whose entire job is done through conversation — it comes remarkably close. A leader who can tell a fact from an opinion, make a request that actually lands, and hold a commitment as real is a leader who is more effective, and whose team is more productive.
We can let these six actions run us, invisibly, the way they run most people. Or we can learn to use them with a bit of mastery — for ourselves, our teams, and the people we care about.
Food for Thought
On reflection, where do the opportunities for tightening up the way you use language lie — in your own life, and in the way you lead?
Where could you start experimenting with a more conscious use of these six actions — even one or two small changes?
Is there a recurring frustration, at home or with your team, that's really a request you've never actually made?
Is there someone whose commitments you've been treating as promises when they were only ever hopes — and what would a cleaner conversation about that look like?
If you'd like to learn more about these basic language acts, and other ways of seeing that might help you be more resourceful, feel free to get in touch.
This framework has deep roots — in the speech act theory of philosophers Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin and John Searle, later adapted for organisations and coordination by Fernando Flores, and developed within the ontological coaching tradition (Rafael Echeverría and the Newfield lineage). But you don't need the philosophy to use it. You just need to start noticing the water.
My own understanding of these acts I owe to two teachers in particular — Alan Sieler and Karen White of the Ontological Coaching Institute (formerly the Newfield Institute) — whose teaching first brought this framework alive for me.