The Physical Agony of Euphemism

My left pinky toe is currently throbbing in a sharp, syncopated rhythm that perfectly matches the ticking of the clock on my manager’s wall, and frankly, the physical agony is a welcome distraction. I just slammed it into the mahogany leg of a filing cabinet-a cabinet that probably holds 455 different ways to tell an employee they are failing without actually using the word ‘failing.’ Across from me, my supervisor is doing that thing with his hands. The steeple. The gentle lean. He is clearing his throat to deliver the first slice of bread in the most cursed culinary creation of corporate America: the feedback sandwich.

‘Hazel,’ he starts, and I already want to retreat into the upholstery. ‘You have been doing such a 25-star job with the new client relationships. Truly, your ability to manage expectations is impressive.’

I don’t smile. I don’t even blink. I just wait for the ‘but.’ It’s the invisible guest in every room, the ghost that haunts every mid-year review. When you spend your life as a financial literacy educator like I do, you learn to spot a bad deal from 85 yards away. And this? This is a subprime mortgage of a conversation. He is trying to buy my goodwill with a currency he hasn’t earned, and in about 15 seconds, he’s going to default on the whole thing. The compliment isn’t a compliment; it’s a sedative. He’s trying to numb the area before he brings out the scalpel, but all he’s doing is making me feel like I’m being patronized by a man who thinks I can’t handle the truth of my own professional existence.

The Multi-Million Dollar Delusion

We all do this. We’ve all been taught that to be ‘constructive’ is to be ‘kind,’ and we’ve mistakenly equated kindness with the obfuscation of reality. It’s a collective delusion that costs companies millions-perhaps even $655 million in lost productivity and sheer, unadulterated confusion. When you wrap a criticism in two layers of fake praise, you aren’t softening the blow. You are just making the recipient work twice as hard to figure out what the actual point of the meeting was. They walk out wondering if they are getting a raise or a pink slip, because the signals were so crossed they looked like a 55-car pileup on the interstate.

In my world of finance, clarity is the only thing that keeps the lights on. If I tell a student that their portfolio is ‘diverse and colorful’ before mentioning that they are losing 15% on their annual returns due to high-fee mutual funds, I am failing them. I am not being a ‘supportive’ educator; I am being a liar. The numbers don’t have feelings, and neither does a deadline. Yet, in the soft-focus world of human resources, we act as if a direct sentence is a lethal weapon. We spend 35 minutes crafting a ‘positive opening’ just so we can spend 45 seconds telling someone their reports are consistently late. It’s an efficiency nightmare that leaves everyone involved feeling slightly oily.

Cognitive Exhaustion of Anticipation

Think about the psychological toll of the waiting. From the moment that first vague compliment leaves the speaker’s mouth, the listener’s brain enters a state of high-alert defense. We are wired for pattern recognition. We know the sandwich is coming. We’ve seen the recipe. So, while the manager is waxing poetic about our ‘team spirit,’ our amygdala is screaming, ‘Where is the strike? When does the hammer fall?’ We aren’t listening to the praise. We are scanning the horizon for the predator. By the time the actual feedback arrives-the part that could actually help us grow-we are too cognitively exhausted from the anticipation to actually process it.

I once sat through a 55-minute session where a mentor told me my ‘energy was infectious’ for the first half-hour. I spent that entire time wondering if I was about to be fired for something I didn’t even know I’d done. When he finally mentioned that I needed to be more precise with my tax-loss harvesting calculations, I was so relieved that I didn’t even stop to ask for clarification on the specific errors. I just wanted to leave the room. The ‘praise’ had effectively sabotaged the ‘learning.’ It turned a professional growth moment into a survival exercise.

The Implied Lack of Trust

This discomfort with directness reveals a profound lack of trust. When a leader uses the feedback sandwich, they are essentially saying, ‘I don’t think you are emotionally mature enough to handle a direct critique of your work.’ It’s infantalizing. It assumes that our egos are so brittle that they will shatter upon contact with a negative data point. But for those of us who actually want to be good at what we do-those of us who want to reach that top 5% of our field-the ‘bread’ is just noise. We want the meat. We want the hard truth because that’s the only thing we can actually build a career on.

There is a certain irony in the fact that we spend so much time building office environments that are supposed to foster ‘transparency’ while our actual conversations remain clouded in fog. We install glass walls and open floor plans, yet we hide our true thoughts behind layers of corporate-approved euphemisms. We want the aesthetic of clarity without the vulnerability of it. True transparency isn’t just about where you sit; it’s about how you speak. It’s about creating an environment where a person can see exactly where they stand at all times, without having to squint through a haze of ‘sandwiching.’

The Architectural Requirement for Honesty

The Interruption of Reality

My toe is still throbbing. My manager is still talking. He’s finally talking about the fact that I missed a 15-minute window for a conference call last week. I want to tell him that I know. I want to tell him that I’ve already calculated the opportunity cost and adjusted my schedule by 45 minutes every morning to ensure it never happens again. But I have to wait. I have to wait for him to finish the critique so he can move on to the final slice of bread-the ‘ending on a high note’ part where he tells me my desk plants look healthy or some other nonsense designed to make him feel like a ‘nice guy.’

“

He finishes the critique. He pauses. I see him searching his brain for something nice to say. He looks at my shoes.

‘And really, Hazel, your choice of professional footwear is always so… practical.’

“

I want to scream. I want to tell him that if he really respected me, he would have just spent 5 minutes telling me the call was important and then let me get back to work. Instead, we’ve wasted 25 minutes on a dance neither of us wants to do. This is the hidden cost of conflict avoidance. We think we are saving people’s feelings, but we are actually just stealing their time. And in my line of work, time is the one asset you can’t hedge against. If you spend 15 years being ‘sandwiched,’ you lose thousands of hours of potential improvement. You become a person who is comfortable in their mediocrity because no one ever had the courage to tell them they were standing in the dark.

The Power of Unvarnished Truth

We need to kill the sandwich. We need to bury it under 55 feet of concrete and replace it with something radical: honesty. Direct feedback, when delivered with genuine respect for the other person’s competence, is the highest form of professional appreciation. It says, ‘I value your work enough to be real with you.’ It says, ‘I believe you can handle this.’ It removes the anxiety of the unknown and replaces it with the agency of the known.

I’ve started doing this with my students. When someone brings me a budget that is $1,225 over their monthly income, I don’t start by telling them their Excel formatting is ‘very tidy.’ I look them in the eye and say, ‘This math doesn’t work. We need to cut $1,225, or you are going to be in trouble.’ Their reaction? Usually, it’s a sigh of relief. Finally, someone is telling them the truth. Finally, they have a clear path forward. No bread. No garnish. Just the facts. It’s amazing how much faster you can solve a problem when you aren’t busy trying to pretend it isn’t a problem.

When we remove the fog, we move faster. This principle applies across all aspects of professional life, including how we structure our physical and digital environments to foster immediate understanding, as seen in modern architectural solutions designed for ultimate visibility, such as those described by Sola Spaces.