Twenty Minutes Before Brunch

bartender preparing a drink

It was a good many years ago, and I was living in Atlanta. I had just about completed a master's degree in counseling. I had learned about family systems and addiction, and the way people in pain will sometimes organize their entire lives around the thing that is hurting them, the way a tongue keeps finding a sore tooth. My supervisor said I had a gift for helping people. This was, I would later reflect, somewhat complicated by the fact that my day job involved helping people drink.

I also had, at that particular moment in my life, rent due.

I had worked in restaurants since high school — waiting tables, a little bartending, some training and management. So when the opportunity arose to pick up a bartending shift at Steak and Ale on Mother's Day, I took it without a great deal of reflection. Which, in retrospect, is ironic, given that I was studying a discipline built almost entirely on reflection.

Mother's Day, if you have not worked in the restaurant industry, is one of the three or four days a year that separates the people who can handle pressure from the people who discover, at 12:45 on a Sunday afternoon, that they cannot. It is extraordinarily busy. And it is preceded by an unusual stillness.

And so there I was, mid-morning, stocking the bar, cutting limes, getting organized, when the first man came in and sat down.

He was somewhere in his fifties, with the look of a man who was technically on his way somewhere but had made an intermediate decision. He ordered something brown and straightforward. And then he began to talk.

His mother-in-law was visiting. She had, apparently, views. About the house, about the children, about certain choices he had made over the course of his adult life that she felt, even now, could stand to be revisited. He was not an unhappy man, exactly. He was a man in need of approximately twenty minutes of being heard.

He was a man in need of approximately twenty minutes of being heard.

While polishing glasses and folding napkins, I listened. I nodded. Asked a question or two — not to fix anything, just to keep the thing moving. He finished his drink. He left a decent tip. He looked, walking out, like a man who had set something down.

Then the next one came in. And then another.

For the better part of two hours, I watched a quiet and steady procession of men make their way to the bar. They were not men in crisis. They were ordinary men — a little tired, a little bewildered by the specific shape their lives had taken, and in possession of more feelings than they generally knew what to do with on a Sunday morning.

They talked about their mothers, their wives, their mothers-in-law. One man's wife had been crying since Thursday and he had the wisdom, at least, to suspect that asking why might not help. He had, he said, been giving her space. I did not ask how that was going. Another had driven his own mother to brunch and she had, en route, re-litigated a disagreement from 1985 that concerned, as best he could tell, a pie.

I listened to every one of them. I was present. I was warm. I reflected back what I heard. I let the silences sit. I asked the occasional gentle question — the kind that opens a door rather than closes one.

It was somewhere around the fourth or fifth man that it dawned on me, slowly, the way things do when you're busy doing something else — that I was helping. Same as I did in my internship. The setting was different, but the work was not: listening, being present, hearing what a person was saying underneath what they were saying, and sitting with discomfort without rushing to fix it. People rarely need advice. They need someone to simply listen, and trust that they'll find their own way.

People rarely need advice. They need someone to simply listen, and trust that they'll find their own way.

The main difference was that here, the tissues were replaced by cocktail napkins, and nobody was going to bill their insurance.

It has always seemed to me that some of the finest helping in the world happens not in offices with diplomas on the wall, but across diner counters and barber chairs and the front seats of Ubers.

My supervisor had told me that the relationship — the human connection — is the intervention. That people don't open up because you say the right thing. They breathe, they settle, they find a foothold, when someone treats them as worth listening to. She was right. I watched it happen, over and over, on a Sunday morning in Atlanta, in a Steak and Ale that doesn't exist anymore.

The lunch rush came eventually and swept all of that away — loud and sudden and demanding, the dining room filling with flowers and grandchildren and the particular chaos of people celebrating the women who had, in one way or another, made them possible.

But I've thought about those men a lot over the years. About what people are actually asking for when they sit down somewhere and start to talk. About how rarely it's advice, and how often it's just this — someone who will be still, someone who will listen, someone who will let you say the thing out loud without trying to hand it back to you improved.

And I've thought about the mothers. The ones who had spent years absorbing the weight of everyone else's hard days without anyone thinking to ask about their own. The ones who had given so much, for so long, that the people who loved them sometimes didn't have the words for it, and so brought flowers instead.

Which is not the worst idea anyone has ever had.

I never did pursue counseling as a career. But I've never forgotten what that morning taught me about what it actually means to help someone. The most useful thing I learned in graduate school, I learned behind a bar.

The most useful thing I learned in graduate school, I learned behind a bar.

[Originally published on Mother's Day.]

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Most managers become coaches the same way I became one that morning — accidentally, in the middle of something else, without any particular preparation. Our workshop, Leading One-to-One, is for people who find themselves in that role and want to do it well. If that's you, I'd love to have you join us.