Everyone Was Trying. And Something Was Still Missed.

I was at a meeting yesterday.

Around my dining room table — two CAS workers, a mom I have been supporting, and me. One worker was mom’s worker, someone she had a history with. The other was the worker assigned to the mom’s two girls — who has also, by extension, taken me on as part of this situation. We were there to set goals, establish timeframes, figure out supports. Everyone showed up. Everyone was trying.

And something was still missing.

Before I even get to the meeting itself — think about what that room contained before anyone spoke. Two workers on one side of the table. Mom on the other. Without me there, it would have been 2:1. The moment I sat down, I changed that. Not by choosing a side — I wasn’t there for CAS, but I also understand their world. I wasn’t there against them either. I was there for myself, for mom, for the girls. Which made me something the room didn’t quite have a category for. A kind of wild card.

Mom told me afterward she had deliberately chosen her seat, leaving the workers to take the other side. She was already working the Field before the meeting began.

I noticed it almost immediately — not as a problem exactly, more like a texture to the room that told me we were each there for something different. The workers were there to gather information and establish a plan. Mom was there to demonstrate her capability and find her voice. I was there to advocate for something sustainable — not just a plan that looked good on paper, but one that would actually hold given where she is and what she is working through.

Four different agendas. All legitimate. All genuine. All mostly invisible to each other.

I want to tell you about two specific moments, because I think they say something important.

At one point the workers were asking about summer camp dates. I had the week — the week of July 12th or thereabouts, one camp running seven days, the other five. I said it. They asked again. I said it again. They asked again.

I got a bit frustrated. Not about the dates. About what the repeated asking was communicating — that I hadn’t been heard, that the answer I had given wasn’t sufficient, that I had somehow not prepared well enough, that I was falling short of what the meeting required. So I named it. I said that if they had needed me to come with specific information that they wanted, they could have let me know in advance and I would have.

The response: “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I didn’t say anything. But my internal response was — I know. That isn’t what I’m saying.

They had heard defensiveness. I was setting a boundary about preparation and expectations. Two completely different things. And in that gap between what I meant and what they heard, something real got lost.

The second moment was when I raised a concern about duplication. Another agency was also involved, also offering supports, and I was worried that too much arriving at once would increase the mom’s anxiety rather than help. I was advocating for coordination, for a pace she could actually sustain. For sustainability over intensity. For thoughtful planning of supports versus tossing solutions at her.

They heard resistance. Or something close to it.

Again — two different conversations happening in the same room.

What I was doing in that meeting — and I say this not to position myself as the expert in the room, because I was also very much in it, also had moments of frustration, also brought my own agenda — was tracking the Relational Field.

I could do that partly because of where I sat in it.

I wasn’t the one being assessed. I wasn’t the one whose parenting was under the microscope, whose capability was being evaluated, whose future with her children was tangled up in what happened in this meeting. And I wasn’t a CAS worker either — I wasn’t there to evaluate or document or establish timelines. That ambiguity gave me something. The workers couldn’t quite place me. I wasn’t a client. I wasn’t a colleague. I understood their world but I wasn’t there for them. Which meant I could move through the room differently than anyone else in it.

I was simultaneously internal to the field — a player with a real role and a real stake — and external enough to see some of what was moving through it. Inside and outside at the same time. It is a lot of work. Not because the seeing is hard, but because the pace is fast and the response time needs to be immediate. You are tracking and participating at the same time and there is no pause button.

Mom’s body language told the whole story. She came in taking control — she told me afterward she had chosen her seat deliberately, leaving the workers to sit together on the other side, facing her. Throughout the meeting she moved from closed and protective to smaller to more open to confident and back again, depending on what was happening in the room. She was working so hard. Not just to answer the questions but to be seen — to demonstrate capability, to articulate what she needs, to show the good work she has done and is doing and how hard she is fighting to get back on track.

What she needed from that meeting, and what I was trying to support, was to be seen for all of that. Not just assessed against a checklist of what still needs to happen.

This is what I mean by the Relational Field.

It is everything operating in the space between people that shapes what is possible before anyone has made a deliberate choice. The power arrangement and what it produces — who feels scrutinized, who feels more in control, who can step back and who cannot. The roles each person is holding and the assumptions those roles carry about what everyone else’s behaviour means. The history each person brings — what they have learned about what institutions do with vulnerability, what happens when you show frustration, whether naming a concern is received as contribution or resistance.

In that room, the CAS workers were reading through a professional lens built from years of child protection work. In that context, defensiveness and protectiveness are signals to track. So when I expressed frustration, or when I raised the coordination concern, the lens was already in place. They heard what they are trained to hear.

They weren’t wrong to track it. They were missing what was actually happening.

That gap — between what someone is actually doing and what the professional or positional lens interprets them as doing — is one of the most consistently costly things I see in complex relational encounters. And it happens not because people don’t care, but because nobody in the room is tracking the field. Nobody is asking: what is the relational environment producing right now, and is it serving what we are actually here to do?

I have been developing a Framework for this — for seeing the Relational Field clearly and working with what you see.

It looks at five things simultaneously. What each person is carrying into the encounter. Who each person actually is, beyond the role they are filling in this moment — their full weight, their history, their knowledge, what they are working to show or protect. What the relationships in the room have built and what that allows or forecloses. What the systemic conditions — the power arrangements, the organizational culture, the professional frameworks — are producing before anyone makes a choice. And what is already in the room before the meeting begins.

In yesterday’s meeting, all five were active and mostly invisible. The workers tracking one thing, mom managing another, me trying to hold a view of the whole while also being in it. The result was a meeting that got things done and still left some of the most important things unseen.

Once you start to see it, it is hard to un-see it. This is the starting point. And knowing what to look for is what changes it.

If you have been in rooms like that — and I think most people reading this have — I want you to know that the disconnect you felt was probably real. Something was likely happening in the Relational Field that wasn’t being tracked. It is a gap in what most of us have been given the tools to see.

The Relational Intelligence Framework™ is my attempt to fill that gap — to give people the language and the lenses to see what is happening in these encounters and to work with it more honestly and more effectively.

If you want to know where you are in your own Relational Intelligence development, the RI Maturity Assessment™ is a free starting point. It gives you a specific picture across the five domains — a starting point of understanding yourself and others, a map for all relationships.

And if something in this story resonated — if you recognized a meeting, a moment, a room where the relational field was producing something that nobody was quite tracking — I would genuinely love to hear about it.