The Waiting Is Over, Tomorrow Is the Day

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 36 · OCTOBER 20, 2026

Tomorrow, Rachael and I will be in the same room for the first time.

In seven months we have built a business, this newsletter, a readiness assessment, a cohort programme and a Vault of 77 documents. (She forgot the YouTube channel and several tools like the Job Description and Meeting Agenda tools — but no matter.) We have disagreed, decided, launched and occasionally panicked. All of it across an ocean, a five-hour time difference, and a WhatsApp thread that will never be made public. (NEVER.)

People find this harder to believe than almost anything else we tell them. And the disbelief is the interesting part. It assumes trust is built in person, and that without the room, what you have is something thinner.

I don’t think that’s right.

There is a lot of received wisdom that real trust needs a room. Coffee, corridors, the conversation after the meeting. Being in person matters, and I’m not pretending that being in the same room as Rachael tomorrow doesn’t matter to me. It does.

But what people usually mean by “you need to be in the room” is chemistry. (A word I am coming to increasingly hate. Chemistry is either a class In high school that was essentially gibberish or that unknowable vibe you have on a date. And both of those things are ridiculous to talk about in the context of the workplace.) Chemistry is not trust. Chemistry is how it feels. Trust is whether it holds weight.

We have said before that trust is architecture, not chemistry. It is built from what people can see you do, repeatedly, over time. Sharing a building gives people more chances to see it. It doesn’t change what they are looking for.

Our five pillars of trust were written for the Chief of Staff and the leader they work with, but they hold for any senior working relationship. Rachael and I are the best evidence I have that all five can be built without ever sharing a room.

It won’t have escaped your notice that Rachael and I are both (highly) competitive, in very different ways. And we both get to say, “I told you so.” (But mostly I do because I’m usually the one who is right. Mostly.) Sardonically, seriously, but never as a judg(e)ment.

What makes that work is a system we built early. Before we argue about anything, we say which kind of argument it is. Is this a hill one of us will die on? Or are we chewing the fat, throwing ideas around so we’ve looked at it from every angle? (This is true. Hadn’t considered it, but we both preface ideas with clear qualifiers, “I’m just spit balling here…”)

Most of the time it’s the second. The hard work happens when we’re on opposing hills, both trying to plant a flag. That’s where honesty and candour stop being nice to have, because one of us is almost always seeing something the other isn’t.

“Should we work with this person?” is a conversation we have all the time. A few weeks ago, Rachael called with one of them. My reaction was immediate, visceral, and very negative. I just said “No.” It was so strong that in that moment I couldn’t even say why.

Rachael’s response? “Fine, we won’t.”

I did explain my reasons afterwards. But she didn’t need them to accept the answer. And she has done exactly the same to me, more than once, and I gave her the same answer she gave me.

That’s what trust in judgement actually looks like. Not agreeing with someone’s reasoning, but trusting it exists before you’ve heard it. None of it happened in a room. It happened on calls, and it was already built.

This is showing up as the same person whoever you’re talking to. With leadership, with key stakeholders, with the team. Up, down and sideways. Not deferential to some, difficult with others, and not reshaping yourself depending on who holds the power.

I have been known to say that the written word is a blunt instrument. A simple “thank you” can read as genuine, or, if you’re in a different place in your head, as a sarcastic insult. The words haven’t changed. The intent hasn’t changed. The only thing that has changed is what’s going on in the reader’s head.

When almost your entire working relationship happens in writing, that matters enormously. Every message is open to the worst reading.

So early on, Rachael and I made a deliberate decision to do as many meetings together as we could. Partly to see how the other operated: how she handles a difficult client, what she notices that I don’t, which questions she asks first. And partly for trust. If you’ve sat in enough meetings with someone, you know what happens in the meetings you’re not in.

Every one of those rooms was a video call. It didn’t matter. What mattered was seeing, over and over, that the Rachael talking to a client was the same Rachael talking to me.

It gave us more than that. A while back we came off a joint call with a client who was very happy with how it had gone. Rachael rang me straight back and asked, “Are you okay?”