Dana had the email written for three weeks.
She rewrote it four times. Once it was two paragraphs. Once it was seven. The seven-paragraph version had a bullet list in it, which is when she knew something had gone wrong.
The problem was not the words. It was that every version she wrote was trying to make her manager agree with her.
Attempt one
The night before she planned to do it, she practised out loud. Vera is a phone call — you tell it who to be, it calls you, and you have the conversation. She asked it to be a manager who did not want to lose her.
It lasted eleven minutes.
She started with how much she had learned. Then the reorganisation last spring. Then something about her growth, and her manager said, "So what would need to change for you to stay?"
And she answered it. In detail. For two minutes.
She hung up and sat there, because she had just spent two minutes negotiating a stay from a job she had already decided to leave.
Attempt two
"I want to be clear that this isn't about money, it's more about—"
"So it's about the team?"
"No, I mean, partly, but—"
She stopped. Started again.
Attempt four
"I've accepted an offer somewhere else. My last day would be the fourteenth."
Silence.
Then: "Is there anything we could do to change your mind?"
"No. I've thought about it a lot and I'm sure."
"Can I ask what they're offering?"
"I'd rather not go into it. I want to make the handover as smooth as I can — can we talk about what that looks like?"
Forty seconds. She said it again the next night to be sure.
The real one
It took about ninety seconds, because her manager was surprised and needed a moment, and because she let him have it instead of filling the pause.
He asked the counteroffer question. She said the same sentence she had said twice on a Tuesday evening to something that was not him.
Three weeks of dread, for something that was over before my coffee went cold.
Why the practice worked
Not because she found better words. Because she found out which words were doing damage.
She could not see that in the email drafts.
She heard it immediately the first time someone pushed back.
If you have a conversation you have been rewriting in your head for weeks, that is usually the tell. The version in your head goes well because you are playing both parts.