encouraging vs warm

Topic: Writing to thank a mentor who shaped your career
Axis varied: tone
A: Encouraging B: Warm

What to notice

Both examples address the same topic and (by default) share every axis other than tone. The only deliberate variable is which tone the writing was rendered through. Read both and ask: where does the framing change? Where does the vocabulary change? What does the reader take away from A that they would not take away from B, and vice versa? The tone swap is the entire cause of those differences.

A: encouraging

Dana,

I have been trying to figure out how to write this for weeks. What finally got me started: last month I put one of my direct reports forward to lead a project she was not sure she was ready for. Then I spent six weeks resisting the urge to step in while she found her footing. She found it.

Somewhere in those six weeks, I traced where I learned to do that. It went back to you.

A decade ago you recommended me to lead the Calloway integration. I kept telling myself I was not ready. You did not argue with me about it. You told me what you had actually observed: that I had held two difficult client situations together without letting them collapse, and that Calloway needed exactly the kind of steady judgment you had watched me develop over the previous two years. You were not being generous. You were describing something real.

What I did not fully see at the time was what that cost you. Staying close without taking over is harder than taking over. Letting someone work through a hard problem, when you could resolve it yourself in an afternoon, takes a particular patience that is not passive - it is a sustained choice to trust someone’s capacity over your own comfort. You made that choice repeatedly.

What you passed forward was not just my confidence. It was a working model of what it looks like to actually believe someone can do something hard - not to hope they can, but to point to the evidence and say: this person, this challenge, now.

I wanted you to know the model is still running.

B: warm

Dana,

I want you to know I’ve been thinking about you lately - not for the first time, but differently.

About ten years ago, you put my name forward to lead the Harmon integration. I remember staring at the project brief and thinking there must have been some mistake. The timeline was tight, the stakeholders were skeptical, and I had only ever been a supporting hand on work like that. I hadn’t earned it yet, or so I thought.

You disagreed. And you didn’t just make the recommendation and step back. You stayed close in a way I didn’t fully appreciate then. You’d check in on how I was handling the Thursday calls. You’d ask about the decision I’d been wrestling with, and you’d listen before you spoke. When I started to spiral after the first milestone slipped, you said something I’ve repeated to myself more times than I can count: “You are not behind. You are right where the work needs you.”

What I didn’t understand at the time was what that cost you. Not just patience, which it clearly did, but the willingness to let it be hard for me when it would have been easier for you to take over. You had to hold yourself back. That is a specific kind of generosity.

I know this because last month I put someone on my team - a younger project lead named Marcus - into a role I wasn’t sure he was ready for. I found myself checking in the way you used to, and saying less than I wanted to. And about three weeks in I realized: I learned this from you.

I don’t know if anyone ever told you that. I’m telling you now.