What she thought was the end of her career, and what came after

Let's name her Ruth. She is an amalgam, not a member or a client. She's 55, runs operations, and is forty minutes into a board session that isn't going well when her voice catches on the word "layoffs" and her eyes well up.

The layoffs, in truth, aren't the core of it. It's the eleven months of them, her father in hospice, the wake-ups at 4 a.m., and the director across the table who has just asked, for the third time, whether operations "has a handle on this." She does have a handle on it. Her grip on it has lasted so long now that her knuckles are sore.

Twelve pairs of eyes are fixed on her in Indianapolis. She has maybe four seconds before someone offers a kind word, and that kind word will make things worse. The genuine choice she makes lies in what she does during those four seconds.

Option A: apologize, then press on

Offering "sorry, give me a second," she takes a sip of water and returns to the slide. The downside is that the apology casts the tears as a mistake, and the room now has permission to treat them that way. For the following week, she keeps imagining what the chair is thinking, since she offered the apology before she had any idea how it would land.

Option B: take a ten-minute recess

Announcing "let's take ten," she walks out of the room. The trade-off is that when the person who was in tears calls the pause, everyone grasps exactly why, yet she comes back into a room that has spent those ten minutes discussing her. The upside is real, though. She comes back collected and wraps up the presentation the way she intended.

Option C: name what happened and keep moving

She says, "It's been a tough year for this team, and that's showing." "I'm going to keep going," she adds, offering no apology and no explanation, only one straightforward sentence. The downside is that some directors will remember that sentence longer than the numbers. The upside is that she has described what everyone just saw before anyone else could.

What veteran executives advise

Women who have run boardrooms for years worry about this less than Lydia does. Tears are seldom the true issue; the apology is what people fixate on. Whoever seized the moment tends to set the direction everyone else in the room takes. Describe it as a disaster and the audience will likely adopt that same view. Frame it as passing weather, and for the most part the room will treat it that way too. They also say something less comfortable: the standard isn't equal. A man who gets emotional over layoffs is "human." A woman is "emotional," and likability research has repeatedly found the same behavior draws a different label depending on who does it. That isn't a reason to hide. It's a reason to control the framing.

In Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women, 29% said their mental health was in poor shape. The women seated in that boardroom are not exempt from this. Some of them have been Lydia.

The verdict

Within the composite, Lydia goes with Option C. Afterward, in front of the entire group, the chair remarks, "That was the most candid update this board has received in a year," then asks the director who raised the hard questions to put them down in writing. It surprised her. It shouldn't have. Most board chairs have weathered far rougher sessions, and the ones people remember are those who kept their composure and carried on.

Ultimately, the question is whether you can deliver the sentence without wrapping an apology around it. If you can, say it. If you can't yet, take the break.

Vote

Given options A, B or C, what choice would you have landed on? Share your letter with your chapter, and we will print the results of the vote next month. If you have ever stood where Lydia stood, we would welcome hearing your account.