What Pressure Reveals About the People We Trust.

What Pressure Reveals About the People We Trust

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, leadership, and the lessons business sometimes teaches us when we least expect them.

This weekend, I received a difficult phone call from someone I have known and trusted professionally. I will deliberately leave out most of the details because they are not important to the lesson, and because I have no interest in using this space to embarrass anyone. What matters is that alcohol was involved, emotions were high, some serious accusations were made, and by the time I ended the 

call I found myself looking at a relationship I had valued very differently.

What surprised me was how deeply the conversation affected me. I have been

 in business for almost 25 years. I have negotiated difficult contracts, lost opportunities, disagreed with clients, made mistakes and experienced the inevitable disappointments that come with building a career. Those things

 hurt, but I have learnt to process them. What I still struggle with is having 

    my character questioned.

My name matters enormously to me. Long before there were brands, books, qualifications, clients or titles attached to it, it was the one thing I carried into every room. Over the years, I have tried to build a reputation around trust: that my word means something, that people can introduce me into their networks without worrying about how I will behave, and that even when we disagree, my integrity should never be the issue. I am far from perfect, but being accused of dishonesty, betrayal or deliberately harming someone cuts somewhere much deeper than losing a piece of business ever could.

Perhaps that is why this weekend hurt more than it ordinarily might have.

 It was the second time this year that I had opened myself up within a business relationship only to later find my character being questioned in ways I found deeply painful. I will not revisit the earlier incident here, except to say that it affected me more than I admitted publicly at the time. For a while, I closed myself off. 

I withdrew emotionally and found myself unable to properly explain even to my wife what I was carrying. For someone who has spent most of his professional life being comfortable around people, building relationships easily and being trusted with other people’s ideas, organisations and ambitions, it was an unfamiliar place to find myself.

We are barely beyond the halfway point of 2026, and already this year has confronted me with situations I had somehow managed to avoid during 

almost a quarter of a century in business. That has been humbling. Experience can make us believe that we have seen most things before. Then life introduces

 a new lesson and reminds us that longevity does not make us immune to disappointment. Perhaps experience is not about reaching a point where 

difficult things stop happening. It is about becoming better at deciding what those difficult things should teach us.

This time, rather than disappear completely into myself, I reached for someone whose judgement I trust. I called my big brother, Greaves.

Greaves has been one of the most important mentors in my life. His career has taken him through different industries and business environments across Africa and as far afield as London, Canada and Russia. More importantly, he knows me beyond business. He knows the person behind the professional reputation, which meant I did not have to defend myself or carefully construct a version of events. I could simply tell my big brother that something had happened and that it had hurt me.

I vented. He listened. Then, in the way older brothers sometimes reduce complicated situations to one unforgettable observation, he said, “The bottle always shows you a true man’s pedigree.”

I smiled when I read it, but I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. 

I am not entirely convinced that alcohol always reveals some hidden, authentic version of a person. Human behaviour is more complicated than that, and people can certainly say and do things while intoxicated that they deeply regret when sober. 

But alcohol can lower inhibitions. It can remove some of the filters that ordinarily govern how we communicate fear, insecurity, suspicion or anger. In business, those moments can sometimes expose tensions that polite meetings and carefully written emails have managed to conceal.

Pressure does something similar. Most partnerships look healthy when there is very little at stake. It is easy to speak about trust, collaboration, loyalty and shared success when opportunities remain theoretical. Everyone can be generous when there is nothing significant to divide. The real test often arrives when someone believes there is something to gain, something to lose or something happening beyond their control. Suddenly, the values everyone spoke about are no longer words in a conversation. They are being tested.

That distinction matters because organisations spend enormous amounts of time performing due diligence on opportunities while sometimes performing remarkably little due diligence on people. We study markets, examine financial projections, negotiate contracts, assess legal risks and debate commercial terms. Yet one of the greatest risks in any partnership rarely appears on a spreadsheet: how will the people around the table behave when they feel threatened?

Character is particularly difficult to evaluate when everything is going well.

 Someone can appear collaborative when every decision goes their way. They can appear generous when there is plenty to share. They can appear trustworthy when trust has never cost them anything. The better test is often what happens during misunderstanding, disappointment or uncertainty. 

Do they ask questions before making accusations? Can they disagree without becoming destructive? Can they protect a relationship while still defending their interests? Those behaviours tell us far more about the future of a partnership than almost anything written into a memorandum of understanding.

The experience has also made me reconsider some disappointments from earlier in my career. There have been tenders I desperately wanted that we did not win, partnerships that never progressed and opportunities that disappeared after considerable effort. At the time, I naturally saw them as losses. The older I get, however, the more I wonder how many disappointments were actually forms of protection that I simply did not recognise at the time.

We naturally evaluate opportunities by imagining what might happen if they succeed. Perhaps we should occasionally ask a different question: what happens if this succeeds with the wrong people? A disagreement when very little money is involved may be unpleasant. The same disagreement after significant contracts have been signed, teams assembled and reputations publicly connected can become catastrophic. Sometimes discovering a weakness in a relationship before the stakes become larger is not bad luck at all. It is very cheap due diligence.

That may be one of the most useful lessons business has taught me. Money does not necessarily change people. Opportunity does not necessarily change people. Pressure does not necessarily change people either. Sometimes circumstances simply give us access to parts of people we had never previously needed to see.

This is also why I am becoming more thoughtful about the difference between relationships and partnerships. I am naturally a relationship person. I enjoy connecting people, sharing ideas, opening doors and believing is possibilities. 

Some of the greatest opportunities in my career have emerged because somebody trusted somebody else enough to make an introduction. I have no desire to lose that instinct simply because a few relationships have disappointed me. Cynicism may protect us from certain people, but it can also prevent us 

from building extraordinary things with good ones.

Wisdom, however, requires boundaries. Trust does not have to be binary. Someone may deserve access to your friendship without automatically deserving access to your business. Someone may deserve access to your ideas without deserving access to your relationships. Fewer people should be given access to your reputation, because unlike money, reputation can take decades to accumulate and remarkably little time to damage.

My conversation with Greaves reminded me why mentorship remains important even as we grow older and supposedly more experienced ourselves. A good mentor does not simply provide answers. Sometimes their greatest contribution is helping us interpret what has happened before emotion decides what it means. When we are hurt or angry, we can easily turn temporary experiences into permanent conclusions about people, business or even ourselves. 

Experience introduces another possibility: observe first, establish boundaries, allow emotions to settle and then decide what the behaviour has taught you.

I still do not believe the lesson from this weekend is that people cannot be trusted. That would be too easy, and probably too cynical. Nor do I believe that one terrible conversation necessarily defines the entirety of another human being. People deserve grace, particularly when they recognise that they have behaved badly. But forgiveness and partnership are not the same thing. We can forgive someone and still decide that sharing a business interest with them is no longer wise. Perhaps maturity is learning to hold those two ideas at the same time.

Yet as I have reflected on everything that has happened this year, another, more uncomfortable question has emerged. Have I become too attached to my name?

For almost 25 years, I have treated my reputation as one of my most valuable possessions. I have wanted people to know that if Mellow gives his word, it means something. I have wanted clients to feel comfortable introducing me into important rooms and friends to know that their trust will never be taken lightly. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In professional services, reputation is part of the currency with which we trade.

But perhaps there is a line between valuing your reputation and becoming dependent on everyone seeing you the way you see yourself. That is the part I am now wrestling with. When someone accuses me of something that contradicts the person I believe myself to be, my instinct is to defend my name immediately. 

I want to explain, produce the evidence, correct the story and make sure everyone understands what really happened. Perhaps some of that is integrity. But if I am completely honest with myself, perhaps some of it is ego too.

Maybe maturity means learning that I do not have to attend every trial at which my character has been placed in the dock. People will misunderstand me. Some will misrepresent me. Others may genuinely see the same situation differently. 

I should correct falsehoods when they threaten people, relationships or work that matters, but I cannot spend my life chasing every version of myself that exists in somebody else’s mind. That would give other people’s opinions far too much authority over my peace.

Perhaps what I need now is not a thicker wall, but better boundaries. To remain open without giving everyone the same level of access. To trust without being naive. To forgive without automatically restoring a partnership. To protect my reputation where necessary while becoming more detached from the need to protect my image everywhere.

There is an important difference between the two. My reputation is built through the pattern of how I live and work over time. My image is whatever somebody happens to think about me today. One deserves stewardship. The other may occasionally require the courage to let go.

Perhaps 2026 is not teaching me to trust people less. Perhaps it is teaching me to understand what my trust is worth. It may also be teaching me that protecting my name does not mean controlling every conversation in which it appears. After almost 25 years of building a reputation, perhaps the reputation itself should be strong enough to survive the occasional person who misunderstands me.

That may be the lesson I was not expecting from this weekend. I began by asking what the incident revealed about someone else. I have ended up asking what my reaction revealed about me.

Greaves may be right that the bottle sometimes reveals a person’s pedigree. Business has certainly taught me that pressure reveals character. But pressure does not only reveal the person on the other side of the table.

It reveals us too.

Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,