I once watched a superintendent I was coaching review a video of himself running a Monday stand-up. He always said he was calm under pressure. “Ask anybody.” Then the tape rolled: fifty-one seconds in, his voice sharpened and he cut a foreman off mid-sentence. Not calm. He watched it twice before he spoke. “I don’t do that,” he said the first time. Then, quieter: “I guess I do that.”

Physicist Brian Cox got me thinking about why that moment worked the way it did.

In the famous double-slit experiment, electrons fired one at a time at two slits create an interference pattern on the screen behind them, the kind of pattern you’d only expect if each electron passed through both slits at once, as a spread of possibilities, interfering with itself. But put a detector at the slits to measure which path it actually took, and the pattern vanishes instantly. The electron stops being “maybe both” and becomes “definitely this one.” The act of observing collapses it into a single, particular state.

I think most of us walk around as a spread of possibilities too. The patient version of you and the version that snaps at the fifty-one-second mark are both real, both loaded and ready, existing at once, right up until something forces you to collapse into one of them. That’s why you can leave a meeting not fully recognizing what you said. It wasn’t one version of you talking. It was the interference pattern of several.

We don’t call this quantum mechanics. We call it “having an off day,” or “I don’t know what got into me.” What actually got into you was already in you, unmeasured.

This is where reflection earns its keep. It’s not soft, and it’s not optional. Reflection is the detector at the slit. Journaling, a hard coaching question, watching your own tape back, none of it invents who you are. It just forces a collapse, out of “maybe both, depending on the day” and into “this is who showed up, and now I have to own it.” That’s also exactly why it’s so uncomfortable, and why most leaders skip it. Unmeasured, you get to keep believing the flattering story. Measured, you get something harder and more useful: a specific, correctable self.

The superintendent watched his tape a third time before he left. Three weeks later, a foreman told me the Monday stand-ups had changed. Nobody installed a detector. He just finally let himself be observed.

You’re still a wave most days. That’s not a character flaw, it’s just physics, waiting for an observer. The only real question is whether you do the looking yourself, or wait for a foreman, a spouse, or a bad Monday to do it for you.