When a client relationship turns difficult, it almost never starts with the thing you're actually arguing about. There's a manager behind the scenes applying pressure. An organizational fire nobody told you about. A misalignment of expectations that was there from day one. The minutiae you're debating is just the surface.

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee bring back Chuck Gose, founder of ICology and co-host of the Frequency podcast, to talk about working with difficult clients. Chuck, by his own correction, does not push people. He elevates them to greatness.

They get into what actually makes a relationship 'difficult' (usually misaligned expectations or personalities, not bad people), why your instinct to defend yourself makes everything worse, how a Batman figurine in your background can build more connection than any pitch deck, and the difference between failure and being wrong, that Chuck argues most people get completely backwards.

In this episode, they discuss:
• Why a difficult client is usually a misalignment of expectations or personalities, not a bad person
• Breaking the ice with levity when things get tense, and why almost nothing you do is brain surgery
• The relationship as a third living thing in the room that you both shape
• Why the issue at hand is rarely the actual issue
• How defensiveness triggers defensiveness, and how to break the loop
• Chuck on why failure and wrong are not the same thing, and what science gets right about it
• Connection as the bedrock that gets you through the rough patches (yes, your Zoom background counts)
• When to walk away from a client, and why the best exits happen together

Plus: Chuck has a notebook of things he's been right about. Pinaki wants one too.

Heads up: Pinaki and Chuck Gose are presenting together for the first time at IABC World Conference in Toronto. 'Communication in Motion: The Science Behind Messages That Move People' on June 15 at 1:30. Pinaki is also presenting 'The Dance Floor Doesn't Lie: What Communicators Can Learn From DJs' with Monique Zytnik on June 16 at 3:00. Plus Comms Reboot, the unconference hosted by Jenni Fields of Redefining Communications. Links in the episode description.

Check out Comms Reboot here.
Learn more about IABC World Conference here.
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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.

A coworker crawled under her desk to fix a power strip. She slipped her heels off, got down on the floor, and made herself vulnerable for two seconds. And that's when the coworker behind her reached over, wrapped an arm around her ankles, and started tickling her feet.

Yes. At work. In 2026. We have questions too.

In this Reacting to Reddit at Work episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Bree Bartos brings Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee a Best of Redditor Updates story so strange the original poster used Friends character names to tell it. Rachel got tickled. Monica did the tickling. Phoebe is the hands-off manager who walked Monica to HR and then never really resolved anything. And five months later, nobody got closure and everybody got punished.

It's a story about workplace boundaries, about what makes a mistake termination-worthy versus a conversation, and about what happens when management avoids the hard conversation entirely and lets a situation rot.

In this episode, they discuss:
• Where the line actually is on workplace physical boundaries, and why "we're all human at work" doesn't mean there aren't any
• The difference between a one-time lapse in judgment and a pattern of disrespect
• Why the real failure here was management never bringing everyone together for a resolution
• Whether the reaction would have been different if it were Joey instead of Monica
• Pinaki on running toward conflict instead of away from it, and the Local Wisdom Nerf gun incident
• Why Monica never actually apologized, and how much that one missing piece mattered
• The mantra: companies come and go, but the relationship is what stays
• An ending where everyone got what they wanted and nobody felt good about it

How would you have handled this one? Because we're still not totally sure.

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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.

Last week Ellen Griley gave us the framework. This week she gets personal.

In this Between the Seasons episode of Why Does It Feel So Wrong to Be Human at Work?, Pinaki Kathiari and Chris Lee are joined again by Ellen Griley, founder of Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms, to dig deeper into what it actually looks like to be human at work when everything around you is already on edge.

Ellen gets vulnerable — about the meeting where she cried advocating for thoughtful AI adoption, about the privilege that lets her show up that way, about learning to co-regulate in real time. Chris names the thing about corporate comms that nobody says out loud: the relentless pursuit of perfection is actually making everything less psychologically safe. And Pinaki closes with a story about sitting next to a professor who researches horrific things for a living and asking: how do you stay positive?

The answer: we're just humans. We're just here.

In this episode, they discuss:

• Why assuming employees open your email with 100% cognitive and emotional capacity is the root of most communication failures

• The New York Times tells you it's a daily paper — why doesn't your internal newsletter do the same?

• Ellen on being human at work when not everyone has the same permission to show up that way

• Code switching is exhausting — even for the best of us

• The power of awkward silence in a room that's about to derail

• How to give people agency when everything feels like a 'because I said so' world

• High school, kindergarten, and the corporate ecosystem — why they're all the same social experiment

• Pinaki on the base layer of relationships that has to exist before strategy can land

• Bree's advice: find one moment of joy each day. Just one.

We're all just four-year-olds with tablets trying to figure it out. This one's the reminder you didn't know you needed.

Check out Ellen's work: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/
Read Shifting Ground: https://www.equilibrious-comms.com/sh...
Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/internal-calms/

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Connect with Us

Pinaki Kathiari – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Chris Lee – LinkedIn | Gallagher Communication

Bree Bartos – LinkedIn | Local Wisdom

Special thanks to digital communication agency Local Wisdom (www.localwisdom.com) for really believing in our mission and making this podcast possible.

If this episode made you think differently, laugh, or even yell out loud, we want to hear about it! Connect with us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to rate, review, and share – maybe with your work bestie… or even your boss if you're feeling bold.

We also bring these important conversations to conferences and private workshops, creating space for real, meaningful change. Take the first step at www.whydoesitfeelsowrong.com.