Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress. No one on this project needed reminding of what was at stake. My job was to not let us lose sight of our ambition when we confronted creative and practical obstacles, and to help us get to solutions in the best possible way. Sometimes that meant allocating more resources, sometimes it meant talking through new drafts of a script, or
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