top of page

By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 3:28:38 am

The Space That Speaks

Some people step too close without realising it. Others recoil the moment we enter their personal space. In boardrooms, cafeterias, client meetings or even casual workplace conversations, the invisible boundary between comfort and discomfort is crossed more often than we admit. And every time it happens, something subtle but significant shifts. A colleague feels disrespected. A client feels pushed. A partner silently withdraws. Space may be unseen, but its consequences are very real —...

The Space That Speaks

Some people step too close without realising it. Others recoil the moment we enter their personal space. In boardrooms, cafeterias, client meetings or even casual workplace conversations, the invisible boundary between comfort and discomfort is crossed more often than we admit. And every time it happens, something subtle but significant shifts. A colleague feels disrespected. A client feels pushed. A partner silently withdraws. Space may be unseen, but its consequences are very real — especially in today’s workplace, where one misread signal can erode trust faster than any spoken mistake.   A few months ago, a mid-sized consulting firm approached me with a puzzling problem. Their young team was technically brilliant, but client retention had dropped sharply. After observing a few interactions, the issue became obvious: enthusiastic associates were unknowingly leaning too close, interrupting personal bubbles, and making global clients uncomfortable. Nothing was ill-intentioned — just unaware. Yet that small behavioural gap had created a Rs 1.6 crore revenue leakage over the year. Once we worked on spatial awareness, presence and non-verbal communication, the same team rebuilt client confidence and closed three major renewals within a quarter.   This is why personal space is not a “soft” concept. It is strategy. It is reputation. It is a non-negotiable part of personal branding.   When people think of personal branding, they imagine polished LinkedIn profiles or impressive introductions. But the truth is simpler and deeper: your personal brand is your behaviour. It’s the distance you maintain, the respect you signal, the safety you create for others in a conversation. Space is communication — silent but powerful. When you don’t understand where your boundary ends and where someone else’s begins, your interactions unintentionally send the message that you lack awareness, sensitivity or professionalism. For a leader, this can appear as dominance. For a young executive, it can appear as insecurity or over-eagerness. For a business owner, it can cost trust and business.   Modern workplaces are more global and more culturally diverse than ever before. In India alone, teams now collaborate daily with counterparts from the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the US — each with very different expectations of proximity. What feels friendly to one culture feels intrusive to another. When employees are not trained to navigate these subtle differences, the company brand is what ultimately suffers.   And here’s the truth companies often overlook: you cannot build a strong organisational brand without strong individual brands inside it. When employees understand boundaries — emotional, verbal and physical — they communicate with clarity, empathy and confidence. They carry themselves with the ease that clients trust. They handle negotiations better. They build relationships faster. They close deals without friction. The company’s culture becomes more respectful, more refined and more reliable.   I’ve seen it repeatedly while working with founders, leadership teams and fast-growing organisations: the fastest way to elevate a company’s external image is to elevate the personal brand of the people representing it. Not through scripted behaviour but through awareness — especially in the small, often ignored details like space, body language and non-verbal cues.   These details decide whether your teams come across as polished or unprepared, mindful or careless, leadership-ready or still learning.   If any of this feels familiar — a slightly awkward handshake, a colleague who stands too close, a new executive who unintentionally intimidates a client — it’s more than a social inconvenience. It’s a branding issue. And one that’s entirely fixable.   Because when people feel respected in your presence, they trust you. When they trust you, they listen. And when they listen, they say yes more often — to ideas, partnerships, renewals and opportunities.   If you’re a business leader who wants your teams to communicate with maturity, presence and global sensitivity, you can reach out for a complimentary consultation call here : https://sprect.com/pro/divyaaadvaani Strong personal brands build strong company brands. And it all begins with something as simple, as silent and as powerful as space. (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

Blowback Breach

An Afghan national, once trained by U.S. intelligence and later resettled in America under a Biden-era evacuation programme, is accused of carrying out the deadly ambush near the White House that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and left another, Andrew Wolfe, critically wounded. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was not an unknown drifter but a former operative of Afghanistan’s elite ‘01 Unit’ - a Special Forces outfit created, trained and armed by the United States itself. The symbolism could scarcely be more brutal: American power has been struck at its physical heart by one of its own abandoned instruments.


That alone should have forced a reckoning with two decades of war, proxy forces and moral shortcuts. Instead, President Donald Trump reached instinctively for the politics of blame. Even before investigators had finished their early assessments, he declared the attack proof of Biden-era vetting failures, ordered sweeping reviews of asylum cases and announced plans to freeze migration from vast parts of the developing world. The incident has been folded neatly into a familiar Trump narrative of invasion and civilisational threat.


The Islamist dimension cannot be wished away. Afghanistan’s fractured militant ecosystem, now ruled by the Taliban, remains a breeding ground for radical networks. But what makes this case uniquely damning is that Lakanwal was not merely an infiltrator from outside but a product of America’s own shadow war. Many former members of the ‘01 Unit,’ displaced after the Taliban takeover, are now known to suffer extreme psychological trauma, with repeated reports of suicide and violent breakdowns among those left without treatment or structure.


This is blowback in its purest form: a man shaped by a covert war, abandoned by its architects, and absorbed into a civilian society ill-equipped to manage the psychic wreckage. Joe Biden’s administration bears direct responsibility for how heedlessly the Afghan evacuation was executed. Operation Allies Welcome airlifted more than 70,000 Afghans into the United States under intense moral and political pressure. Vetting was bloated, rushed and stretched thin. That gamble has now exacted a lethal price.


Yet, Trump’s attempt to pin the entire episode on his predecessor collapses under even light scrutiny. The gunman reportedly applied for asylum in December 2024 and was approved in April this year under Trump’s own presidency. He had no known criminal history. The systems that failed to reassess him, monitor him or flag him are not Biden’s anymore. It seems that between Biden and Trump, America has managed a rare double achievement of being both recklessly careless and brutally vindictive.


The White House complex is among the most fortified political spaces on earth, enveloped by surveillance, intelligence fusion and dense armed presence. If a lone attacker could stage an ambush there, it suggests breakdowns in threat anticipation.


The White House attack should have produced sobriety at the very top. What it has produced instead is the oldest evasion in Washington: bureaucratic negligence repackaged as civilisational war.


Comments

bottom of page