🥞 What Pancake Day Can Teach Us About Difficult Conversations (Yes, Really)
- Elevation Occ Psy
- Feb 17
- 4 min read
It’s Pancake Day. Which means somewhere today, someone will flip too early, burn the first batch, or argue about whether lemon & sugar is clearly superior to chocolate spread.
And honestly? It’s the perfect metaphor for workplace psychology.
Stay with me.
In occupational psychology, we spend a lot of time talking about performance, wellbeing, resilience, leadership. But one of the most powerful (and uncomfortable) predictors of healthy workplaces is this:
How well we handle difficult conversations.
Pancakes are deceptively simple. Flour. Eggs. Milk. Heat. Difficult conversations are deceptively simple too. Words. People. Emotion. Timing.
Yet both go wrong in remarkably predictable ways.
🥞 The First Pancake Effect (a.k.a. Why We Avoid Hard Conversations)
You know how the first pancake is almost always a disaster?
Too thick. Too thin. Burnt. Raw. Stuck to the pan.
Most of us don’t expect perfection first time — we expect iteration.
But when it comes to difficult conversations at work? We expect ourselves to get it right immediately.
So instead of risking a messy first attempt, we avoid it altogether.
In my research around difficult workplace conversations, one consistent theme emerges:
People don’t avoid hard conversations because they don’t care. They avoid them because they care too much — about relationships, reputation, being seen as competent, or not causing harm.
Avoidance feels safer in the short term. But just like leaving pancake batter in the bowl, it doesn’t make the situation better — it just delays the inevitable (and sometimes makes it stickier).
🥞 Heat Is Necessary (But Too Much Burns)
In psychology, we know that some level of emotional activation is helpful. Zero emotion? We disengage. Too much emotion? We become defensive.
A pan that’s too cold gives you a pale, floppy pancake. A pan that’s too hot gives you smoke and regret.
Difficult conversations work the same way.
The goal isn’t to remove emotion — it’s to regulate it.
In occupational psychology we often talk about:
Capability – the skills and knowledge to have the conversation.
Capacity – the emotional, cognitive, and physical headspace to do it well.
Even the best recipe won’t work if you’re exhausted, stressed, or already overwhelmed. And no amount of skill can compensate for zero capacity.
Before you have that feedback discussion, performance conversation, or boundary-setting moment, ask:
Do I have the capability?
Do I have the capacity?
Is the heat at the right level?
🥞 The Flip: The Moment We Hesitate
There’s always that moment.
The pancake is bubbling. You know it’s time to flip. You hesitate.
What if it splatters? What if it folds in half? What if I ruin it?
That hesitation mirrors the exact cognitive pause before we start a difficult conversation:
"Maybe now isn’t the right time." "Maybe it’ll resolve itself." "Maybe I’m overreacting."
In workplace psychology, this is often tied to threat perception. Our brains are wired to interpret social risk (conflict, disagreement, rejection) in similar ways to physical threat. So we delay.
But here’s the thing:
If you wait too long, the pancake burns on one side. If you wait too long, resentment builds on one side.
Timing matters. Not perfection — timing.
🥞 Toppings Matter (But They’re Not the Base)
We often focus heavily on delivery style in difficult conversations:
Use “I” statements
Be constructive
Show empathy
Choose the right words
These are important. They’re the toppings.
But the base matters more:
Psychological safety
Trust
Clarity of expectations
Consistent leadership behaviour
You can’t rescue a poorly cooked pancake with syrup alone. And you can’t rescue a culture of avoidance with one well-worded feedback model.
My research consistently shows that organisations don’t struggle because people don’t know how to have difficult conversations.
They struggle because:
People lack the emotional or cognitive capacity in the moment.
Psychological safety feels inconsistent or fragile.
Roles, expectations, or boundaries are unclear.
Avoidance has become the cultural norm.
🥞 It’s Messy — And That’s Normal
Here’s something reassuring from occupational psychology:
Difficult conversations — when handled constructively — are associated with healthier working relationships, clearer expectations, and stronger team functioning.
Thriving teams aren’t conversation-free. They’re conversation-capable.
They’ve had awkward starts. They’ve misjudged timing. They’ve reflected and tried again.
We sometimes interpret difficult conversations as a sign that something is wrong.
In reality, the absence of honest conversation is often the stronger indicator of risk.
Growth conversations. Boundary-setting conversations. Expectation-setting conversations. Wellbeing check-ins.
These aren’t signs of dysfunction. They’re signs that people are engaging.
Just like Pancake Day — a little mess doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It usually means you’re actually cooking.
🥞 So This Pancake Day…
As you’re flipping (or ordering), here are three reflective questions:
What conversation am I avoiding because I’m afraid of getting it wrong?
Do I need to build my capability — or restore my capacity?
Is the heat too low (avoidance) or too high (reactivity)?
And perhaps most importantly:
Am I expecting the first flip to be perfect?
Workplaces don’t improve because we eliminate difficulty. They improve because we increase our psychological skill in navigating it.
Sometimes that starts with accepting that the first pancake is just practice.
If this resonates, my research explores why difficult workplace conversations feel so risky — and what actually enables people to step into them with confidence.
Because just like Pancake Day, these moments come around regularly.
We can dread them. Or we can get better at flipping them.
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