Atul Sood sat down for a job interview at McDonald's and told the interviewer the truth.
No, he hadn't sold his company. He'd shut it down. Three months earlier his marriage of 11 years had ended, he'd been hospitalized for a mental health crisis, and the team he'd spent five years building told him he couldn't run the company anymore because he couldn't run his life. He had a deal on the table that would let him spin the whole thing as an acquisition. A tiny piece of equity, a press release, a nice tidy story.
He told her the real one instead.
Her response: "You were the most honest candidate I interviewed."
She hired him.
I've known Atul for 25 years, since we were both in college in Philadelphia. I had him on the podcast this week because he's built a genuinely interesting career (business development for restaurant tech, a fractional CBO now working with half a dozen companies at once, an actual plan to build a national Indian fast-casual chain). But that's not why I'm writing about him. I'm writing about him because somewhere in the middle of a conversation about networking tips, he delivered a great message about honesty and vulnerability.
When Everything Falls Apart
At 38, Atul's life fell apart in a three month window. He was diagnosed bipolar. He was getting divorced. His startup was collapsing. All at once, not in sequence. His parents flew in from India and moved into his one bedroom apartment with him, the same year he moved out of a five bedroom house. He stopped seeing his kids as often. He had a manic episode, then a severe depressive one. His own team came to him and told him, “you can't manage your divorce, your mental health, and us.”
He told me, flatly, "when life is shit, let life be shit for a little while." Not a mantra. Just what happened. He leaned on a handful of college friends, his sister, his parents, his cousins, and let it be bad before he tried to make it better. He also admitted he started dating again way too soon afterward, which he says he wouldn't recommend to anyone in his situation. No polish on that one either.
That's the version of himself he brought into the McDonald's interview room. Not the recovered, tidy, ready-for-LinkedIn version. The actual one.
Ten Years Later, It Happened Again
At 48, Kitchen United, the company he'd sunk seven years into, failed. He didn't work for a year and a half. His 25th college reunion landed right in the middle of it, and he skipped it. Not because the company was failing (though it was), but because he didn't want to stand in a room full of people who'd made VP at Citigroup while he had nothing to show for the decade. He told me if he had it to do over, he'd go anyway. But at the time, he couldn't.
The lesson isn't that he pushed through. The lesson is that he let himself not push through, twice, and both times it worked out better than if he'd faked it. That's the whole argument I make to leaders bracing their teams for a reorg or an AI rollout or new leadership: the instinct is to build the airtight case (the pitch deck, the roadmap, the logical argument for why this change makes sense) because you think that's what buy-in requires. But you’ve got it backward. People can smell the difference between a leader who has it together and a leader who's performing having it together.
This is All Very “Yes, And”
What was interesting is how often things Atul said aligned with “Yes, And” and the YES AND Framework. He described his approach to every new relationship as going in with the expectation that "we'll be friends for life, just you wait and see," a line he's borrowed from Winnie the Pooh of all places. That's saying “yes, and” to the potential of a new relationship instead of “yes, but” to why they might not connect.
When someone introduces him to a new contact, his instinct isn't "what can I get from them," it's "yes, and what can I do to help this person." That's the exact phrase, unprompted, on my own podcast. He follows up two or three times in the first month after meeting someone, then lets it go quiet for months without worry, because the rapport is already built. Small steps, not a home run on the first swing.
None of this is a system he studied. He told me flat out he's never put a formula to it. He just does it, because somewhere along the way he figured out that trying to “close” every conversation costs him the actual relationships that matter.
He said something I love: "I haven't done particularly well financially. I haven't achieved some SVP title. But I am rich as hell in relationships." If he needed help tomorrow, he could call over a hundred people who would show up for him.
That's not luck. That's a mindset he built by being honest about the parts of his life that weren't working, over and over, in rooms where the easy move would've been to perform something else.
If You’re a Leader
Everyone treats the loud pushback as the problem. It's not. The bigger risk is the quiet majority who've stopped objecting because they've stopped caring. That's apathy, not resistance, and it's harder to spot because it doesn't look like a problem. It looks like compliance.
Your people aren't holding out because the change management plan isn't clear enough. Most of them aren't fighting you. They're good people, tired and overwhelmed from being asked to do more and more with less and less, and they're watching to see if you'll tell them the truth about what's hard before you ask them to get on board with what's next. Atul didn't get hired because he recovered well. He got hired because he stopped performing recovery and told the truth about the mess while he was still standing in it.
She didn't hire the guy who sold his company. She hired the guy who admitted he hadn't.
This is the exact gap I work through with leaders before a rollout. Not how to explain the change better. How to be honest about it before you ask anyone to get excited.
I go deeper into this with Atul on the podcast, including how he built a network of over a hundred people he could call tomorrow if things fell apart again, what it actually looks like to run a fractional career across half a dozen companies at once, and the LinkedIn call he got from a CEO he hadn't spoken to in ten years, from three account executives who'd never met him. Worth the listen if any part of this landed.
P.S. Everything in this article points to the same underlying question: is your team actually excited about what's coming, or have they just gone quiet? Most leaders I talk to can't tell the difference from where they're standing. That's exactly what a YES AND Gameplan call is for.
It's a one-on-one diagnostic conversation where we turn the camera around on your specific team, your specific change, your specific situation, not a framework on a slide. You walk out with a clear picture of who's actually with you, who's just complying, and what small steps would turn quiet compliance into real buy-in.
No pitch. No deck. Just the honest conversation most leaders never get to have about what's really going on with their people.
Get more info and sign up to get your own customized YES AND Gameplan here