The Goldilocks Impulse: Navigating Online Professional Spaces

Over the past eight years, I have increasingly relied on online spaces for community, communication, and care in my professional world. In these spaces, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, the usual scaffolding of tone, ritual, and embodied presence often falls away. What remains is a volatile mix of projection, preference, and performance. Clinicians, academics, and facilitators often find themselves caught in reactive loops, where the desire for "just right" communication collides with the impossibility of achieving a perfect fit.

The Fragility of Language and Safety

Anxieties in these spaces often center on language. Debates flare over word choice, tone, and intent, with questions of safety at the forefront: Is this space emotionally safe? Politically safe? Professionally safe? The act of speaking, whether choosing a word, a tone, or a metaphor, can be read as an invitation or an intrusion.

For example, consider a hypothetical discussion on LinkedIn about gender-neutral language in academic publishing. A facilitator posts a question about adopting inclusive pronouns, hoping to spark constructive dialogue. One commenter interprets the question as a "dog whistle" for progressive ideology and accuses the facilitator of pushing an agenda. Another commenter views it as insufficiently radical and claims it sidesteps deeper systemic issues. The thread spirals into polarised camps, with terms like "inclusion" and "neutrality" carrying different meanings for different people, yet no one pauses to clarify intent. Misunderstandings escalate, trust erodes, and the facilitator deletes the post, feeling attacked and unheard. This scenario, which could also be drawn from contentious debates around gender, Gaza, or the Southport murders and riots, illustrates how quickly language becomes a lightning rod for projection and conflict. Even as I write these brief lines, I am left wondering how much of my naivete and politics will be exposed and judged.

Professionalism in these moments can quietly collapse, not in dramatic outbursts but in the erosion of trust, containment, and shared meaning. A single comment lingers for days, replayed like a looped recording. Responses are drafted, revised, and abandoned, or they are posted and met with outrage. The group becomes a stage for symbolic enactment, where stakes feel impossibly high and roles remain unclear. Curiosity is misread as provocation, and nuance is perceived as a threat. Beneath it all lies a deep ambivalence: the longing to belong and the fear of being cast out.

The Goldilocks Metaphor

The fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears offers a potent metaphor for this dynamic. Evolving from the older tale Scrapefoot, it follows a curious intruder, first a fox, then an "obscene crone," and finally the golden-haired Goldilocks, who enters the bears' home and samples their milk, chairs, and beds in search of what feels "just right." In early versions, she is attacked or thrown out; in the modern retelling, she flees unharmed.

The tale has softened over time and shifted from a cautionary story about intrusion to a cosy fable about preference and fit. Yet it remains a commentary on group life. In online professional communities, we observe a Goldilocks impulse: a drive to find the "just right" tone, emotionality, or stance, which often leads to rejecting others' positions due to subtle discomforts. This pursuit masks anxieties about belonging, rupture, and accountability. It also fuels what Freud called the narcissism of small differences, where minor divergences in values or identity become hypersensitive flashpoints, amplified by the stripped-down nuance of digital communication.

The tale’s metamorphosis, from fox to crone to girl, mirrors how we frame intruders in online professional spaces. The fox is clever but sneaky, and is punished for crossing boundaries. The crone, described as "obscene," carries gendered disgust and symbolic exile, deemed too much or too monstrous. Goldilocks, young and palatable, reframes intrusion as forgivable exploration. Curiously, they all behave similarly, sampling the bears’ world without permission, yet their framing dictates their fate. These archetypes reflect how we cast ourselves and others online: as provocative foxes, unacceptable crones, or likeable little girls. They raise questions about who the reader finds acceptable to enter uninvited into the cottage, and under what terms someone is cast out. When we start to notice our own judgements, we can see how grace reshapes them to foster learning and inclusion.

Building Symbolic Containers with Grace

Professionalism is not about policing tone or suppressing emotion but about creating symbolic containers: shared frameworks, rituals, and boundaries that hold the complexity of human experience without stifling free speech. These containers, grounded in an ethics of grace, recognise that we are all growing and learning, stumbling through the messiness of communication. Grace allows us to meet each other’s imperfections with generosity and fosters spaces where curiosity thrives over judgment. Unlike activism, which often prioritises confrontation over connection and can be the antithesis of dialogue, these containers privilege reflective exchange, enabling growth even through rupture. With a learning mindset and reflective openness, rupture need not be avoided but can become a catalyst for deeper understanding and transformation.

Practical tools for building such containers include:

1. Embracing a Learning Mindset: Through modeling and encouragement, groups can nurture a culture of viewing communication as a journey of growth, distinct from the polarizing stance of activism. In the gender-neutral language discussion, for instance, members could model curiosity by approaching posts with the assumption that everyone is learning, not preaching. This might inspire questions to foster understanding of worldview, such as, "When you use the word ‘inclusion’, what does that mean to you?" rather than accusations of bad faith. Such a mindset, fostered through relational example, encourages free expression and frames misattunements as opportunities for dialogue, allowing rupture to spark growth rather than exile.

2. Ritual of Reflective Openness: We might develop a practice of pausing before posting to reflect, "Am I open to learning or being wrong?" This ritual, encouraged through relationships rather than rules, counters the trend of anonymous posting, which often fuels dysregulation by disconnecting speakers from accountability and mimicking the unreflective certainty of activism.

These practices, shaped by modelling and encouragement, prioritise free speech by creating space for honest expression while rooting it in a culture of grace and growth. They invite us to see each other not as fixed adversaries, as activism might cast us, but as fellow learners navigating the cottage together, capable of growing through rupture with curiosity and accountability.

The Ethics of Grace as a Group Concept

Beneath the curated bios and careful posts lies a deeper longing: to be understood, met, and allowed to speak freely without being cast as the fox, crone, or wayward girl. This longing shapes the group’s symbolic life, including its unspoken moments: the unsent drafts, the comments written and deleted, the silence chosen over risk. These moments carry the weight of our learning process and reflect our fears, hopes, and areas for growth.

An ethics of grace as a group concept means collectively embracing the imperfections of communication with generosity, recognising that every member is navigating their own path of growth. Grace is not passive tolerance but an active commitment to meeting others where they are, even when their words sting or miss the mark. It requires accountability, not as a punitive measure but as a willingness to own one’s impact and learn from it. This stands in stark contrast to the culture of anonymous posting, which often shields individuals from accountability and fuels a climate of distrust. Anonymity can protect against personal attack but also enables unchecked reactivity, as posters feel free to provoke without facing the relational consequences of their words. Grace, by contrast, invites us to show up fully, with our names and intentions visible, trusting that the group will meet our missteps with understanding rather than exile.

Groups can foster this ethics of grace by creating norms that honour both free speech and accountability. For example, a facilitator might host a discussion thread titled "Learning Moments," where members share a time they misspoke online or felt misunderstood, framing these as opportunities for collective growth. Another practice could involve a group agreement to respond to challenging posts with curiosity, such as asking, "Can you help me understand your perspective?" before reacting. These practices acknowledge that not knowing and exploration are integral parts of learning, and that grace enables us to remain engaged even when we falter. They also counteract the anonymity-driven dysregulation by encouraging members to stand behind their words, fostering a culture where accountability is a shared act of care, rather than one driven by shame.

This ethics of grace asks us to reflect: What am I learning through this discomfort? How can I meet others where they are in their growth? What am I hoping for when I speak or stay silent? By posing these questions collectively, groups can create spaces that are both safe enough to receive care and also risky enough to require the bravery to hold a different view. Where free speech becomes a tool for connection rather than division. Grace is not a passive state; it’s a practice. And like any practice, it requires effort, modelling, and repair when ruptures occur.

This ethics of grace is not a guarantee of harmony, nor a shield against rupture. It becomes even harder to practise when power is unevenly distributed. In such moments, the invitation to “meet others where they are” must be tempered with an awareness of whose voice carries weight, and whose discomfort is most likely to be dismissed. In an age where assumptions about identity are often made before any real encounter (based on intersectional stereotypes rather than lived experience), this is no easy task.

Yet grace remains a scaffolding. It is a shared commitment to stay in dialogue, even when discomfort arises. In some spaces, this scaffolding holds. In others, it buckles under the weight of projection, anonymity, or power asymmetry.

Staying in the Cottage

The Goldilocks story invites reflection on projection and preference. Who do we cast as the intruder? Who gets to belong? What kind of bears are we when we find someone asleep in our bed? In online professional spaces, the challenge is to move beyond the pursuit of "just right" toward an ethics of grace that embraces free speech and the messiness of growth. By building symbolic containers rooted in curiosity, accountability, and learning, we create communities capable of holding difference without rupture, or transforming rupture into opportunities for dialogue and growth.

Perhaps then, we can stay in the cottage together, even when the porridge is too hot, and we’re all still learning how to share it.

If you'd like to explore these ideas in a supportive and reflective space, you're warmly invited to join the Quarterly Reflective Practice Group for Psychologists in Leadership. This group provides a confidential environment for clinical and counseling psychologists to reflect on the intersection of personal and professional experiences, leadership dynamics, and systemic challenges. You can find full details and register via Eventbrite.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1396982084019?aff=oddtdtcreatoro hot, and we’re all still learning how to share it.