Making a call

Hi. How are you? This is Guilherme with another episode of the Inglês Diário podcast. Hope you’re all doing great today. I’m recording this on a Tuesday afternoon here in Sorocaba. It’s been a pretty productive day, and I’m really happy to be here with you.

Today, I want to put you in a situation that I think many of us have faced at least once. Use your imagination: Imagine you and your best friend have been planning a trip for months. You bought the tickets, booked the hotel, everything is ready. But, two days before the trip, you get a call from your manager at work. There is a huge emergency with a client, and the manager says, "Look, I really need you to work this weekend. If you don't, the project will fail."

Now, you have to make a choice. You can either stay for the trip and disappoint your friend, or cancel the trip and stay to help your team. You are in a very difficult position. You have to make a call.

To make a call. In English, "making a call" has nothing to do with calling someone on your phone. It means to make a decision. When you are in a situation where there is no "perfect" choice, you have to choose one path and take responsibility for it. You have to make a call. We use this a lot in professional settings—like, "I’ll let the director make the final call on this project"—but we also use it in our personal lives.
So, back to our story: you’ve made your call. You decided to stay and help your team, because the job is really important to you right now. You tell your friend, and obviously, they are not happy. It’s a tense moment. You feel like you need to apologize, but you also want to be honest about why you did it. You need to get it off your chest.

Think about the physical feeling of holding a heavy weight on your chest—it makes it hard to breathe, right? When you have a secret, a worry, or a feeling of guilt that you’ve been keeping inside, it’s like that heavy weight. To "get it off your chest" means to finally talk about it, to tell someone how you feel, or to confess something so you can feel lighter and move on.
You sit down with your friend and say, "I’m so sorry. I really wanted to go, but I felt I had to stay for the project. I just needed to get this off my chest because I felt terrible about canceling." You are releasing that emotional weight.

So, here is my question for you: If you were in that situation, what call would you make? Would you go on the trip or stay for work? And when was the last time you had to get something off your chest? Was it hard to talk about?
Leave a comment. I’m curious to see what you guys think! See you next time, bye!