You have written the message. Your cursor is over Send. That half second, before it goes out, is the simplest chance you have to protect the trust the message carries.
Most of what we send goes out on autopilot, and most of the time that is fine. The messages worth slowing down for are the ones that carry weight: the reply to an upset family, the update a lot of people are waiting on, the answer to a hard question. A few seconds of checking is what keeps one of those from quietly costing you.
The Pre-Send Check is a short list of questions you run against one real message before it goes out. Is this a deposit into the trust account, or a withdrawal? Will they understand it the first time? Did I ask them something, or only tell them? Is this a promise I can actually keep? Is the human reason for it in there? Can every family receive it, in a form they can read, at the same time as everyone else? And if the news is hard, is the hard part plain and near the top, where they will see it?
You reach for the questions that fit the message. One pass takes a few seconds, and it catches the small things that draw trust down: the line people have to read twice, the promise you could not keep, the hard news buried at the bottom.
Every practice in the book comes down to what you send and say. The check gathers them into the seconds before a message leaves, when you can still change it.
One-page checklist from A Culture of Communication. Keep it open while you write.