Before They Can See Their Part

I remember sitting in his office and feeling my jaw clench.

He was walking me through, once again, everything that had gone wrong. Who had shut him out. Who had said what. Who was making his work impossible. In his telling, every problem started with someone else.

And my body was having none of it. My chest tightened. My heart picked up speed. I could feel myself bracing, the way you brace before an argument. On the outside, I was nodding along professionally. On the inside, I was rolling my eyes. Oh my God. Seriously?

What I wanted to say was something like, "Can you not see what you're doing here?"

The Story He Was Telling

This was years ago. My client was facing real challenges, and he was certain they were everyone else's doing.

The most recent hurt was that he'd been left out of a conversation he believed he should have been part of. He was angry about it. From where he stood, it was one more example of people working against him.

What he didn't seem to see was why. In the past, when he'd been included in sensitive conversations, things shared in confidence had a way of traveling. His colleagues had learned to protect themselves. He hadn't acknowledged that as a problem, if he'd registered it at all.

So there I sat, clenched and bracing, with a strong pull to prove him wrong. To lay out the evidence. To make him see the error of his ways.

The Armor I Brought Into the Room

Here's what I've come to understand about that pull.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to stop people before their emotions made things worse. To shut down the overreaction before it could spill onto me. When I was younger, that may have kept me safe. It was protection.

But it doesn't protect anyone now. Not me, and not the person in front of me. In that office, it was just armor.

I was early in my training in Judith Glaser's Conversational Intelligence framework at the time, and I was learning to notice when I was moving toward connection and when I was moving away from it. Sitting there, I could feel it clearly. My judgment wasn't in service of helping him. It was about control. I wasn't connecting. I was disconnecting.

What Shifted

So I tried something different. I let my armor down a little.

I let myself register what was underneath all that blame. He was hurting. He was scared. He was afraid of what being excluded might mean for him. Once I let myself feel that, my body softened. My tone softened.

And I started reflecting back what I was hearing. Not his conclusions about other people.

His experience.

"That makes a lot of sense."

"It sounds like being left out of that conversation really hurt."

"I can understand why you'd be worried about what that means, given everything that's been happening."

Something in him eased. I could almost watch the defensiveness loosen its grip.

And because there was more room in the conversation, I could get curious. I wonder how others might have perceived that situation. What's another possible explanation here?

Those were questions he couldn't have heard earlier in our conversation. Now he could consider them. And over time, he started to see how he was contributing to the very situation that was causing him so much pain. That was the growth we'd been working toward all along. It just didn't come from me proving him wrong.

"But Isn't That Just Agreeing With Him?"

You might be wondering this. It's a fair question.

If someone is busy blaming everyone else, doesn't empathy just reinforce their story? Isn't being an empathetic witness the same as co-signing their version as the right one?

Here's the distinction that has helped me: reflect the feeling, not the verdict.

Co-signing sounds like, "They're awful. I can't believe they did that to you."

Witnessing sounds like, "It makes sense that hurt." Or, "I can see why that scared you."

The first validates their story about other people. The second acknowledges what they're living through. One takes sides. The other steps outside of right and wrong altogether.

It also makes room for more than one truth at a time. My client was genuinely hurt by being excluded. And his colleagues had genuine reasons for excluding him. Both were real.

Witnessing his hurt didn't require me to pretend the second truth didn't exist. It just meant I didn't lead with it.

Holding multiple truths asks something of us, though. We have to be regulated enough to have room for them. When I'm clenched and bracing, there's only room for my version.

Why Safety Comes First

There's research that helps explain why this works.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory describes how emotions like fear and anger narrow our attention and thinking, focusing us on the threat in front of us.

Positive emotions do the opposite. They broaden what we're able to notice and consider.

In other words, when we feel threatened, our world gets smaller. We fixate on our one slice of reality. When we feel safe and connected, we can take in more: other viewpoints, other explanations, even our own part in things.

So when someone is stuck in a protective pattern, insisting that they see the other side tends to backfire. It adds threat. And more threat means a narrower view.

We can't expect people to see another perspective until they feel some sense of safety and connection first.

What This Asks of Leaders

This matters far beyond a coaching session.

When leaders are navigating change, budget cuts, or a crisis, it's natural to want people to understand where you're coming from. If they could just see the bigger picture. The constraints. The reasons.

And yet, people usually need to know you understand where they're coming from first.

I'd go so far as to say that's the responsibility of leadership. When we fixate on others not understanding us, it's worth pausing to ask: what aren't we understanding about them?

What fear, loss, or hurt is sitting underneath the resistance?

Witnessing that isn't a detour from the real work. Often, it's what makes the real work possible.

There's a quieter benefit, too. When we practice being an empathetic witness with the people who are hardest for us, we expand our own capacity to stay grounded in uncomfortable moments. As a mediator, I've seen again and again that people on opposite sides of a conflict share far more feelings about it than they realize. Getting to that shared ground starts with someone being willing to see the human on the other side of the table.

They're people, too. They deserve compassion and understanding, just like we do. And often, the people who rub us the wrong way are the ones who have had the fewest experiences of being truly witnessed.

Do You Accept the Challenge?

This week, notice who triggers your judgment.

Maybe it's the person who always seems to be the victim. Maybe it's someone in a far more comfortable position, complaining about something that seems small. Maybe it's the colleague who says the hard thing out loud and then struggles with the backlash.

Whoever it is, notice what happens in your body. Do you clench? Brace? Roll your eyes, even if only in your head?

Then try something different. Get curious about what they might be feeling. Reflect the feeling, not the verdict. And see what becomes possible.

Who tends to activate your armor?

What might they be feeling underneath what you're reacting to?

What would it look like to witness them, even for a moment?

This week's free resource, Witnessing Is / Witnessing Isn't, offers a one-page guide to reflecting feelings without co-signing the story, plus a quick body check-in for noticing when your own armor comes up.