The harder you push your point, the more people resist. Prime the conversation first: get genuinely curious, and name the shared intent before you make your case.
The Harder You Push, the More They Resist
Every time I’ve walked into a disagreement determined to make my point more clearly, more forcefully, more logically — I’ve made it worse.
In psychology, this is called The Backfire Effect. The more you impose your counter-argument, the more likely people are to double down on their belief.
I know it comes from a place of care. But when I fall into the trap, because the emotions get the better of me, it creates an equal and opposite reaction.
That is, of course, if I actually speak up and make my point. Because, to be honest, my struggles with conflict have mostly stemmed from avoidance. A fear of speaking up, challenging opinions, and disagreeing with someone’s perspective.
And if you’re anything like me, you may feel at times like you’re oscillating from avoidance to arguments.
I’m sharing this because I’ve worked on this my whole life. And while I now help individuals and organisations to build conflict fitness, I’m human. I’m prone to relapse, and it’s a mindset, skill, and behaviour that needs constant practice. It’s no different from keeping fit.
Jonah Berger at Wharton has spent years studying why people resist change, and his findings ring true: “When we feel like someone is trying to persuade us, especially if we feel like they’re being pushy or aggressive, we push back. We lean the other way. Even if we were on the fence about something, if someone tries too hard to get us to do it, we’re more likely to resist.”
Not less likely to agree – more likely to resist. Think about when someone tries to impose their political views on you. It hardly ever works, right?.
Julia Minson’s work at Harvard Kennedy School builds on this. She found that the very act of trying to persuade someone can signal disrespect for their autonomy: “If you respect my ability to think for myself, then you would lay out the information and let me come to my own conclusions. You wouldn’t be trying to persuade me.”
In fact, the moment someone realises you are trying to persuade them or prove a point, their defences activate. They become more entrenched and vigilant.
Why? It’s an instinct to want to be safe and to want to be right — it’s what makes us really human. Think about the schooling system. Teachers pose a question to the room, and pupils are rewarded for the correct answer. So the way we debate and construct arguments — whether we are right or wrong, whether we win or lose — becomes wired into our psyche.
The door to persuasion opens from the inside — you can’t push someone through it. They have to choose to step through it themselves.
So what options do you have instead?
It’s particularly useful when you’re in a negotiation, debate or disagreement with someone who is very entrenched in their worldview. It’s a powerful way to avoid the trap of trying to change someone’s mind and instead help them change it themselves.
I used to think it was manipulative, but I’ve come to understand the human dynamics behind it.
I guess the point here is that people are highly capable of change. But we want to change on our terms. We need to see it for ourselves.
Building Conflict Fitness
My framework for navigating difficult conversations is PRIME > POINT > PROOF. I want to dive more deeply into this next time.
Priming is the work of reducing psychological threat (i.e. defensiveness) before you make your point.
In dialogue, the key to finding productive ways forward is to get genuinely curious first — not perform curiosity while actually preparing your rebuttal, but actually want to understand what they're seeing that you might be missing.
The question to ask yourself before you speak is: Am I entering this to win, or to understand? If the honest answer is to win, you’ll likely leave the situation with a bitter taste.
And next, before you both start making your points and the discussion becomes adversarial, name the shared intent of the discussion.
What caught my eye
Storyblok Culture for Dissent
Most leaders I’ve worked with say they want people to challenge them, but it rarely happens. At Storyblok, they’ve embedded “conflict by design’”. Any employee can request a meeting with members of the senior team at any time. It sounds good, but naturally people hesitate (“I don’t want to waste their time” or “I’ll come across as stupid”).
To break down this barrier, they built dissent into the architecture. The firm divides its workforce into randomly assigned pairs of people once a week for “virtual coffee chats”.
For leaders who are struggling to create a safe space for debate, the solution might lie in simply changing the language they use, as Bushe explains. “If I have a different way of thinking about something, framing that as ‘dissent’ would immediately set it up as a sort of conflict,” he says, suggesting that it would be more constructive to describe the airing of a divergent opinion as “making a contribution”.
Yale Validates the Science of Conflict Skills, at Scale
More than 100 Yale students, drawn from every graduate and professional school, have completed a pilot Cultivating Conversation Fellowship, a structured programme that teaches practical approaches to navigating disagreement with empathy and intentionality.
“… People get so bent up and consumed with forming their rebuttal that they aren’t really listening to each other. Perspective-taking allows for a human connection that helps us listen and transcend the differences.”
It’s so refreshing to hear about the next generation of leaders following a structured programme in this, and it’s exactly why I offer training for future and current leaders.
“Nervous System Regulation” is Becoming a Named Leadership Competency
I think this is an interesting shift in language. The Centre for Conscious Leadership’s 2026 Paradigm Shifts, explicitly name nervous system capacity as a core leadership skill. The language is moving from “emotional intelligence” (a competency) to “nervous system at capacity” (a physiological state). I call this the biochemistry of leadership. To manage high-stress situations, we’ve got to learn how to regulate ourselves first.
“Traditional leadership development operates on a foundational delusion: that knowing better inherently leads to doing better. If it did, the L&D industry would have worked itself out of existence. Every leader who's read the books and attended the trainings would be transformed by now. They're not—because leadership doesn’t have a knowledge problem; it has a nervous system problem”.
Intelligent Disobedience
The British Army has a protocol called ‘intelligent disobedience’ that goes beyond respectful challenge. It’s code that explicitly authorises ignoring or defying an order or instruction if personnel judge it to be immoral, unethical, or illegal. I think there’s a lot to unpack here. Whilst I have been very fortunate to do some work with Commanders of the British Army, it would be interesting to see how this is lived and breathed. A protocol like this in a leader > follower environment feels useful. I’m curious about the psychological conditions under which people feel safe to disobey.
Conversation bridge of the week
The most productive lever for improving disagreement is in observable behaviour, specifically language. But always remember, this is not a script, make it your own.
“I have an idea to build on that, tell me how you think this lands”
This is the “Yes, and...” of professional disagreement.
Instead of tearing down their idea to make room for yours, you are “stacking” perspectives.
The phrase “tell me how it lands with you” is powerful because it focuses on their experience of your idea rather than the “correctness” of the idea itself. It keeps the dialogue collaborative rather than competitive and gives them authority to challenge you if they disagree.
Download my 10 Power Statements for disagreeing better
Mindset Shift of the Day
I was coaching a senior leader this week — a brilliant guy, someone anyone would want as their leader, on how to step into spaces to make a contribution when you feel like an imposter. This quote from Amy Gallo feels apt to reference.
"The avoidance is supposed to protect us from the pain, but the avoidance IS the pain."
There have been so many times when I avoided speaking up in meetings, which gave me temporary relief in the moment. But what was more painful was the rumination that followed, not the feeling of anticipation in the moment.