The Influence Shift – March 2026

March 2026

The conversation you’re winning might be the one costing you the most 

A letter to the leader who’s smart enough to win every argument — and still losing ground.

You became a leader because you’re good at solving problems. You think fast, you’ve seen a lot, and when something’s broken you know how to fix it.

But conflict doesn’t respond to that same toolkit. And the faster you move to fix it, the more you can miss.

In conflict, I used to get defensive fast. As an engineer, I was trained to have the right answers. That was the value I thought I brought. So, when someone pushed back, I pushed back harder. More logic. More detail. What I didn’t see was that I’d stopped responding to the conversation and started responding to how it made me feel : threatened, dismissed, underestimated. The content became almost secondary.

That’s the part nobody teaches you when you step into leadership (among other things).

Here’s the trap: 

When conflict rises, your brain reads it as a threat. Your nervous system fires before your judgment has a chance to weigh in. You’re flooded.

And a flooded leader doesn’t listen. They defend.

This is why conflict is so hard for technical leaders especially. You’ve built a career on precision and logic. But the emotional brain doesn’t care about your data. It cares about survival.

Here’s the truth:

In that flooded state, you become the least effective version of yourself at the exact moment leadership matters most. You push harder when you should pause. You win the exchange, and miss the idea that was sitting just underneath the friction.

This is why Emotional Intelligence is so important. 

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” — Viktor Frankl

There are 2 skills that matter the most in leading through conflict:

1) Self Awareness – recognizing your emotional state in the room, in the moment. Not on the drive home. Most of us don’t notice we’re flooded until we’re already three sentences into a response we’ll regret.

2) Self-Regulation – taking action to create space between your trigger and your response so you can feel the emotion, then shift towards behaviours that serve the conversation (not your ego).

The shift you need to make:

From → reacting to how someone shows up
To → staying curious about what they’re carrying

From → flooding the room with logic
To → pausing long enough to hear what’s underneath

From → managing the other person
To → managing yourself first

Here’s what I’ve learned: the most difficult people in a conversation are often the ones with the most important things to say. But when we’re flooded – defensive, reactive, focused on being right – we can’t see past the behaviour to what’s underneath it.

Here’s a simple framework to consider in your next conflict:

✨ Look past the behaviour to the belief.  Defensiveness, bluntness, over-explaining – these are usually fear in disguise. Ask yourself: what does this person need to feel safe enough to say the real thing?

✨ The friction is the map. Where the conversation gets hardest is usually where the most valuable thinking lives. Don’t smooth it over – follow it.

✨ Ask before you answer. One question: “What’s driving that for you?”  unlocks more than ten minutes of rebuttal ever will.

The next time you feel the heat rising, drop one anchor question instead of making your case: “Help me understand where you’re coming from.”  Then actually listen. See what happens.

Question for Reflection: What would you find if you stopped reacting to how someone shows up and started digging deeper for what they’re actually trying to say?

If this landed for you, you won’t want to miss it our Masterclass on April 23. See details below ⬇️