They might be difficult. They might be unreasonable. They might be the reason you didn't sleep last night.
They're still not your enemy.
The moment you decide they are, something shifts. You stop listening. You start defending. You narrow your focus to winning — and lose sight of everything else that matters.
I've sat across from people I deeply disagreed with. People who tested my patience, my principles, my composure.
What I've learned is this: the less I made it about defeating them, the better the outcome — for everyone.
Being clear about what you want doesn't require losing sight of who they are.
Respect isn't agreement. It's the decision to treat someone as a person, even when the conversation is hard.
Here's what I've come to understand — not from books, from rooms.
It sounds simple. It isn't.
Because in the moment — when your heart rate is up, when the other person has just said something that landed badly, when the stakes are real and the clock is moving — your instincts don't reach for respect.
They reach for protection.
And protection looks like opposition. It sounds like rebuttal. It feels like fight.
I remember a conversation early in my career where I walked in convinced the person across from me was acting in bad faith. Every signal confirmed it. The tone. The posture. The position they opened with.
So I did what most people do. I matched their energy. I fortified. I prepared to win.
And the conversation went exactly where you'd expect it to go.
Nowhere.
It wasn't until much later — after the deal had collapsed, after the dust settled — that I learned something that changed how I think about every difficult conversation since.
The other person wasn't acting in bad faith.
They were afraid.
Afraid of being taken advantage of. Afraid of looking weak in front of their own team. Afraid of making a decision they couldn't undo.
Their behavior looked like aggression. Underneath, it was self-protection.
And mine looked exactly the same to them.
Two people. Both protecting themselves. Both convinced the other was the problem. And neither one able to see past their own defense long enough to find out what was actually possible.
That experience taught me something I carry into every room now:
The person across the table is almost never the obstacle.
The obstacle is the story you've told yourself about them before the conversation begins.
When you set that story aside — not abandon your position, not surrender your interests, just set aside the narrative that they are your adversary — something opens up.
You start hearing what they're actually saying instead of what you expected them to say.
You start noticing what they need instead of what they're demanding.
You start finding room that wasn't there before.
Not because the room changed.
Because you did.
What this newsletter is
Each week, I'll take one idea — something I've posted about, something I've lived, something I've learned the hard way — and go deeper than a post allows.
Not theory. Not tactics. The real stories. The real lessons. The moments where what I thought I knew got tested.
The book is coming soon. And as I get closer, I'll continue sharing more about the conversations that matter most — and how the way you show up matters more.
Thank you for being here.
— Howard