Xavier was invited to a leadership council meeting.
The council had gathered to decide something significant: whether the company should move from in-person classroom training to a predominantly virtual, self-paced model. Subject matter experts had been called in for their views. Xavier was one of them.
To Xavier, this looked straightforward. The world had changed. People were comfortable learning online. The pivot seemed obvious.
The room disagreed with itself. Half the council held firm that classroom learning was more effective, and both sides settled in to convince the other.
Xavier had a clear position. He said almost nothing.
Instead, he ran a loop that will be familiar to many of us. How do I say this without offending anyone? Will they agree? Is my logic sound? Someone else is already making my point — what’s the use? This will only add confusion. Why bother?
He left the meeting dissatisfied. Not because the council decided wrongly, but because he had not spoken.
The problem isn’t confidence
When Xavier brought this to me, the easy diagnosis was sitting right there: he lacked confidence. It wasn’t true. He is an accomplished, seasoned leader with a long track record, and he knows it.
So I asked him what rules he was following in that room.
He thought about it, and out they came — be objective, be neutral, never sound arrogant, never be rude. Good rules. Rules I’d want in any leader. But held tightly enough, they had stopped working as a style and started working as a gag. Xavier was so careful not to be opinionated that he had stopped offering his opinion.
If you’ve ever left a meeting replaying the thing you didn’t say, you know this loop. It isn’t rare and it isn’t a character flaw. It’s a habit — and habits can be worked with.
Here are the four shifts that changed it for him.
1. Decide what the conversation is for
Xavier’s turn came from an unlikely place: the 5 Whys.
The 5 Whys is a genuinely excellent tool. Ask “why” repeatedly and you excavate the root cause of a problem. Xavier used it daily. It worked.
Then he noticed what it did to people.
“It seems like the 5 Whys can make people defensive,” he said. “It creates an antagonistic situation. The other person perceives it as an interrogation, and it degenerates into you versus me.”
He was right, and the research agrees with him. Michael Marquardt, who has spent a career studying how leaders use questions, makes the point that leaders ask questions constantly — Why are you behind schedule? Whose idea was that? — and that these cast blame rather than genuinely request information.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Machines have root causes. People have reasons, histories, and stakes. A tool built to find fault in a process will find fault in a person if you point it at one.
I asked Xavier what he had gone into that council meeting to do. He had assumed he was there to decide. But the way he’d been thinking about it — marshalling his logic, anticipating objections, bracing for the room — was the posture of someone preparing to win.
The shift: before you enter a conversation where views differ, decide whether you’re there to find the flaw or find the answer. Those are two different meetings, and they need two different mouths.
2. Get curious before you get correct
Xavier walked into that room knowing what he thought. He never asked what the other camp knew.
That was the miss, and when I put it to him he saw it immediately. Somewhere in that council were people with real, lived reasons for believing in-person learning worked better — attendance patterns, engagement they’d watched fade on a screen, a cohort that only clicked in a room. Xavier never surfaced a single one of them.
Curiosity here isn’t a courtesy. It’s how you earn a hearing. When people feel understood, they listen differently — and the objection you learn about at minute five is the objection you can answer at minute twenty.
The shift: ask one honest question about the opposing view before you state your own. Not a rhetorical one. A real one, where you don’t already know the answer.
3. Name what you’re feeling, or it will speak for you
We are emotional beings who prefer to think of ourselves as intellectual ones.
So we tend the argument carefully and ignore the feeling underneath it — the irritation, the fear of looking foolish, the flare of being contradicted. Ignored, those feelings don’t leave. They take the wheel. They pick the sharp word, flatten the tone, keep the mouth shut when it should open.
When I asked Xavier what he had actually been feeling in that meeting, his first answer was analytical — something about the quality of the debate. His second answer, after a pause, was the real one: he had been irritated. He thought the room was being slow. And the irritation was precisely what convinced him it was safer to say nothing, because he didn’t trust how it would come out.
You don’t need to resolve the feeling. You only need to notice it, so it isn’t steering.
The shift: in the moment before you speak, name the emotion to yourself. I’m annoyed. I’m anxious about how this lands. Naming it is usually enough to loosen its grip on your delivery.
4. Ask what, not why
This is the shift that changes conversations fastest, and it has real evidence behind it.
In a study of how question wording affects thinking, people asked empowering questions — “What could you do to exercise more?” — responded very differently from those asked disempowering ones — “Why aren’t you exercising more?” The first group offered more solutions, took more personal responsibility, were more optimistic, and talked about the future. The second gave more excuses, pointed at outside circumstances, were more pessimistic, and dwelt on obstacles.
Same topic. Same person. One word changed — and the entire quality of the thinking changed with it.
“Why” is past-facing. It asks people to defend a decision already made, so they do. “What” is forward-facing. It asks them to build, so they build.
The shift: convert your challenge into a “what” question before it leaves your mouth.
Instead of “Why do you think classroom training still works?”, try:
- What are you seeing in the room that we’re not seeing on screen?
- What would have to be true for a virtual model to work here?
- What are your reservations about self-paced learning?
- What are some ways we could get what we both want?
None of these hides Xavier’s position. Every one of them gets it heard.
What holds the four together
These shifts work because they change what the room is for.
A meeting where everyone arrives to win produces a winner and a set of quiet people. A meeting where everyone arrives to decide produces a decision that survives contact with reality.
The second kind of room has a name: psychological safety — the shared belief that you can speak, question, and disagree without being punished for it. It isn’t built by announcing it. It’s built by how the most senior person in the room responds to the first person who disagrees with them.
And here is the part Xavier hadn’t considered until we sat with it. His silence wasn’t neutral. Every other person in that council who was also holding back — and there is always more than one — read his silence as one more signal that speaking up wasn’t worth the trouble. He thought he was being careful. He was, without meaning to, making the room a little smaller.
The point
You don’t become opinionated by having an opinion. You become opinionated by refusing to hold anyone else’s.
State your view. Speak in facts, not verdicts. Hold the position with an open hand — firm enough to be useful, loose enough to be moved by something better. Ask what, not why. Then listen as though the answer might change your mind, because occasionally it should.
That isn’t the absence of conviction. It’s what conviction looks like when it’s actually trying to get somewhere.
Where this gets easier
Xavier didn’t change this by reading about it. He changed it by practising it out loud, with someone watching — which is what coaching is for.
At Youniq Minds, we work with leaders one-to-one and in cohorts, where a new way of speaking can be tested in a room built for exactly that. No one is broken; nothing needs to be fixed. Most of us simply need support to adapt to what the room is now asking of us.
Ready to begin? Book a Discovery Call.
