Safe Enough to be Wrong

People don’t change because they’re proven wrong.

They change when it becomes safe enough to stay in the room while they’re wrong.

Because if being wrong costs you connection, most of us will choose staying connected over being honest.

I often say that everything is about relationships.  When you really look at it, how we do anything can be understood through that lens.  Clients heal in relationship—with their therapist and their support system.  Students learn in relationship—with their classmates, their teachers, and even the material itself.

And if there is one more thing I know about relationships…they are complicated.

We bump into each other. We misunderstand. We feel hurt, defensive, certain.  And sooner or later, in any meaningful relationship, it will feel like someone is right and someone is wrong—and the wrong person needs to change.

What doesn’t work is telling someone, over and over, how wrong they are.

Sometimes it doesn’t even work when you explain how much it matters to you.

What doesn’t work is proving how right you are.

What doesn’t work is refusing to really hear them—their ideas, their perspective, their experience.

To make it safe, you have to listen.

Really listen.

Not just waiting for your turn, or listening for the part you can correct.

To make it safe, you have to show empathy for what they’re feeling.

What does it cost them to shift?

What are the stakes, internally, if they see this differently?

To make it safe, you have to take the judgment out of it.

You have to trust that, no matter what their belief or stance is,

it comes from a place in them that is trying to do something important.

Something protective.

Something necessary.

And when it’s safe enough,

something starts to loosen.