We tend to assume that when people resist a good idea, they're being irrational — but the psychologist Donald Winnicott noticed something more interesting: people often resist not the idea itself, but the feeling of being changed without consent. He called this the need for a 'holding environment' — a space where a person feels safe enough to let new information in without it threatening who they are. Applied to everyday life, this means that the quality of your argument almost never determines whether someone changes their mind. What determines it is whether the other person feels seen and stable before you ask them to shift. The next time someone pushes back on something you're certain is correct, the resistance is probably not about the logic. It's a signal that the holding environment isn't there yet.

Who in your life do you try to persuade before you've made them feel genuinely understood?

Drawing from Object relations psychology — Donald Winnicott