When a deal is stalling or a client goes quiet, the instinct is to push harder — more follow-ups, more data, a better deck. But the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne noticed something subtler about persuasion: that we rarely change our minds because someone argued us into a corner. We change because we feel safe enough to let go of our current position. Montaigne called this 'connaissance par fréquentation' — knowing someone through sustained proximity — and he believed it mattered more than any single brilliant argument. Combine that with what attachment theorist John Bowlby's successor Mary Ainsworth documented in her Strange Situation experiments: that a person's willingness to explore and take risks depends almost entirely on the security of their base. In sales and financial advisory, the implication is uncomfortable: the client who won't commit isn't unconvinced by your logic — they may simply not yet feel safe enough to be wrong in front of you. The concrete move is small. Before your next stalled conversation, replace the status-check email with one that costs you something — share a mistake you made, a deal that went sideways, a product that underperformed. Voluntary self-disclosure signals that this is a space where imperfection is survivable. That's what makes decisions possible.

In the last 48 hours, what did you share with a client or colleague that cost you something — that made you slightly more vulnerable rather than more authoritative?

Drawing from Renaissance Humanism combined with Developmental Psychology — Michel de Montaigne (Essays, 1580, Book I, Chapter 26: 'On the Education of Children') & Mary Ainsworth (Strange Situation experiments, 1969, on secure base as precondition for exploratory behavior)