When a deal stalls, most people work harder on their pitch. They refine the deck, sharpen the numbers, rehearse the objections. But the 12th-century Sufi philosopher Al-Ghazali noticed something unsettling: the more certain we feel about our position, the more selectively we hear what's actually being said back to us. He called this 'the veil of self-satisfaction' — not arrogance exactly, but a kind of cognitive fog that settles when we've invested heavily in being right. Modern attachment research backs this up from a completely different angle: Bowlby's work on anxious attachment found that people under relational threat tend to hear rejection signals in neutral responses. In a client conversation, that means a slow reply or a vague 'we'll think about it' gets processed as confirmation of your fear rather than as information worth examining. The practical move isn't more persuasion — it's a moment of deliberate vacancy before you respond, long enough to ask: what is this person actually telling me, versus what am I expecting to hear?

In the last 48 hours, when a client or colleague gave you an ambiguous response, what assumption did you immediately reach for — and where did that assumption come from?

Drawing from Sufi Philosophy combined with Attachment Psychology — Al-Ghazali (Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 3, on the diseases of the heart) & John Bowlby (Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2, on anxious attachment and perceptual distortion)