Turning an Adversary Into an Ally
When I was a fifth grader, I couldn’t understand why some kids weren’t nice to me.
I wasn’t the kind of kid who shrugged it off. I genuinely wanted to know the reason. The confusion followed me home, to the dinner table, where I asked the question and received answers that would be fit for a Hallmark card but didn’t fit the situation. So I carried the question with me instead, for years, without a good answer. It was a heavy backpack to lug around, especially during adolescence.
What I got eventually wasn’t an answer. It was a workaround.
At twenty, I started lifting weights seriously. The bullying stopped around the same time — not because I went looking for confrontations, or because I was strong enough to carry that backpack of uncertainty, but because the confrontations stopped coming. Problem solved, more or less. Except it wasn’t really solved. I had changed the physical variable without answering the original question. I still didn’t know why some people were unkind. I just wasn’t an easy target anymore.
Fast forward a few decades. I am now, by most measures, a physically imposing person. Former black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I can bench press one-eighth of a ton. I have a shaved head, a trimmed goatee, a mostly-black wardrobe, and I take up a reasonable amount of space in a room. None of this matters in a university workplace, where positional authority beats physical presence every time. It definitely doesn’t matter where a tenured faculty member having a bad day and an elevated opinion of their own frustration can say things to a support professional that would land very differently in a parking lot at night.
I have been on the receiving end of those conversations.
There was one in particular. A diminutive woman in her upper fifties, borderline shouting at a man two decades younger, a foot taller, and a hundred pounds heavier. In any other context, the geometry of that situation resolves differently. But this was her office, her institution, her positional authority — and if the much larger man raised his voice in return, there would be no version of that story where anyone would take his side.
So I stood there, towering over her, and I did the hardest thing available to me. I checked my face. Deliberately. I made sure what she was seeing was calm. And when she paused for a breath, I raised one index finger — not aggressively, just a quiet, nonverbal request for a moment — and I said, “[First name], I am not responsible for this issue you are having. I am here to help. And even though you don’t seem to realize it right now, I am on your team.”
The monologue stopped.
I continued in my naturally deep baritone voice: “I have a couple of ideas up my sleeve that might fix this. Will you allow me to help you?”
She deflated. There was an apology. I smiled and thanked her for that. I then said, “Let’s see what we can do.”
I want to be honest about what made that possible, because it didn’t come naturally and it didn’t come quickly. Somewhere in the years between the dinner table and that faculty office, I had assembled a small set of mental tools that I now run, almost automatically, when an unkind email lands in my inbox or an unkind person is standing in front of me.
The first tool came from an unlikely place. There’s an episode of Ted Lasso where Coach Lasso tells a player to “be a goldfish” — the happiest animal in the ocean, because it forgets everything in ten seconds. The idea isn’t forgiveness exactly. It’s functional release. Don’t carry the transgression into the next moment. I found that useful, as far as it went.
But my version goes a step further than the goldfish. I don’t just release the unkindness. I replace it with a question: what would have to be true about this person’s life for them to be acting this way right now? Not as an excuse. As an explanation. There is more to their situation than I am aware of. There almost always is.
When I ask that question, something shifts. The hostility stops being personal and starts being data. I picture scrambled eggs sliding off a Teflon pan — the acerbic energy just doesn’t stick. And I remind myself: my response here could turn an adversary into an ally. Not always. But sometimes. And sometimes is worth trying for.
The woman who was shouting at me that afternoon is now someone I support with something close to genuine warmth. When we meet for video consults, I am proactive. “I am sure that is a stressball for you. Now you know me — I always have an idea up my sleeve. Let’s get things back to good.” She responds in kind. The relationship that followed that afternoon is better than it would have been if I had never been tested at all.
I still don’t fully know why some people are unkind. I stopped needing the answer a long time ago. What I know instead is that the charitable assumption — the deliberate choice to construct a generous explanation before responding — costs me nothing and occasionally changes everything.
The fifth grader at the dinner table would find that satisfying, I think.
More later...