How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It’s by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you’re not.

I’m Melody wilding, bestselling author. Human behavior professor and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let’s put psychology to work for you.

How you communicate in the toughest situations, like when you have to disagree with powerful people, that is what you will be remembered and evaluated on. So let’s talk about how you show up in those moments in a way that both makes you proud and creates the perception you want to be known for.

Specifically, by the end of this episode, you’ll have exact phrases you can use the next time you need to push back on someone who outranks you, including when and how to use each so you are not second-guessing. Now, I’m willing to bet that sometime in the last few months, maybe even more than once, you sat through a conversation or got an email where someone more powerful than you said something that you knew for sure was off-base, uninformed, outdated, or maybe even straight-up incorrect.

And each time, you probably had this little internal battle with yourself. Do I say something? Do I just let it go? If I do speak up, how do I make sure I’m not coming off like a naysayer or a disrespectful jerk and end up alienating this leader or making my team look bad? You might pride yourself on being easy to work with, low-maintenance, and maybe you call it being adaptable and a team player.

Even in cases where you had a better idea or a promising direction to offer, you stayed quiet. You didn’t wanna rock the boat, but then the issue you saw coming a mile away lands on your desk to fix. Now, you are the one responsible a few weeks later, and you’re annoyed. Or perhaps it’s gone totally the other direction.

You speak up, you offer an executive a counterpoint, and it’s received in absolutely the wrong way. You think you are being logical, and they see it as you not being open-minded, or they get defensive and they dig their heels in. And now you’re worrying you have just blown the trust you’ve been trying to build with this important decision-maker for months.

Both of those situations come down to the same communication skill, diplomatic dissent. In other words, mastering that crucial but very tender window where you have to tell a person with power over your career that you see something differently. Yet, if you are anything like the clients who come into our Speak Like a Senior Leader program, having to respectfully oppose those above you is something you are encountering almost daily, yet you have had little to no guidance and training on, and you are fumbling when you are under pressure as a result, which, let’s face it, is more often than not right now when stress levels are literally the highest they have ever been. When you are feeling crunched, when you feel like you have deadlines, and demands, and expectations bearing down on you from right and left, that is when your own tolerance thins, and the comment you would’ve shrugged off is now the one you answer with this edge in your voice.

Your emotions get the better of you, and you ramble, or you come off shorter than you mean. And that slip-up where your frustration shows becomes a defining moment in the minds of the decision-makers who don’t see you that often, which is not what you want, because it will disproportionately inform what they think you are capable of or not.

So you have to get better at staying grounded through all of this. You have to have poise and constructively challenge those around you, even when that person who is senior than you says, “Oh, we just need one more thing added to this project that’s already ballooned out of scope.” Even when you see a plan is heading for a huge roadblock, and you need to say so without coming off as resistant, and even when an executive repeats something about your customers, your team, that was true a year ago and isn’t anymore.

Being able to speak your opinion without making it a contest about who is right, being able to articulate an alternate point of view and still bring people along, these are the aspects of how you articulate yourself and come across that prove you are ready to or are already operating at the next level.

Because when an executive is deciding who to bring into that million-dollar negotiation, who sits in on that politically loaded conversation with the company’s biggest customer, they are looking for the person who not only has judgment but is savvy about how they communicate it. They are looking for the person whose presentation and language says, “You can trust me.

You can trust me to handle sensitive situations without making a bigger mess of things. You can rely on me to give you the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. You can depend on me to represent us well in front of the clients, vendors, the board, without you having to do a lot of micromanaging.” So if you wanna guarantee that person is you, then you’ve got to grab your spot for the free, five-day Overlooked No More Summit I have coming up September 14th through 18th.

You can sign up. Link is in the show notes. It’s melodywilding.com/summit. Straddling that line between being a trusted truth-teller or coming off as combative and hard to work with, that is razor-thin. So let’s get into those three specific phrases to make sure you are landing on the right side of that equation.

This is language for those times when you have to push back on someone who is outranking you, and do it without damaging the relationship or your reputation. Because by the time you have reached your level, the top brass who are in your orbit, the powerful people, they have plenty of yes people. They have plenty of, “Oh, great idea, let me jump on it.”

They have the sycophants who tell them what they wanna hear, who blow hot air on every decision. What they also have just as much of is the opposite, the know-it-alls, the subject matter experts who will double down when they are challenged, or who treat every conversation like it’s a debate that they have to win.

So what they are starving for, though they would rarely say this, is they need that person in the middle, someone like you who can be competent and credible, who can tactfully tell them when something is heading in the wrong direction, and do it without sucking up or flattery, and without putting up a fight.

All right. The first script you can use to disagree with powerful people is this, “That’s a fair point. The challenge I see is blank.” I wanted to start here because of what this phrasing does in both your nervous system and theirs before you’ve even actually made a point. When you are about to push back on someone with power, your own threat response is already firing.

Your heart rate is up, your voice is tightening, your brain is rehearsing the sentence three times before you say it, and you can feel the cost of getting something wrong, so you blurt it out fast, you may over-soften it, you may just stay silent entirely.

But on their side, the moment they sense disagreement is coming, their defense system kicks in too. They are stressed just like you, maybe even more so, because they’ve got investors, other major players breathing down their neck. So do not be surprised when powerful people are just less careful about how they deliver their disagreement to the point where their requests just come out more blunt than they might usually. They stop listening to what you are saying.

They start figuring out how to defend what they just said. And when that happens, it’s the worst of both worlds, because now you’re on opposite sides of the conversation. They are on one side of the table protecting their idea. You are on the other side of the table bracing to challenge it. Whatever you say next, no matter how smart it is, for someone who has their guard up, it’s not going to get through.

And if you take this personally, if you match their tone, you shut down, you get overly compliant, you’ve given away the only piece you can control, which is your response. So the fix here is to start by finding something, anything little in what they said that you can actually agree with. Not to appease them, but to instead put you both on the same side of the conversation before you then go and introduce a different view.

And so doing this lowers the intensity for you. When you open and you say, “You know, that’s a fair point,” you are not just bracing for confrontation. You can be a little bit more at ease. And think about how that also feels from the other side. If I just said to you, “That’s not gonna work. We don’t have the budget for that,” you feel immediately shut down.

You’re gonna push back. You’re gonna defend yourself. You may dig in even harder. But if I say, “You know what? That is a fair point about needing to move quickly. The challenge I see is that we’ve already assigned resources.” Instead, you feel a little more heard first, and now we’re working on the problem together instead of arguing about who’s right and the merits of it.

So you do not wanna say, “Well, legal isn’t going to approve that. They’re gonna have a lot of comments on that.” Instead, you wanna say, “That’s a fair point that we need more clarity in the announcement. The challenge I see is that legal has flagged language like this as risky and not approved it in the past, so we’d wanna make sure to loop them in early to avoid losing any more time on this.”

So the formula here for this first one is your point of agreement plus your point of view. You’re acknowledging their idea and then sharing your concern. And to give you some alternates to swap out for whatever sounds more natural, here’s a few other ways to say this or deliver it. You might say, “You’re right on X.

What I want us to think about is Y.” Or, “I agree with you on X. Where I’d want to dig in a little more is Y.” You might also say, “That makes sense, especially the part about A. My concern would be B.” Or last one, “I’m with you on A. The piece I keep coming back to is B.”

Your second script to disagree with powerful people is this, “I’d like to add a nuance to that.” This is a small but really important reframe that can change how what you say next is then received. So the psychology behind this is that the executive, the important person that you’re disagreeing with, probably does not have the same ground-level visibility into what’s going on as you do.

They are not seeing the weekly data come in. They’re not talking to customers every day. They’re not hearing from the team where the bottlenecks are. They are several layers up. They are forming opinions based on summaries, secondhand information. So when they say something that doesn’t line up with your experience, the temptation is to correct them, to say, “Well, actually, that’s not quite right,” or, “I don’t think that’s accurate,” or even just say, “Well, in my experience…”

which then makes them feel wrong when, in fact, they were just working on outdated or not fully formed assumptions. This is where I wanna tell you something that I have taken a lot of flack for on social media. The best and savviest communicators that I know rarely, if ever, say the words, “You’re wrong.”

They rarely, if ever, say, “You’re wrong” to powerful people, because it turns what could’ve been a productive conversation now into something that’s contentious, an argument, and it just unnecessarily burns trust and social capital you might need later. You’re wrong is almost also never just those two words.

It comes with implications attached to it. You’re wrong, and that’s a bad idea. You’re wrong, and you didn’t think that through. This doesn’t make sense. So for the person receiving it, especially when that person has status and ego attached to the ideas they just floated, it feels like a slap in the face, and the tough part is you don’t get to decide whether they experience it that way.

So when you use this phrase, I’d like to add a nuance to that, it sidesteps a lot of that. You are telling them you have just more information for them. You’re providing another layer to consider. You’re suggesting there’s a data point. So you may use this opportunity to highlight a trend that you see or feedback that you’re hearing, a downstream impact that they may not be aware of from where they sit.

So I’d like to add a nuance to that. Something I’m hearing consistently from the field is this. Or, I’d like to add a nuance to that. There’s a pattern in the reports from the last 60 days that I think might be relevant here. Another version of this same approach is saying something along the lines of, “I wanna make sure we’re factoring in…”

When you say that, you’re not blatantly saying you forgot or you missed something. You’re treating it more just like a simple oversight. It’s more the kind of thing someone who is juggling a dozen priorities would have, rather than a flaw in their judgment and thinking. I wanna be very clear. I’m not telling you to be a pushover.

It’s quite the opposite. You will hear that in every one of these phrases we’re going through today. You are still saying what needs to be said. You are just saying it in a way where the other person can actually hear it, that they don’t shut down, and that’s the long game. It pays you back in ways that have nothing to do with them liking you or their ego.

When you do this, you walk out of meetings without that pit in your stomach. You don’t replay the exchange for days afterwards, wondering if you came across too strong. The conversation stays calm enough that the door is open for the next one, and you get to leave this one knowing you handled yourself well, which is worth so much more, in my opinion, than just being right. The last script you can use to disagree with powerful people is this question, “What needs to be true for us to move forward with this other direction, this other idea?”

So notice, this is a question. You’re actually not introducing your point at all yet, and the purpose of this is to pull the powerful person into thinking with you instead of pushing back against you. You are inviting them to think through conditions that would make some other path viable, even if it’s just totally hypothetical for right now.

Actually, better if it’s hypothetical for right now. There’s this well-documented effect in behavioral research. It’s actually called the question behavior effect, very creative, as researchers tend to be, and the question behavior effect comes down to this, that when you ask someone about a future action, and researchers would ask people things like, “Would you donate to this cause next month?

Would you consider voting for this candidate?” Studies have found that the person being asked, their brain then actually rehearses that scenario. They are picturing the future. They’re considering what it would take. They are thinking about how they would feel doing the thing, and once that mental rehearsal happens, people are significantly more likely to follow through, even if they were skeptical at first.

So you are leveraging that here. By asking that question and phrasing it as, “What would need to be true?” You’re getting them off of defending their argument and instead mentally rehearsing what it would take to support or implement a direction more aligned with where you wanna go.

Once they identify the criteria or conditions that would need to be in place, now you have an opening to find a compromise. Now you can respond with something like, “You know, that makes sense. I think we might actually be closer than it seems like.” Or, “I can go ahead and put together a version that addresses those specific concerns, and we can move forward from there.”

All right. Before we wrap up, I wanna leave you with the bigger picture on all of this. How you disagree tells senior people around you a lot about how you operate. People are watching whether you can handle conflict without blowing everything up, whether they can put you in front of more important people for bigger negotiations with tougher stakeholders, how you step up or do you crumble when there’s differing perspectives and stronger personalities.

So, the phrases we walked through today are useful, but the deeper thing they are doing is totally changing how you operate under pressure. And I’ve alluded to this today, but I really wanna underscore it, that at your level, winning is not the point. The goal is not to change their mind and get them to say, “You’re right.

Let’s do it your way. You have convinced me.” If that is the bar you walk into every conversation with and that you set for yourself, you’re gonna walk out of almost every one of these interactions feeling like you failed. The goal is instead to have a conversation that has substance behind it, to get the thing you know is right or the direction you think is valid into the discussion so that the decision that gets made is better informed than it would’ve been if you just stayed quiet.

Sometimes they will change their mind. Sometimes they will change course. Sometimes they won’t, and they’ll go ahead anyway with your concern, at least it’s on the record. But both of those are wins. So, I want you to think of your job more as improving the quality of the thinking that’s happening, showing you are trying to act in the best interest of the business and team, not trying to win every exchange or protect your turf.

If this episode was useful, the next thing to do is to RSVP for the Overlooked No More Summit that is happening September 14th through 18th. It is just one hour a day, 3:00 PM Eastern on those days. It’s free. It is live with me. It is brand new. Go to melodywilding.com/summit. Make sure you have grabbed your spot.

Link is also in the show notes.

Today you got those three phrases to disagree tactfully, but the summit is five days, again, an hour a day of me teaching you the full system for executive communication. The one our clients in Speak Like a Senior Leader have used to get through to a difficult, powerful person from the get-go, get buy-in for huge projects, stop getting talked over in meetings, and instead become the one people come to for opinions and much more.

So during the summit, big news, I am actually opening the doors for the final time this year to Speak Like a Senior Leader. This is our client beloved, our best-selling eight-week training program where you will go from being the seasoned expert whose influence does not match their intelligence to the person handed dream opportunities before they ask, precisely because you can articulate your points, ideas with more precision and poise.

And you’ll be able to do that with the coaching inside of the program where you are working alongside getting feedback and input every single day from me and my team. You’ve done enough of consuming podcasts like this, books, LinkedIn posts, and saying, “Oh, yeah, that sounds good. I should do that.” You need practice paired with expert feedback, guidance, and working through your specific situation, which is exactly what you get inside of Speak Like a Senior Leader.

All right, I will see you at the summit. Remember, that’s melodywilding.com/summit, and I will catch you in the next episode.

Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening, it’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self-assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.