Holding your ground

I used to react to everything.

If someone said something sharp at work, I answered right away. Fast, defensive, and usually sharper than I meant to be. By the end, I had lost the very point I was trying to make.

Then I watched a colleague deal with someone who was being openly rude to her. She didn’t get angry, and she didn’t go quiet either. She stayed polite, stayed calm, and made her point anyway.

That’s when I realised calm isn’t the same as silence.

Here’s what I’m learning. When someone is rude to me, what I feel isn’t really anger. It’s panic. Something feels under threat, and I want the moment over as fast as possible. So I rush. And rushing is exactly how I lose my ground.

But my ground isn’t winning the argument. I can’t control how the other person speaks or reacts. My ground is what I can control: My tone, My words, My point, and My belief that I deserve respect.

Someone being rude to me says more about how they’re handling pressure than about who i'm.

I’m not there yet. But I’ve started noticing the panic before I respond. That small pause is where the superpower begins.