I was recently reading “Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language” by Amanda Montell, and the author was talking about truth. The context that they were talking about was if a man would keep repeating the same thing, time and time again without objection from others, it would become the “Default truth” and in doing so it would become actually true. Again, in this context, they meant it in terms of a men vs women thing, however thinking about the actual corporate world, I realised that everyone does this to each other 1.
That default truth isn’t necessarily male versus female. It’s a thing humans do to each other. How many meetings for how many projects have I been in over the decades, where simply the loudest, most strident voice, the one that repeats their point of view again, and again and again, won.
How many of us when faced with this have muttered to ourselves, “oh, yeah, we’ll just accept it for now and then get back to it when they have calmed down”. But in doing so, you’ve accepted their truth. It’s a human trick, not a magic trick.
There are 2 things to learn here:
- Is don’t let people that do this as a standard tactic get away with this without challenge.
- On the meetings that you think that the only way you’re gonna get any further is to just accept what the person said and move on or take it offline. Make sure that you actually do that and bring it back up later, keep fighting, or in the end you have let that person become the truth.
- Though I FULLY accept that women experience it far more than men[↩]