Some People Have No Intention to Understand You

I didn’t learn that lesson overnight. It took years and a very specific moment before it finally landed for me.

A few years ago, I sat at the most senior leadership table in my organization and presented a staffing issue that I knew was coming. I didn’t show up with opinions or hunches. I showed up with researched data, operational projections, workload impacts, and solutions that aligned with both present and future needs.

My intent was simple: to raise an issue early enough that it could be solved without the downstream crisis I could see forming.

I remember waiting for curiosity. For questions. For debate. For even one person to pick up the information and engage with it.

That isn’t what happened.

What came back instead were off-hand comments, unrelated opinions, and surface-level dismissals that made it abundantly clear no one had actually listened. The data wasn’t read. The projections weren’t absorbed. The solutions weren’t considered. The urgency wasn’t acknowledged. The issue was swept aside as if it was inconvenient or irrelevant.

I left that meeting confused and frustrated. I replayed it in my head more times than I care to admit, looking for the point where I must have gone wrong. Should I have explained it differently? Should I have brought more charts? Should I have spoken louder? Slower? Shorter? Should I have pushed harder? Softer? Should I have waited for a different meeting with different people?

For a long time, I placed the weight of that moment on myself.

Years later, that exact staffing challenge became a regional issue impacting every police agency. And the regional governance group adopted the exact model I had proposed, the one that had been ignored in that room, as the solution worth exploring.

Suddenly, it was obvious what the “right idea” had been. Suddenly, there was interest, oversight, and urgency. Suddenly there were resources and working groups and committees.

There’s a particular kind of silence that comes with realizing you were right,  just too early. It’s not triumphant. It’s not vindicating. It’s more of a quiet acknowledgment that the problem was never a lack of clarity or data or articulation. The problem was the room.

It wasn’t until after I left policing that the lesson finally snapped into focus:

Some people engage with you with no intent to understand you.

Understanding requires effort. It requires curiosity. It requires stepping outside one’s own assumptions and sitting with information long enough to let it change or challenge something. That’s uncomfortable. Not everyone is willing to do it.

Some people seek clarity. Some seek confirmation. Some seek accuracy. Some seek comfort. And some only seek the story they already believe.

And here’s the part I wish I’d understood sooner: No amount of explaining will ever shift a mind that’s committed to staying closed.

If you find yourself constantly defending your decisions, your leadership, or your vision to people who are not curious, redirect that energy. Not every audience is the right audience. Not every table is the right table. And not every disagreement is a signal to try harder.

Find rooms where context matters. Find people who ask intelligent questions. Find leadership environments where the goal is understanding, not dismissal.

Life is too short to narrate yourself to an audience that isn’t listening.

I didn’t actually include this story in Tightrope, but sharing it today felt important. Because I know I’m not the only one who has sat in a room and watched good ideas,  necessary ideas, collapse under the weight of disinterest or ego or fear.

If this is you, hear this: being unheard does not make you wrong. Being misunderstood does not make you unclear. And being early does not make you naïve.

Sometimes the world catches up later.