TEST Some people you cannot reach

Years ago, when crime was rising in Venezuela, Colgate-Palmolive, my employer at the time, brought in a self-defence trainer. Not martial arts. Something more practical: how to move through the world safely, how to read situations, how to protect yourself when the gap between you and the other person is not just physical but fundamental.

I still clearly remember a key instruction.

Culture is not what you say you value. It is what the twenty-first person you hired does when nobody is watching.

If someone approaches you to rob you, do not try to reason with them. Do not try to persuade. Do not try to explain. Hand over what they want and leave.

The trainer's reasoning was not about cowardice. It was about translation. He said: in that moment, you and this person are not speaking the same language. Not literally but at the level of values, formation, worldview. What they believe is acceptable, what they believe about the world and their place in it, is so fundamentally different from yours that any attempt at dialogue will fail. You are not in the same conversation, even if you are speaking the same words.

I filed it away, I thought it was about crime.

It wasn't.

I've spent a long time believing that most conflict is bridgeable. That if you communicate clearly enough, listen carefully enough, show good faith thoroughly enough, you can find common ground. I built a company on that belief. I led hundreds of people through it. It served me well, for a long time, in the kinds of conflicts where the other person was operating from a similar interior architecture, a shared sense of what was fair, what was decent, what the rules of engagement were.

But there is a category of conflict where that belief becomes a liability.

There are people and organisations whose foundational formation — the values absorbed early, the behaviours rewarded over years, the version of success they were handed — is so different from yours that the gap is not a communication problem. It is a formation problem, and formation, unlike communication, cannot be fixed in a conversation.

Not every conflict is a misunderstanding. Some are a collision between two completely different versions of what is acceptable.

The mistake I made and I see others make it constantly, is spending enormous energy trying to get someone to see something they are genuinely, structurally unable to see. Not because they are stupid, but because their interior architecture was built differently. The thing you are trying to appeal to — their sense of fairness, their capacity for reciprocity, their belief that how you get somewhere matters as much as whether you get there — may simply not exist in the form you need it to.

You are speaking. They are hearing something completely different. Not a different interpretation of the same message. A different language.

There was a moment in this realisation — and I remember it clearly — when I felt something very close to grief.

Because if what I believe is true: that how you treat people matters, that building something with integrity is worth more than building it fast, that the people who worked alongside you deserve to be seen — and if the people I was dealing with genuinely do not share that belief — then everything I thought we had in common was a projection.

I had been conducting a conversation that only I was in.

And for a moment, that made me question everything. Maybe I had been naive. Maybe the values I built my career and my company around were just a luxury, something you get to believe in when the stakes are low enough.

But I came back from that. And here is where I landed:

The answer is not to become what you are dealing with. The answer is not to abandon the formation that took decades to build because it is being tested by someone whose formation is incompatible with yours. That would be the ultimate loss, not of the dispute, but of yourself.

The goal is not to win the argument. The goal is to stay intact while the argument runs its course.

What I know now, from the other side of some very hard experiences, is this.

There is a category of situation — in business, in leadership, sometimes in life — where the most sophisticated thing you can do is recognise that you are not in a conversation. You are in a process. And processes have mechanisms. Laws. Contracts. Structures designed precisely for the moments when two parties cannot reach each other through goodwill alone.

Stop trying to convince. Stop trying to be understood by someone who is not built to understand you. Hand it to the process and keep your energy for something that deserves it.

This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence that takes a long time to earn.

It is also, I think, a form of identity protection, the ability to recognise when continuing to engage is costing you more than the engagement is worth. To hold your own values intact not by arguing for them, but by refusing to let them be eroded by the friction of someone else's incompatible ones.

The self-defence trainer in Caracas understood something that took me years to apply beyond the context he taught it in.

Some people you cannot reach. That is not your failure. It is formation — theirs and yours — doing exactly what formation does.

Know when to hand it over. And walk away intact.

— Sabrina

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