Seeing the Human Being Across the Table
Welcome to The Monday Mentor
Every Monday, I'll bring you one mentor, a thinker, a teacher, a voice that has shaped how I lead, coach, and live. Not as a lecture, but as an invitation. A few minutes at the start of your week to think a little differently about who you are and how you show up.
At Quantum Leader, we hold to a simple conviction:who you are matters.Leadership is not a bag of techniques you reach into. It's an inside-out expression of the person underneath -your fears, your values, your capacity to stay open when everything in you wants to close.
So let's begin where I believe all leadership begins. Not with strategy. With peace.
The metaphor that stayed with me
A client once told me he was going into his management meetings like he was going into battle.
I've never forgotten it, in part because of how honest it was, and because of what it revealed. He said out loud what so many of us feel and never name: that the person across the table is an opponent. That we have to fight to defend our points. That every contrarian view is an attack, and the goal is to win.
Sit with that for a moment, because it's more common than we admit.
We rarely walk into a roomintendingto make war. But we walk in braced. Armed. Already rehearsing our rebuttal while the other person is still speaking. We mistake this for being prepared. It's actually being closed.
And here's what I've come to learn: when we interact from a place of opposition, we don't create the outcomes we say we want. We create conflict. Then we call it "business," as if the label made it inevitable.
It isn't inevitable. That's the whole point of today's mentor.
The mentor: Marshall Rosenberg
Marshall Rosenberg, the father of Nonviolent Communication, was a psychologist who didn't develop his ideas in the comfort of a lecture hall. He tested them in the hardest rooms on earth: prisons, schools in crisis, communities torn apart by violence, nations at war with each other. It’s not easy, but it works.
Rosenberg's central claim is both simple and radical: each of us is responsible for the peace we bring into the world, through the way we speak and the way we listen.
Read that again, because it quietly removes every excuse. Not governments. Not the other person. Not the difficult colleague who "started it." Us. In every exchange, every day, we are either adding peace to the world or adding conflict to it. There is no neutral.
In one of his books, Speak Peace in a World of Conflict, Rosenberg describes what it took to genuinely see the human being across the table and how much inner preparation that required. This is the phrase I keep returning to. Not "manage" the person across the table. Not "handle" or "win over."See.
Think about how rarely we actually do this.
The story we invent
Here is why seeing is so hard.
When we're filled with anger, frustration, fear, or old pain, we quietly rewrite the story of who is in front of us. The other person stops being a human being with needs and feelings of their own and becomes an enemy to defend against. Their tone becomes evidence. Their disagreement becomes an attack. Everything they say gets filtered through a single question: how do I defend myself?
Rosenberg gave this a name. He called it the "enemy image".
It's such a precise phrase because it points to something true: the enemy is often animage, not a fact. It's a story our strong feelings construct in the moment, faster than thought. And once the image forms, we're no longer in a conversation. We're in a war we invented, fighting a version of the person that exists mostly in our own head.
The tragedy is how convincing it feels from the inside. In that moment, we are certain the other person is the problem. We rarely notice that the feeling came first, and the enemy came second.
What it means to hear what's alive
Rosenberg's invitation is hard: stay open long enough to hear what isalivein the other person. To connect with their needs before rushing to defend our own.
What does that actually look like?
· It's the pausebefore you respond.
· It's the question asked out of genuine curiosity rather than as a trap.
· It's the willingness to let someone finish a thought you disagree with, and to sit with it, rather than reloading while they speak.
Beneath every hard position is a need. Behind the colleague fighting for control is often a need for security. Behind the one pushing relentlessly on the numbers is often a need to be trusted, or to protect their team.
When we listen for the need instead of the attack, something shifts. Understanding replaces suspicion. And the enemy — that image we built — becomes a human being again.
This is not weakness. Let me be clear about that, because "nonviolent" can sound soft to people who live in tough rooms.
It takes far more strength to stay open under pressure than to armour up. Anyone can fire back.
Staying human when you've been provoked is the rarer, harder discipline.
Peace begins inside
Here is the part inspired by Rosenberg's work that I find most powerful.
Peace in the boardroom, or between nations, begins inside us. It always has.
It lives in our attitude, in how we choose to see the person in front of us, in the words we reach for in the very moment we feel most provoked. Every one of those carries the power to bring peace or to provoke conflict.
And this scales in both directions. The same principle that could ease a negotiation between countries is the one that shapes how you speak to your spouse over dinner, or to your child at the end of a long day, or to the colleague whose email just made your jaw tighten. The stakes change. The mechanism doesn't. Peace is always built or broken in the small, immediate choice of how we meet another person.
Which brings me to the most important part: it's a choice.
We can walk in as if going to battle.
Or
2. we can walk in ready to see the human being across the table.
Your choice has the power to change your world.
This is the first edition of The Monday Mentor. Every Monday: one mentor, one idea, one invitation to lead from the inside out.
If it resonated, subscribe and share it with someone who leads. And I'd love to hear from you : what patterns do you notice in your own meeting rooms that breed either peace or conflict?
Kindly,
Daniela
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