I recently found myself in a conversation with someone who, I later realised, was saying one thing to me and something else entirely to someone else.
It’s more common than you think.
People get caught in the middle, saying whatever they think will please the person in front of them.
Same in business too. We tell the customer we are customer-focused, only to focus on the business metric that matters.
The same pattern shows up in liars, in cheats, in people who say “I don’t know” when they know exactly what they think — they just don’t want to be pinned to it.
Courage is the solution.
We don’t want to hear no. So we shift the story, soften the position, tell each person the version they want. And in shifting, we lose — not the argument, but the thing that actually matters: trust.