What’s Actually True Here?

There’s a question I keep coming back to - in difficult meetings, under pressure, or in the middle of a week that’s starting to feel like too much.

It’s four words. Most people hear it as a challenge. It’s actually a reset.

What’s actually true here?

It came from a conversation with my line manager, in the middle of a project that

wasn’t landing the way I expected.

On the ground, the project was working.

Teams were engaging.

The experience was landing.

The feedback, from the people actually living it, was strong.

At the stakeholder level, though, it was a different story.

The questions weren’t subtle. They were direct. Challenging. At times, openly

negative.

“I’m not convinced this will land.”

“This feels like a big shift for something that’s already working.”

“Why would we move away from what we know is safe?”

This was not hesitation. It was real, sustained resistance.

And you can feel what happens next.

The confidence you walked in with starts to fade. Your thinking speeds up

immediately.

The internal monologue kicks in:

They don’t believe in this.

This isn’t going to get through.

I need to push harder here.

The meeting ends.

But the thinking doesn’t.

You carry it, replaying and reinforcing your certainty that what you felt is exactly

what's happening.

That’s how I felt when I sat down with my line manager afterwards, talking through the meeting, explaining what happened, and making my case for why this project would be hard to deliver.

That’s when they asked:

“So what’s actually true here?”

At first, it didn’t sit well with me. My first reaction wasn’t clarity; it was to get

defensive.

What do you mean, what’s true? Do you think I’m overstating this?

But that wasn’t their intention. They weren’t questioning me personally. They were questioning the story I had already created in my mind.

What Was Actually Happening

Here’s the thing: part of my thinking was accurate.

There was resistance.

Stakeholders were pushing back.

They weren’t fully bought in.

But that’s where accuracy ended.

Where My Thinking Shifted

Even when resistance is real, your mind doesn’t just reflect it. It amplifies it.

You weren’t only facing the situation itself. You were also dealing with your own

interpretation of it.

What was actually happening:

 Stakeholders were challenging the approach.

 They were leaning towards safety.

 They weren’t ready to fully commit.

What I started to believe:

 This is going to fail.

 I’m losing control of the room.

 I need to push harder to get this through.

That’s the shift: it goes from being a challenge to feeling like a threat.

Nothing had escalated. But in my head, it already had.

And I was about to behave as if it had.

The situation was difficult. My interpretation made it heavier.

And that shift changes everything.

Where It Goes Wrong

If I had followed that thinking into the next conversation, I wouldn’t have been

responding to the situation. I would have been responding to the story I’d built

around it.

I would have:

 pushed harder than needed

 become more defensive

 tried to force alignment

And that’s what would have caused real resistance - not the project itself, but my

reaction to a story I had created in my mind.

Fact vs Story

This is the distinction that matters.

Every difficult situation has two layers:

Fact — what has actually happened

Story — what you’ve added to it

In that moment:

Fact:

Stakeholders were challenging the approach. No decision had been made.

Story:

This is failing. I’m losing control. I need to defend it.

One reflects reality. The other escalates it.

Most people don’t separate the two. They experience them as the same thing, which means they end up fighting a battle that’s partly real and partly invented.

What Changed

Once I actually separated fact from story, everything shifted.

Not the situation.

My response to it.

The conversation slowed down.

The focus moved back to what we actually knew.

We worked through the questions instead of reacting to them.

And the resistance that once felt like a threat became something we could actually address calmly and directly, without all the extra noise. We worked through the concerns properly. Understood what was actually driving them. Aligned where we needed to. Backed things up with data where it was required. And made tweaks to the project that, honestly, made it better.

The result was something everyone was genuinely aligned with. It’s still in place.

That would not have happened if I had walked into those conversations with a story rather than the facts.

Why This Matters

This isn’t about avoiding difficulty or pretending situations aren’t hard.

The situation was difficult.

It’s about not making it harder than it needs to be.

Because most of the pressure you feel in moments like this doesn’t come from the situation alone.

It comes from the meaning layered on top of it.

A challenge can start to feel like a threat. A question can turn into doubt. Hesitation can seem like failure. But these changes aren’t inevitable—they happen when you let your story take over.

And once that shift happens, your behaviour follows it.

Final Thought

Most people don’t react to what’s actually happening. They react to the version of

events they’ve already created in their minds, and they do it so quickly they don’t

notice the difference.

The question that closes that gap is simple:

What’s actually true here?

Because if you don’t ask it, you don’t just deal with the situation.

You deal with your version of it.