There’s a line a lot of highly competent people repeat to themselves like a rosary, and it goes something like this: I don’t know how to play that game, and I’m not going to learn, because that’s not who I am. Notice it’s never said with regret. It’s said with pride. Almost like a medal.

And that pride is exactly the problem.

Because there’s a huge difference between refusing to betray who you are and refusing to learn the language of the room you’re standing in. Most people confuse the two for an entire career, convinced they’re protecting their character when, really, they’re just avoiding the discomfort of being watched while they try.

I spent years around a piece of engineering that explains this better than any leadership course ever did. There’s a principle in telecom engineering called impedance matching. No formulas needed: if the signal leaving one piece of equipment isn’t matched to the resistance of the next circuit, it doesn’t pass through clean. It bounces, reflects, loses strength, sometimes disappears altogether — even when it started out as a perfect signal.

The signal doesn’t change its content. It changes its impedance to get through — and that’s not the signal betraying itself, it’s the only way it arrives whole on the other side.

Now swap the word signal for conviction, and swap circuit for boardroom, committee, the group of people deciding who moves up and who stays put for another cycle. Most people with full competence, full delivery, full results walk into those rooms with a powerful signal and zero impedance matching. They say the whole truth, exactly the way they feel it, with no translation for the circuit that’s listening. And then they’re stunned when the signal doesn’t land, when the good proposal doesn’t convince anyone, when the right idea loses to a weaker one simply because the weaker one arrived packaged the way that circuit could actually receive it.

And they call it an unfair system.

Sometimes it is. Systems have plenty that’s crooked. But part of it isn’t the system. It’s the refusal to make the adjustment, dressed up as integrity.

I want to ask something simple, the kind of question that stings more than it looks like it should: when was the last time you changed how you presented an idea — not the idea, the delivery — so a specific person could actually hear it? If the answer took a while, or came with a “but I shouldn’t have to do that,” we’ve already found the first exposed wire in this conversation.

Nobody’s asking you to lie. That confusion is exactly what keeps so many good people stuck for years, sometimes an entire career, one rung below what their competence would otherwise support.

Let me describe a scene I watch repeat itself, different names, different companies, nearly identical structure. Someone technically flawless, respected, admired even by internal rivals, walks into a room where direction gets decided. She has the right read. She knows exactly what needs to be said. And she says it — straight, no cushioning, no attention to who’s at the table, no awareness that this particular director can only embrace an idea if some part of it feels like it was born from him too.

The right idea gets rejected.

Months later, someone more skilled at the game takes the exact same idea, gives it a different name, asks that same director two questions before presenting, lets him finish a sentence midway through the pitch — and the idea sails through. It becomes a project. It becomes recognition. And the person who had the original idea is left, once again, wondering why the world is so unfair to people who are direct.

The world isn’t unfair to people who are direct. It’s deaf to a badly matched signal. It always has been. It always will be.

Here’s a word I borrowed from a thinker who spent a career studying how the modern world lost the solid shape of its old certainties: liquid. Not solid. Not gas. Liquid.

Solid has its own shape and doesn’t yield. It looks like strength, but it’s fragility in disguise, because what refuses to bend, once the pressure gets big enough, shatters all at once. You’ve seen this. Years of flawless rigidity, and then one day, under real pressure, the whole structure collapses, because it never once learned to give an inch.

Gas is the opposite and just as dangerous. No shape at all, filling whatever space is offered, agreeing with everyone, shifting position with whichever way the room’s wind is blowing, until eventually nobody knows what this person actually thinks — including the person themselves.

Liquid is the third state, and it’s the hardest one to sustain, because it demands you remember who you are even while your shape keeps changing. Water poured into a round glass turns round. The same water in a square glass turns square. It changes shape entirely, without resistance, without drama. And it remains, from the first sip to the last, exactly the same composition.

This is the persuasion I’m trying to describe when I talk about playing the game without betraying what’s sacred to you. It’s not disguising what you think. It’s accepting the shape of the glass — the timing of that room, the ego of that director, the specific fear running through that committee, the internal politics of that moment — without a single molecule of what you stand for changing.

And here’s where most good people get it wrong: shape isn’t substance. Most people confuse the two out of fear — the old fear, the same one that’s kept you tending an empty chair for years without ever pulling it out — the fear that changing shape is the first step toward dissolving completely.

It isn’t. It only is if you never knew, from the start, what your composition actually was.

There’s an exercise I use with people who arrive at exactly this point in their career: fully capable, fully frustrated, unable to understand why merit alone isn’t converting into position. I ask them to list, without any judgment, three things they refuse to do politically because they consider it beneath their dignity. And almost every time, the list is full of things that have nothing to do with dignity — they have to do with a fear of exposure wearing the costume of principle.

For example, praising someone above you in public isn’t flattery. Often, it’s translating a real signal of respect into a language that specific environment can actually recognize. Asking a question you already know the answer to, just so someone else gets to look smart in front of the group, isn’t weakness. It’s relationship engineering, the kind of fine adjustment that builds the sort of trust no results spreadsheet can build on its own.

Now, yes, there’s a real line here. And it deserves to be stated without any hedging, because this is exactly where a lot of people, trying to learn the game, lose their own footing.

Lying about a number to look good in front of whoever’s deciding isn’t shape, it’s altered substance. Publicly agreeing with a decision you genuinely believe, with real conviction and not just stubbornness, will hurt people — just to avoid displeasing someone above you — isn’t adjustment either, it’s dissolving until you disappear. The difference between these two mistakes and a healthy adjustment is simple to state and hard to feel in the moment: are you changing how you say it, or are you changing what’s true?

If the answer is how you say it, give yourself permission. Adjust as much as needed. If the answer is what’s true, stop — because that’s no longer water taking a new shape, that’s you erasing yourself inside the glass.

Here’s something nobody tells you, something I learned the hard way, watching a cell tower in the rain, waiting on an energizing authorization that kept getting delayed for months: the system doesn’t reward whoever shouts loudest about being right. It rewards whoever manages to get the right signal through clean on the other side, even after passing through three different circuits, each with its own resistance. And that isn’t luck, isn’t networking luck, isn’t — God forbid — systematic flattery. It’s translation competence. It’s the part of emotional intelligence no technical course ever teaches, because technical courses wrongly assume a good idea defends itself.

It doesn’t. Somebody has to carry it, gently, all the way to the right place.

I also notice that people who genuinely struggle with this liquid side of leadership almost always carry an old story of having been manipulated, at some point, by someone playing this exact game with dirty intent. And from there comes the dangerous equation: political game equals manipulation, manipulation equals betrayal, therefore playing equals betraying. The equation feels logical. Except it lumps together two things that have nothing to do with each other — the tool, and the intention of whoever’s using it.

A knife cuts bread and it cuts people. The knife doesn’t choose. The hand does. And refusing to learn how to use the knife, out of fear of becoming the wrong hand, leaves you without bread for the rest of your life, while whoever has the wrong hand keeps cutting freely, with no competition from anyone who would have done it differently.

You don’t need to become whoever manipulated you in order to learn how to play. You need to learn the same game with the hand you already have, which is clean, which always was.

And I need to say something here, before moving on, because it would be dishonest not to: some rooms can’t be matched, period. Some directors only accept ideas that feel like their own — not out of ordinary vanity, but out of an insecurity so deep that anyone else’s shine feels like a threat. Some companies are entirely built to reward real flattery, not translation — the kind that demands you lie, not that you read the timing. In places like that, liquid finds no glass that won’t crack first. And there, the brave move isn’t the adjustment. It’s leaving. Recognizing this early spares a capable person years spent patiently, with real emotional intelligence, trying to fix a container that was cracked from birth. But notice this is the exception, not the rule — and it’s far too easy to use the real exception to justify the usual refusal, in any room, including the healthy ones.

This shows up outside the office too, if you pay attention. Some people step into a crowded checkout line, see an older man fumbling with change and a receipt, and just help, without announcing they’re helping, without turning it into a speech about kindness. And some people, in that same line, spend the whole wait complaining loudly about the system, the line, life in general, convinced that being right about the problem already solves it. The first person is doing, without knowing the technical name for it, exactly the liquid adjustment we’re talking about: reading the moment, adapting the gesture, without giving up an ounce of what they value. The second confuses being right with being effective — and leaves the line exactly the way they entered it, just more exhausted.

Traffic makes it even clearer. There’s the driver who, cut off, guns the engine, lays on the horn, swerves lanes just to make a point — and pays for it in adrenaline, in risk, sometimes in a ticket, while the other car never even registers there was a dispute. And there’s someone who feels the exact same rage, exactly the same, and chooses to ease off the gas for one second, because they know the real goal isn’t winning that stretch of asphalt, it’s arriving whole to the nine o’clock meeting. That’s not resignation. That’s reading priority correctly. The anger doesn’t disappear — it just stops steering the car.

Inside a company, this same reading gets a fancier name and produces an identical effect: timing. Every good idea pitched at the wrong moment dies as fast as a bad idea pitched at the right one thrives. I watch this constantly in people with full competence who never learned to sense a room’s emotional temperature before speaking. They walk into a meeting right after a budget cut was announced and pitch new investment, with flawless data, without noticing nobody in that room is psychologically capable of saying yes to any spending that day, no matter how good the numbers are. The idea wasn’t rejected for being bad. It was rejected because it arrived in a glass that was already full to the brim with something else.

Reading that temperature isn’t flattery, manipulation, or weakness. It’s the part of leadership no technical degree teaches, because a technical degree evaluates the content of the signal, never the state of the circuit that’s about to receive it. And whoever refuses to learn this reading, insisting a good decision should hold in any climate, is morally correct and completely ineffective in practice — and repeated ineffectiveness eventually has a price too, even if nobody says so out loud.

There’s a simple test for knowing, day to day, whether you’re making this liquid adjustment in a healthy way or whether you’ve slipped to the wrong side. After any political conversation, any strategic compliment, any calculated silence, ask your body — not your mind, which rationalizes everything — whether what’s left is a residue of shame or a residue of tiredness. Tiredness is normal, the game is tiring, always has been, always will be. Shame is something else. Shame is your body telling you that, in that specific moment, it wasn’t water changing shape. It was you compromising the composition.

And if, reading this, some inner voice is already preparing its defense — “but I could never flatter anyone, that’s just not me” — pause a second before accepting that voice as the final word. Sometimes it really is what’s sacred in you speaking. And sometimes, disguised as the sacred, it’s just the old fear of being seen trying, the same fear that tends an empty chair for years, insisting it’s still waiting for the right moment.

The difference between the two isn’t solved by thinking harder. It’s solved by acting once, small, controlled, and noticing what’s left afterward: tiredness or shame.

Some people reading this will feel relief, because someone finally named the difference between playing dirty and learning to pass cleanly through a high-resistance circuit. And some will feel a specific discomfort, because the defense they’d been holding for years — this is just who I am, take it or leave it — just lost a piece of its ground.

Let that discomfort sit for a while. It’s usually the first sign that the water, after years standing still, trying to hold a solid shape that was cracking on the inside, is finally about to find the right shape of the glass — without ever stopping, sip after sip, being exactly who it always was.

📌 If this reflection touched something in you, there are hundreds of other pieces on my blog going deeper into leadership, power, persuasion, and human behavior inside organizations. Visit marcellodesouza.com.br and keep this conversation going.

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