Understanding another person’s perspective does not require surrendering your own convictions. It simply requires enough humility to recognize that another person’s experience is real, even when it differs from your own.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of the Gottman–Rapoport Intervention.

Healthy relationships are not built because two people always agree.

They are built because each person becomes increasingly skilled at helping the other feel seen, heard, and understood.

enial is not a personality flaw. Decades of psychological research suggest something more complex. Denial and avoidance are frequently adaptive responses to overwhelming stress. They reduce immediate emotional intensity and allow a person to continue functioning. The problem develops when avoidance shifts from a coping strategy with potential utility to a default setting that causes unnecessary pain.

Experiential avoidance – attempts to escape or suppress unwanted internal experiences even when doing so causes harm – is well discussed in modern psychology (Hayes et al., 1996). When individuals repeatedly rely on avoidance as a primary coping strategy, it becomes automatic. The strategy that once limited threat might now create it.

Stress tolerance refers to a person's capacity to manage actual or perceived stress while maintaining perspective, composure, and effectiveness. It involves working through difficult situations without allowing frustration, anxiety, anger, or disappointment to dictate decisions and behaviors.

Leadership, teaching, and coaching are filled with moments that test this capacity. A difficult conversation with a student or employee, an unexpected setback, resistance to change, a poor performance, or competing demands can all create significant pressure. These situations are unavoidable. What separates effective leaders from ineffective ones is often not the absence of stress, but the ability to respond constructively when stress arrives.