Think about the last person you interacted with today- human encounters.
Perhaps it was a colleague.
A child.
A parent.
A client.
Someone you supervise.
Someone serving you in a shop.
Or perhaps someone with whom you disagreed.
Now consider a slightly different question.
How did that person feel after encountering you?
Not: What did I intend?
Not: Was I right?
Not even: Was I helpful?
But:
What was the psychological experience of encountering me?
That question has been sitting with me because so much of human behaviour happens not simply within people, but between people.
And those encounters can move us.
Sometimes towards understanding, curiosity and connection.
Sometimes towards defensiveness, withdrawal and disconnection.
Sometimes they leave us exactly where we were.
Human encounters leave psychological traces
Consider a child leaving a classroom.
Do they leave feeling understood or misunderstood?
A parent leaving a SEND meeting.
Do they feel that their knowledge of their child mattered, or that decisions had already been made?
An employee leaving supervision.
Do they feel more able to think openly, or more careful about what they say next time?
A colleague leaving a difficult conversation about race, disability, neurodiversity or another aspect of identity.
Do they leave curious?
Defensive?
Ashamed?
Heard?
Angry?
Ready to think again?
A parent leaving their teenager’s room after a difficult conversation.
Did the young person feel listened to — or managed?
A patient leaving a hospital appointment or GP surgery.
Did they feel seen as a person — or processed as the next patient?
Every encounter leaves something behind.
Sometimes it is barely perceptible.
But over time, these small psychological traces can accumulate into trust or mistrust, belonging or exclusion, psychological safety or psychological threat.
Human encounters are bigger than either person
The Six Stages Framework helps us understand that people can occupy different psychological positions in relation to difference, challenge, inclusion and change.
But an encounter is rarely simply:
Person A is at this stage. Person B is at that stage.
Something happens between them.
One person’s defensiveness may activate another person’s frustration.
One person’s curiosity may reduce another person’s need to defend.
One person’s certainty may close down thinking.
One person’s unexamined bias may shape what they notice, what they assume and how they interpret the other person before the conversation has even begun.
One person’s willingness to remain psychologically present may create enough safety for a difficult conversation to continue.
This is why I increasingly think we need to pay attention not only to where people may be positioned on the SSF continuum, but also to what happens when psychological positions meet.
But a good encounter is not always a comfortable encounter
There is an important distinction here.
If someone leaves an interaction feeling uncomfortable, that does not necessarily mean the encounter was harmful.
Growth can be uncomfortable.
Challenge can be uncomfortable.
Having a long-held assumption questioned can be uncomfortable.
Being invited to consider the impact of our behaviour can be uncomfortable.
Psychological safety does not mean protecting people from every experience of discomfort.
A good friend is not necessarily someone who always agrees with you.
The question is therefore not simply:
Did this person feel good after encountering me?
It is:
Was their dignity preserved?
Was there space for thought?
Was challenge offered without unnecessary humiliation?
Did the encounter increase or reduce the possibility of movement?
That is a very different standard.
What might our encounters reveal about us?
It is relatively easy to describe ourselves as inclusive.
Reflective.
Empathic.
Anti-racist.
Neurodiversity-affirming.
Trauma-informed.
A systems thinker.
But perhaps another source of evidence lies in what repeatedly happens around us.
Do people bring us difficult truths?
Can they disagree with us?
Can they say, “I think you may have got this wrong”?
Do people become more able to think in our presence?
Or do they learn to remain silent?
This does not mean making ourselves responsible for every emotional response another person has.
Nor does it mean abandoning boundaries, challenge or professional judgement.
It means becoming curious about our contribution to the psychological space between us.
Through the SSF Lens
Across the Six Stages Framework continuum, human encounters may look very different.
As we move along the negative axis, encounters may become increasingly shaped by avoidance, defensiveness, blame, hostility, rigid certainty and, at the more extreme positions, dehumanisation and exclusion.
As movement occurs towards the positive stages, we increasingly see the capacity to tolerate complexity, reflect on our own contribution, remain curious in discomfort, listen to lived experience and consider the systems surrounding the individual.
At the more developed stages, the question changes again.
It is no longer only:
How inclusive am I?
It becomes:
What conditions am I creating for other people to think, belong, contribute and grow?
And then another question follows:
What happens to those conditions when I am under pressure?
Because our emotional state enters the encounter with us.
When we are tired, anxious, overwhelmed, angry or under strain, our capacity to regulate ourselves, remain curious and tolerate difference may change.
Which raises another deceptively simple question:
On a good day or a difficult day, which version of me did that person encounter?
A stage is not a permanent identity.
Our capacity to access curiosity, reflection and empathy can shift according to what is happening within us and around us.
That does not remove responsibility.
But it does make self-awareness and self-regulation part of the work.
Cave Reflection: The Cave of Good Intentions
Perhaps there is another cave worth noticing.
Inside it, we judge our behaviour primarily through what we meant to do.
I was only trying to help.
That wasn’t what I meant.
I treat everybody the same.
I was just being honest.
It was a bad day. I didn’t mean any harm.
Intent matters.
But intent is only one part of an encounter.
The way out of the Cave of Good Intentions may begin when we become willing to hold two things at once:
I may have meant well.
And my impact may still be worth understanding.
That is not an invitation to shame.
It is an invitation to curiosity.
This week’s Lens Check
Think about three encounters you have had this week.
One that went well.
One that felt difficult.
One that you barely noticed.
Ask yourself:
What might the other person have experienced in their encounter with me?
Then go one step further:
What did I contribute to the psychological space between us?
And what about the encounters we barely notice?
The person we pass without acknowledging.
The colleague whose contribution is repeatedly overlooked.
The child who has learned not to ask.
The employee who stopped speaking because previous attempts went unheard.
Sometimes the psychological significance of an encounter lies not in what happened, but in what failed to happen.
Who becomes invisible when we remain sheltered inside our own caves of comfort?
And perhaps the most important question:
Did our encounter make movement more possible — or less?
Because sometimes the clearest evidence of our psychology is not found in what we say we believe.
It can be found in what becomes possible for other people when they encounter us.
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Moving from Certainty to Curiosity
Why curiosity can create space for reflection and psychological movement.
Read: Moving from Certainty to Curiosity – The Cave of Simplification
Measuring What Matters
A visual formulation exploring psychological safety, belonging and meaningful organisational change.
Explore VF003: Measuring What Matters
The Cave of Simplification
Why complex human experiences can become reduced to explanations that are easier to manage.
Read the Cave of Simplification reflection
External link
Harvard Business School – Four Steps to Building Psychological Safety
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