How to Disagree With Someone You'll See at Next Week's Meeting
You know the moment. Someone in the meeting says something that lands like a small slap, and the room keeps moving. You have a few seconds to decide whether to answer. The sentence you want arrives first in your other language, fully formed and perfectly sharp, and the English version is still on its way.
Congresswoman Analilia Mejia has a lot of practice with moments like that, and she has mastered navigating them with confidence and grace. In fact, the night before we recorded our conversation, a constituent at a town hall told Congresswoman Analilia Mejia that she belonged in his party.
He did not agree with her. In fact, he had come with a different view on one of her positions and had no qualms telling her so immediately. By the end of the evening he still disagreed, but what had changed was how the disagreement felt. He told her she should switch parties because he found it pleasant to be in disagreement with her.
"It's the best compliment I could have gotten last night," she told me, and she clearly meant it.
Mejia represents New Jersey's 11th Congressional District and is the first Afro-Latina to serve in Congress, after twenty-five years as a union organizer, policy advocate and community leader. She also describes herself as "an interrupter." I wanted to understand how an interrupter becomes someone people enjoy arguing with. As far as I can tell, the answer lives in the moment before she speaks.
For example, at the town hall, her first move was to do nothing. "I listened," she said, "because it's important to hold the bag. Let people throw up in the proverbial bag." She is referring to giving the other person space to unload their frustrations out before anyone tries to solve anything. Listening that way told her what sat under the man's anger. She heard fear. So she named it, told him his concern was valid, and only then separated the concern from the reasoning she disagreed with.
Then came the step most of us skip. She pointed to what they shared and kept the disagreement as focused as she honestly could. With people across the political divide, she often opens with some version of "I bet you and I share a goal," which might be a safe community, a love for the Constitution or a belief that things should be fair. What usually remains is a disagreement about strategy. That, she said, lets people "disagree on the question" rather than "on each other as people."
Most of us argue on the widest possible front, as if every point we concede is ground lost. For anyone leading in another language, that habit is especially expensive. Every extra point of disagreement is one more argument you have to win in words you didn't grow up with.
The Gooey Center
The town hall was a public argument. Mejia also talks about less public situations when someone tells her she's "too this or too that," when a microaggression lands in the middle of an otherwise ordinary exchange.
As a woman, a person of color and a frequent first, she is often, as she puts it, "one of one." I asked whether she can actually let those moments go, knowing she'll sit across from the same people at the next committee meeting for years.
"Not always, sister," she said. "But I try every day."
What followed was one of the most candid descriptions of composure I've heard from someone in public life. She spoke about "the gooey center" that years of hard rooms cover in layers. She spoke about the moment the amygdala takes over and offers four options: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Her best tool in those moments is something we can all do, breathing. "There are moments in which it takes multiple box breaths to get myself back," she said. She has been in situations where, without that breath, she would have answered "in a way that was going to harm my career, the relationship, or the opportunity."
This is the moment my clients describe to me most often. A meeting turns tense, they know exactly what they want to say in their first language, but the English isn't processing quick enough. For people leading in another language, the distance between feeling something and finding the words for it is wider, and pressure stretches it further. The instinct is to rush into that space or freeze inside it. A breath turns the space into something you control. You can't collect your words until you've collected yourself, and the pause that at first may feel like weakness from the inside actually looks like composure from across the table.
Then she offered a tactic I told her, on the spot, I was adding to my own repertoire.
A Borrowed Voice
Growing up bilingual, Mejia is no stranger to this situation. When stuck on a language barrier, her strategy is simple: own it and don't translate. She believes in giving yourself grace and when applicable, borrow someone else's voice to make the moment smoother. "I'll say, you know, my grandmother, my father, my mother taught me…," she explained, and then she says the thing in Spanish. "It would allow me to verbalize what I am thinking with some distance."
It sounds like a simple tactic, but linguistically, it's actually a sophisticated move. The sociologist Erving Goffman separated three roles we usually treat as one: the person who speaks the words, the person who wrote them and the person whose position they represent. When you say "my grandmother used to say," you are still the one speaking, but you've stepped out of the other two roles. The point gets made and the listener hears it. Nobody is entirely sure how much of it is you, which gives everyone a way to save face, including you.
Many of the languages international leaders grew up with already work this way, with proverbs and the sayings of elders doing a great deal of diplomatic work. Mejia carries that habit into rooms where bluntness is often treated as the only option, and it works because it is both honest and gives her time to formulate a more direct approach in English.
She cautions us to remember that the borrowed voice shouldn't become a way to pretend nothing happened. "To acknowledge it even for just yourself is important," she said. "It's part of the self-respect."
And that self-respect has a firm floor. Mejia mentors young women in politics, labor and business, and her advice to them is very direct. Don't let people keep making you choose between being assertive and being a doormat. "Never pick doormat," she said. You also don't have to win every fight on the spot. "Sometimes there's the long game."
The Distance You Don't Know You Have
Everything so far is distance Mejia creates on purpose. However, the story she returns to most is about a distance she didn't know she had.
Before the 2024 presidential election, while leading a national organization, she was trying to work out which issue would sit at the center of the campaign. She assumed it would be democracy and the integrity of its institutions. Others bet on climate, because fires had been destroying communities and keeping children home from school. Then her organization did what organizers do and asked, one conversation at a time, across its members and leaders. The answer that came back was housing.
When she told one leader she was surprised, given everything else at stake, the leader said, "If I don't have a safe place to sleep, I can't think of anything else."
What makes the story stay with you is what Mejia says next. She is a woman of color, a mother of school-aged children, the first Afro-Latina in Congress, and she believed she understood privilege. "I took the fact that I had a place to sleep, frankly, for granted," she said. "I skipped over such a tremendous thing."
Later in our conversation she described growing up as a working-class kid who knew food and housing insecurity. Read the two stories side by side and the lesson gets sharper. Even someone who has lived through a problem can drift far enough from it to stop seeing it. What corrected it was a question.
Near the end, I asked for one insight from her own path. She suggested a question worth asking anyone whose career you admire is, "What mistake taught you the most?" Then, knowing I would turn it back on her, she preemptively answered it.
"The biggest mistake I've ever made," she said, was to "start from what it is that I want." Knock on a door, ask for a vote, explain why it matters, and where there's any difference, "people feel told what to do instead of engaged."
For leaders working across languages, this may be the most freeing idea in the whole conversation. Telling takes the most words, the most precision and the most performance. Asking takes one good question and the patience to hear the answer. Hers are disarmingly simple. What's keeping you up at night? If you had a magic wand, what would you fix?
So before your next difficult meeting, prepare this in place of a script. Think about common ground for the person most likely to push back, your own version of "I bet you and I share a goal." Then, when the pushback comes, ask before you answer. "What worries you most about this?" buys you a breath and tells you what's underneath.
The man at the town hall still disagrees with Mejia, yet he left feeling heard, and even wanted her on his side. That's a result most of us would gladly take into the next difficult meeting on our calendar.
If you saw yourself anywhere in this article, you're exactly who I had in mind. Hear Congresswoman Mejia tell these stories in her own words, from the town hall to the saying she borrows from her grandmother to the one question she wishes more people would ask her. Listen to our full conversation.
And if you're done playing small in rooms like these, come join Leadership English Insiders. It's where I share the frameworks I build for moments like these, insights I don't share anywhere else, and a community of global leaders who know exactly what it's like to lead in another language.
