“Meeting people where they are” shows up in many places. In psychology, it’s central to Motivational Interviewing. In harm reduction, it helps reduce the negative consequences of substance use. In education and learning design, it’s used to better engage learners. This post isn’t about any of those. It’s about the framework I’ve solidified for working well with people from different backgrounds and contexts, at work and in daily life.
I work in tech. Like many people in the field, I spent most of my career focusing on technical skills. When I worked well with others, I credited it to luck, being in the right environment, surrounded by like-minded people.
That story started to break down when I ran into people who were genuinely difficult for me to work with. These experiences frustrated and drained me for a long time. What made it more confusing was that this happened in the same environment where I met some of the best mentors of my career.
The contrast made me pause. Maybe working well with people isn’t as random as I thought. Maybe there is a structured way to work effectively with people in any environment, without it feeling unpredictable or exhausting when differences show up.
When I say “difficult,” I don’t mean a lack of integrity or poor character. That’s a different problem. I mean people who see things differently, value different things, and sometimes clash with me because of it.
We live in a society made of people. Knowing how to work with them is not optional but a core survival skill. More than anything, I just wanted to feel calm and confident, instead of frustrated or drained when working with people who think differently from me. That’s what started my search for a more structured way to work effectively with people from diverse backgrounds and contexts, while staying grounded myself.
From Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Kerry Patterson & co’s “Crucial Conversations”, to Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, I distilled these lessons down to a simple framework I can remember and use, “meeting people where they are, so I can walk with them”, guided by a clear sense of my ultimate goals.
This was the opposite of how I had been operating. I tried to change people so they would meet me where I was. I was so wrong!
I now think of it as hiking through a mountain range. We may be on the same mountain, but we’re on different paths, standing at different points along the way.
They see a different view from where they stand. They have different context.
I once grew frustrated with a colleague at work who kept pushing back on a project scope I proposed. To me, the plan was obviously the right path forward. Their concern was that it was too big. I kept thinking, I just need to convince them. Why aren’t they convinced yet? The more we went back and forth, the more frustrated I became.
Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t persuasion but context. They didn’t know that part of the project’s purpose was to enable a separate work stream outside their team’s responsibility. From their perspective, the scope looked unnecessary and risky. From mine, it was essential.
I think of it as standing on different parts of the same mountain. I was closer to the peak, with a wider view. They were still climbing, seeing only part of what I could see. If I wanted to work with them, maintain a good relationship, and deliver the project successfully, the answer wasn’t to argue harder. It was to describe what I was seeing and show them a path to get there, by sharing the missing context.
This works the other way too. At another point, I was upset when a product lead shut down an idea I felt strongly about. At the time, I thought they were being overly risk-averse. What I didn’t know and what wasn’t visible to me was the broader context. The company was already past its planning phase. Direction changes mid-cycle were rare. A reorganization was also being planned, one that would soon reshape our entire project area.
I was still climbing toward a clearer view. My product lead was already near the peak, seeing far more than I could at the time.
Now, when my reasoning isn’t understood or when I don’t understand someone else’s, I ask myself “what context is missing here?”
People at different points on the mountain face different rock formations. They have different capabilities.
As I gained experience, I moved into more senior and leadership roles. At first, I carried over an old mental model. I assumed the people around me had similar experience and ways of thinking. That assumption quickly showed its limits.
During one onboarding experience, I got annoyed when a new team member kept asking questions about setting up their development environment. The answers were clearly written in our engineering handbook, or so I thought. In my mind, these were problems they should be able to solve by trying a little harder.
What I failed to see was that the skills I took for granted, knowing where to look, how to debug, and what to try next, were not yet part of their toolkit. Those “simple” steps were new terrain to them.
I still wanted them to succeed. And in that moment, showing them how to climb was far more useful than getting frustrated. Not everyone has climbed the same rocks I have. When someone gets stuck in front of a steep wall, I can meet them there and show them how to take the next step.
Looking back, I’m sure many people once did the same for me. They came down from higher ground to meet me where I was, and helped me learn how to climb unfamiliar rock formations.
People climb the same rock in different ways. They have different learning styles.
One of the most important lessons I learned as I stepped into technical leadership was that helping people overcome the same challenge doesn’t mean guiding them along the same path.
Early on, I believed that good guidance meant laying out a clear, step-by-step solution for technical problems. When others didn’t follow that path, I felt disrespected, even personally challenged. For more systemic problems, I relied on well-defined processes and stages. When things drifted from the plan, I felt frustrated and defeated.
Over time and after a few humbling experiences, I realised the flaw in my thinking. People don’t climb the same rock the same way. Some want precise instructions on where to place each step. Others need a sense of direction and a rough map of the terrain, so they can find their own way over.
If I want people to succeed, my responsibility isn’t to force my path on them. It’s to give them what they need to climb in their own way.
People face different emotional challenges as they climb. They have different emotional states.
I once felt unsettled working with someone who got defensive and argumentative in response to my suggestions, and temperamental when things didn’t go their way. At the time, I thought it meant they didn’t trust my ability since I was new to the area. That upset me a lot.
I still wanted to have a good working relationship with them. As I practiced “meeting people where they are”, I began to see a different possibility. Their reactions may not have been about me at all. They may have been feeling insecure, overwhelmed, or unsure how to handle the situation.
They needed reassurance, trust and encouragement to believe they could climb the rock in front of them without falling or getting hurt.
Meeting people where they are doesn’t mean agreeing with everything, avoiding hard conversations, lowering my standards or abandoning my principles, or trying to fix people. It starts with clarity, knowing my ultimate goal, the kind of relationship I want to build and what I want to learn about their paths. With that clarity, meeting people where they are simply means understanding their current reality and adapting my approach so we can move toward shared goals, while I remain calm and grounded.
Wishing others would meet me where I am feels a lot easier at first, but it rarely works. It usually ends in frustration. In contrast, meeting people where they are takes more effort upfront, but it works far more often, especially when we share a destination. When I can walk with someone from where they are to where we’re trying to go, the work feels deeply rewarded.
Understanding where someone is on their hiking journey, what views they can see, what rocks they are currently climbing over, and what they need to climb next, really helps me decide where to meet them and how to walk with them towards a shared destination. The more I practice meeting people where they are, the more paths I learn between different points. Over time, I recognise starting positions faster and it takes less effort to find a workable way forward together.
Because of this, I slow down before reacting. When working with people starts to feel frustrating, I check the four things: context, capability, learning style, and emotional state. I don’t always get it right, but even asking these questions changes the tone of the interaction and helps me stay calm.
When I look back at my career, many of the people I admire met me where I was when I was more junior and walked with me to a place with a wider view. I’m grateful for that and grounded in knowing there’s a way to work well with people, practiced by many thoughtful and capable individuals.