How to Win an Argument Even When You Lose

, as we can find ourselves agreeing and doing nothing to avoid confrontation, or saying ‘yes’ when we really should say ‘no

A win in an argument is getting someone to modify or change the territory of his truth and replace it with your truth.

The softer your voice, the less dramatic your language and the less you attack the other person, the greater your chance of being heard.

they will look small if they don’t win, and that making you a bit smaller will make them a bit bigger.

They don’t want to actually destroy you. They just want to weaken you a little bit, with the idea they will then be able to impose their point of view more easily.

To feel good about yourself, you need to feel you have a presence in the world. You need a sense of place, of some influence and a belief that you have a degree of control over the events of your life

3. Self-esteem
The emotional security – that is, the self-esteem – of the individuals who are disagreeing plays a huge part in deciding how bad an argument will be. Because like attracts like, people with high self-esteem will tend to hang with people with an equally good self-esteem and so their arguments will generally be less frequent and less angry. When two people have a poor self-esteem, which in effect means the greater ease with which each will interpret difference as rejection or putdown, anger more readily spins out of control. The less you like yourself, the more fights you’ll have because you’ll be defending more areas than you really need. The more you like yourself, the more tolerant you will be of difference and the easier it is to treat the relationship as being more important than the issue

If an argument is over moral or ethical issues, the more you feel the other person’s view violates your sense of what is not merely factually accurate, but proper and right according to your principles, the angrier you are likely to become. A position that appears to debase your moral, political or religious position, will feel like an attack on the essence of who you are. Then you may feel you have to argue, because if you don’t fight back, you could be made to feel as if you are nothing

1. The relationship
The nature of the relationship between two people defines the expectations each has of the other. The closer you are, the more a difference will seem like distance. Similarity of attitude is a major factor in a love relationship and disagreement feels like rejection. The same difference between you and a work colleague should generally provoke less emotion than between you and your lover, although, of course, there is still plenty of ferocious bullying at work, where territoriality is alive and well

Our problems flow from the difficulty in managing a trade-off between being nice enough to belong and yet powerful enough to stand up for ourselves