If people say I intimidate them, what am I really doing wrong?

I’ve had several conflicts lately with a woman I have to deal with at work. I could explain each of the conflicts — and I could tell you why she’s the problem, not me. But what if I’m wrong?

Someone else I work with talked with the woman to see what was going on between us. It’s a business relationship we would all like to save if we can. He tried to explain what he saw happening.

“You intimidate people, David,” he told me. “For a lot of the people you deal with, it’s great, because you seem dominant and forceful. You get people to do what they’ve agreed to do when they would run over other people. But your personality is so strong that some people are just intimidated.”

If I hadn’t heard different versions of this discussion for my entire life, I would have been angry. Maybe insulted. Me? Intimidating? There’s no way. I’m super nice to everybody. In fact, I’m constantly afraid of letting other people down. How could anybody be intimidated of me?

But I’ve heard it since I was young. I remember hearing it in college. Two different newspaper publishers told me — when I was working as managing editor for each of them — that I was right in pretty much everything I said or did on my job. But they said I was so intense and intimidating that people were afraid to disappoint me.

After all these years — and all of my many attempts to be kinder and gentler — I’m still having that effect. And I’m baffled about why it happens.

When I was young, I was a steamroller. I can admit that. I was supremely confident in myself. I didn’t have any doubts.

By the time I was around 30, I had experienced my first major failure and I went through some depression and serious thinking about myself. I was determined to incorporate what I was learning — about uncertainty and arrogance and treating people more gently — into my life.

I wasn’t so sure of myself anymore. I knew I could fail. I no longer believed I was perfect.

When I was in my 30s, a group vice president for the media company I worked for told me that I needed to stop letting people know that it was “my way or the highway.” I asked him if he thought I had been wrong in the conflicts I had had with people in the company. He sounded exasperated.

“You haven’t been wrong about anything, as far as I can tell,” he told me. “In every one of these cases, you’ve been completely right. You know that. They’ve known that. I’ve known that. But you’re smarter than them and you’re overpowering to them. They resent you for being right. They want you to be wrong.”

The conversation still didn’t make sense to me. If I had been right in these conflicts, what was I doing wrong? Was he telling me he wanted me to be wrong? I was confused.

After I left that company, I spent the next 20 years as a self-employed political consultant. I butted heads with clients and with other consultants, but I could walk away from clients if things annoyed me enough. I eventually realized that some people put up with my strong personality simply because they liked what I brought to the table.

I knew how to win — and that’s all that mattered to most of them.

For about the last seven years, I’ve been working for others. To be honest, I’ve hated it. I don’t take orders well. I don’t like being in the position of not being able to dump associates or clients who annoy me. And I’m still absolutely baffled why anybody is unable to get along with me.

What am I doing wrong? I have no idea.

No matter how hard I try to be nice and accommodating, some people try to take advantage of me or my company. And that’s when I push back, very nicely at first. Sometimes more aggressively if that doesn’t work.

And I don’t really know how else to act.

When I was a little boy, my father would sometimes argue with me about minor points on which we disagreed. It was never about his behavior or anything between the two of us. Those things were off limits. But I was allowed to have my own thoughts about completely external things — from history or politics or some objective facts.

If my father disagreed with me, he might push back and give me his argument. I would then explain politely why I thought his view was wrong. This frustrated him. More than once, he became annoyed enough to say something that confused me.

“You just think you’re right about this,” he would say.

In confusion, I would say, “Well, if I thought I was wrong, I wouldn’t have taken the position.”

And that seemed to irritate him, too.

Was I supposed to say ignorant or stupid things sometimes — just so he could show he was right some percentage of the time? I never understood. I always said that I knew I could be wrong, but that I would hold a position until someone showed me why I had been mistaken.

So what’s the issue today? Is my personality too strong? Am I intimidating? Am I too intense? Am I too sure of myself at times?

I still don’t know. The only things I can be sure of are that my personality clashes with certain other people — for reasons that aren’t clear to me — and that I am better off when I can disengage from certain people when we clash.

There are certain things I do really well, but I’ll never be loved by everybody. I’ll never even be liked by everyone. And I don’t even understand why they wouldn’t like me. I really don’t.

I feel like an alien here. I don’t know where I’m from, but I still don’t seem to have found “my people.”