You’re in a sales negotiation with someone affluent.
Then you feel intimidated.
You stop asking the right questions. You shrink. You become boring to talk to. The energy shifts. You lose rapport.
You put the client on a pedestal, treated them like a celebrity instead of a human being.
And just like that, you lost the deal.
Or maybe you’re talking to someone you think is “way out of your league.” Same thing happens. You overthink. The conversation feels forced. You watch yourself performing instead of genuinely connecting.
Power Isn’t Only at the Top
We assume power resides with bosses, leaders, and people who have more money than we do.
Michel Foucault’s work complicates that picture. Power isn’t a thing one person holds and another lacks. It circulates through relationships, institutions, and everyday conversation. It shapes who speaks, who gets heard, and which decisions feel possible before anyone even names them.
Whether you’re negotiating a sale, applying for a job, asking someone out, or collaborating at work, there’s an ongoing interplay of influence happening underneath the surface. Erving Goffman spent years studying how much of social life is performance. We manage impressions. We read rooms. We adjust ourselves to whatever role a situation seems to demand of us.
Power configures the social space we inhabit. It doesn’t just sit at the top and dominate from there.
What Pedestals Actually Cost You
Here’s the problem. Power dynamics push us into fixed roles faster than we’d like to admit.
You go quiet. You start projecting perfection. You stop asking the questions that would’ve made the conversation interesting in the first place. Pierre Bourdieu would recognize this pattern immediately. Status, taste, and confidence get performed over and over until they start feeling like nature itself. Eventually that performance becomes the very thing blocking real contact between two people.
I’ve watched this happen in real estate meetings. In marketing pitches. In conversations where nothing was officially on the line, and the stakes still felt enormous anyway.
The person across from you isn’t a category. They’re someone navigating the same invisible structures you are, usually carrying the same uncertainty, just dressed up in better clothes.
Understanding People Loosens the Grip
Once you see that, your attention shifts.
When you start seeing the other person as human, imperfect, still learning, still negotiating their own influence, something opens up. Cognitive empathy becomes possible. This isn’t sympathy, and it isn’t flattery either. It’s simply the ability to imagine what the interaction looks like from inside their skin.
Power moves. It doesn’t sit still, and everyone is negotiating it, whether they realize it or not. That awareness won’t make hierarchy disappear, but it does make hierarchy a lot less hypnotic.
Confidence isn’t proof someone’s better than you. It’s just how they’re managing the room. Your own nervousness isn’t disqualification either. It’s information: something in the situation asked you to shrink, and you agreed before you even noticed you were doing it.
Real connection tends to show up when the people “above” you are allowed to just be people. Not gods, not judges, not the final verdict on your worth.
What Changes in Practice
In a negotiation, this might mean asking the question you were afraid would sound naive. In a job interview, it might mean bringing curiosity instead of auditioning for approval. In an ordinary conversation, it might just mean listening for the person instead of the status.
Power has less to do with hierarchy than with how we relate to each other. How we project ourselves. How we listen. How we respect the space we’re sharing.
The more you understand people, the less intimidating power feels. It stops looking like a wall and starts looking like a pattern, and patterns can be seen. Once you see one, you get to choose how you stand inside it.
Back to that sales negotiation. The affluent client across the table isn’t testing whether you deserve to be there. He’s just another person trying to manage a room, same as you.
Most intimidating people never asked you to feel small. You did it preemptively.
The negotiation wasn't lost when they spoke. It was lost when you decided their status mattered more than your curiosity.
Power matters. But the moment you stop confusing status with superiority, the conversation changes.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.
Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3(2), 71–100.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Pantheon Books.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.
Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View. Palgrave Macmillan.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
