Looking for gray

I like gray. This color with so many connotations represents me. Gray is a shade that implies light and darkness, it implies playing with shadows, with nuances, with contrasts. Gray doesn't want to win. Gray seeks balance, the sum of black and white, the sum of you and me. Gray perfectly fuses light and darkness. Gray flees conflict, avoids confrontation, and slips through the cracks of agreement.

For more than 15 years, I have been explaining what feminine communication is and, when I finish the conference, I always talk about the importance of gray. And I define gray as a leadership style, for me associated with the feminine, of seeking agreement. Gray doesn't want to win, it wants to solve. Gray doesn't want to lose because losing would mean there has been no agreement, no negotiation. And life is about negotiating, losing a little and winning a little. Gray facilitates connection. In art, in painting, grays help to add shadows; in photography, to add more or less light, and, in fashion, it solves color combinations that don't hold up.

We are at a historical moment where we are normalizing aggression, wars, deaths, rapes, fear. The wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Syria are what we have for breakfast every day and, deep down, they are looking for a winner and a loser. Gender violence, which hits us full in the face with a woman murdered every week in Spain, seeks the man dominating the woman. Insecurity in the streets is also the result of the bad guy imposing himself on the good guy. And those are all extremes.

We have normalized life under contraposition, the strong versus the weak, the one who wins and the one who loses. And gray works to find what complements us. That very fine ray of light that remains from white and crosses with the darkness of black and has generated gray. And in any negotiation, however tough it may seem, there is that fine line that will lead us to build a gray.

Someone who is getting to know my grays and knows of my curiosity in seeking them, left me this book Break the Barrier of No by the American guru Chriss Voss, who led the most complex negotiations as an FBI agent and is now a university professor. And in this text, he tells us how crucial it is to get the phrase "That's right" from your interlocutor. This binomial is powerful because it opens the door for us to listen, empathize, reformulate, and negotiate. These two words pronounced by our interlocutor can take weeks to arrive, but when they appear, they are that ray of light that we hold on to very tightly to build that bridge from there and grow from the gray, from what unites us.

You all will remember the movie from ten years ago 50 Shades of Grey, where a young magnate seduced a virgin university student. Eroticism, desire, consent, sex, love, domination, submission, romanticism, all mixed, all in their doses of lights, shadows, contrasting nuances, and darkness merged. It is no coincidence that this is the color, besides being the protagonist's surname in the movie, Mr. Grey. Gray also plays a decisive meaning in sex-affective relationships. Gray is the great window to all the nuances, bonds, pacts, and agreements that you can propose to paint together.

Gray is always a door to a solution; you have to look for it. I don't believe it's a capacity exclusively associated with women, but I have observed that the search for connection, for a point of union, for avoiding conflict, for building bridges is very associated with the feminine. Anyone who knows me well knows that, in the face of conflict, I look for the gray. I look for where that is, however remote, that makes us equal so we can connect. It has to be true; gray is found through authenticity, transparency, and empathy. Gray strips you of ego; gray makes you equal.

Looking for the gray is always worth it. Gray always matches. That's right!