A speaker reflects a senior man's question back at him, exposing an assumption he'd made about his wife of 20 years. The man says "Touché" and the room shifts. Mirroring someone's words can surface what they didn't know they believed.
I remember once, this was about 15 years ago, I was speaking to a room and most of the room was lower ranks, but one person was clearly upper rank, oldest person in the room at the time, and was older than me at the time. And he raised his hand and he said, excuse me, Mike, but with all due respect, are you saying that I need to ask my wife of 20 years? Now the whole room was sitting there going, oh, what's skinny little civilian man going to say on stage? Because that's exactly the looks they had on their faces in that moment. And I just said, with all due respect, is it you didn't think your wife ever deserved a choice over these last 20 years, or you just didn't give her one? What did he say back? Touché. Because what did he not like? His own words. All I did was play back the version he announced out loud and what it really sounded like. That's all I did, right? And he didn't like it. He didn't— he wasn't mad at me though, because he's like, fair. You called me out, right? And so we could have an honest conversation.
