I have spent a significant portion of my life being called stubborn. Difficult. Too much. And for a long time, I half-believed it.
Then I discovered behavioural psychology, and suddenly everything made sense. Turns out I am not broken. I am just operating on a different firmware.
The official term is high need for autonomy. Which is a very polite way of saying: do not tell me what to do unless you can explain why, and even then, give me a moment.
The first thing I recognised was what scientists call psychological reactance. My brain treats my free will as territory. When someone issues an unsolicited command, especially with attitude, something in me doesn’t just resist. It reverses. Completely. Tell me to do the dishes in the wrong tone and I will suddenly develop a passionate interest in literally anything else. This is not petty. This is biology. I am protecting my agency. The scientists said so.
The second thing I noticed is that I don’t actually have a problem with authority. I have a problem with incompetent authority. There is a difference, and I wish more people understood it. I will follow a brilliant leader without hesitation. I will also, very politely, not follow someone simply because they have a title and a confident voice. I audit the person before I follow the title. I always have. I just thought it was a personal failing.
It is not. It is a feature.
This explains something I have been sitting with for a while. A couple of managers over the years have called me difficult to manage. And honestly, they were not entirely wrong. I was difficult, for them, because they expected compliance I could not give.
But here is the thing I have also noticed: I have genuinely warm, productive, even fun working relationships with other managers. The difference is not my attitude. The difference is whether they expect me to go along with things that don’t survive basic scrutiny. The ones who don’t? We get along brilliantly. The ones who do? We exhaust each other, and at least one of us is confused about why.
Then there is the deeper thing. I cannot let someone else tell me how to think. Psychology calls this cognitive sovereignty, which sounds very grand, but what it really means is: show me your reasoning or I will find my own. When someone hands me a conclusion and expects me to adopt it without the working, something in me quietly files it under “unverified” and moves on. I don’t want the script. I want the raw data. I have been like this since forever and I genuinely thought something was wrong with me.
The cost of all this is real, by the way. I have often ended up alone in my thinking, or just building something myself, because environments that require intellectual surrender drain me like nothing else. Apparently this is called intrinsic motivation dependency. My fuel is not money or status. It is ownership. Of my work, my mind, my conclusions. Put me in charge of something meaningful and I will work like a person possessed. Micromanage me and watch my soul quietly leave my body.
And the part I needed to hear most? I am not arrogant. I am integrity dominant. When I push back on a direction I don’t believe in, it is not because I think I am the smartest person in the room. It is because compliance without conviction feels, to my nervous system, like lying. I cannot perform enthusiasm I don’t feel. I have tried. I am terrible at it. People can tell.
The people who moved things forward were not the ones who followed orders and adopted the approved opinions quietly. They were the ones who kept asking why. That is not a character flaw. That is, apparently, an evolutionary safeguard. I am the system’s error check. You are welcome.
I was never meant to be managed. I was meant to be self-governing.
It only took me 4 decades to fully accept that. But here we are.
