I love when people surprise me for the better.
Regardless of where you lean politically (and you know I don't take sides here,) I think most people would agree that, simply put, humility probably doesn't rank in the top five strengths of our current president.
Fine.
That's why I was intrigued when I learned about a 2026 biography called The Queen and Her Presidents, by Susan Page. In it, she shared an uncharacteristically humble reflection by President Trump on a conversation he'd had back in 2018 with Queen Elizabeth II.
Here's what happened:
During that visit, the President pressed the Queen to divulge her favorite prime minister and president. Surely, after seventy years she had her “best” and “worst” labels ready.
Nevertheless, she didn't offer them. As Trump himself recounted,
“I couldn't get her to say a bad thing about anybody. She was amazing, actually… I don't think she wanted to create controversy. It was unnecessary.”
And then, the line that stopped me: “She was sort of the opposite of me.”
But the one to watch here isn't the President; it's the Queen.
That’s because she set the record straight on a long-standing leadership communication myth.
Is it really “how you say it”?
You've heard the saying a thousand times: it's not what you say, it's how you say it.
It’s an adage that’s half right–which is exactly what makes it all-dangerous.
Here’s the truth: Landing a message is like building a house.
- Your words (“what you say”) are the foundation.
- Your delivery (“how you say it”) i.e. your tone of voice, your expression, your body language, is the walls and the roof.
A foundation with no house on it is just a slab in a field. But walls and a roof with no foundation aren't much of a house either; they're a collapse waiting to happen.
A message that lands needs both.
The Queen understood this instinctively.
Why did the President back down?
Look closely at why her non-answer actually worked.
She said, “They were all wonderful. I couldn't possibly choose.” On paper, that's a dodge, and President Trump is not famous for accepting the first (or the hundredth) “no.” So he kept pushing.
Yet she still didn't budge. And the reason she could hold that line, ask after ask, is congruence.
In my work I talk about the three Vs:
- the verbal (your words)
- the vocal (how you sound)
- and the visual (your face and body).
When those three agree, you exude credibility.
But when they don’t match, people’s instinct wants to believe the delivery, and ultimately distrusts the words.
For example: Imagine if the Queen had delivered that same gracious line, but with a hesitant pause on the third ask, or a sheepish smile on the fourth.
Her counterpart would have read the subtext in an instant — she's hiding something — and leaned in even harder.
Instead, her words, her tone, and her expression said the same thing every time, warmly and completely. There was no gap between them, no chink in the armor.
As a result, the most persistent questioner in the world eventually realized he had hit a wall, and backed down.
Not because he lost his nerve, but because there was nothing there to crack. He accepted that he wasn't going to get the answer he wanted. That isn't luck. That's power, quietly exercised.
That's massive skill.
But was she being authentic?
Here's the question I love, because it's the one that trips people up: was she being honest? Was she being “authentic”?
Let’s face it, she must have had opinions — thousands of them, seventy years' worth, carefully never spoken.
But she was being authentic to something more important than a passing preference: her lifelong strategic objective.
“Authentically” (i.e. impulsively) trading gossip with an American president about who she liked and disliked might have been fun in the moment. It would also have served no goal she actually cared about, and could have detonated several.
Here’s the key: She was playing the long game. She knew her destination, she knew which message would get her there, and she delivered it in a way that ensured it was received exactly as intended.
That's the part people miss about diplomacy. We treat it as mere politeness, or worse, as spinelessness. It's neither.
100 years ago, Howard Newton defined tact as “the art of making a point without making an enemy.” And Churchill purportedly said that diplomacy is the art of “telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
One way or another, none of those are “soft” skills. They're strategy, executed through language. And more often than not, it’s hard.
That reframes the whole picture. Restraint like hers isn't timidity; it's the signature move of the master strategist.
The leader who blurts out whatever they can't resist saying in the heat of the moment, the “I gotta be me” cathartic explosion that feels so satisfying on the way out the mouth, isn't being bold or authentic. That's the trademark of the amateur tactician — someone who just traded a long-term objective for a few seconds of relief.
The master holds the line. The amateur fires off. And everyone in the room can tell the difference.
The takeaway for leaders
You make that choice in every hard conversation.
Don't start with what you want to say, or even how you want to say it.
Start with your objective: what do you actually need this person to think, feel, and do when it's over? Then lay the foundation, and build the house.
When what you say and how you say it line up, people believe you — and you move the needle, whether the room is a palace or a Monday staff meeting.
The Queen demonstrated a masterfully nuanced version of influence that day. And she didn’t have to raise her voice to prove it.
The other half of the story
Of course, the Queen showed the half of the story where restraint wins. Kevin Price and I also took on the other half on my new “Leadership Language: Learning to Lead” segment on the Price of Business show. More specifically, the kind of words no delivery can rescue, no matter how “warmly” you say them.
Because the truth is that it’s most definitely NOT just “how you say it” that matters.
Sure, your delivery, i.e. “how you say it,” can turn the meaning of the words upside-down.
But what you say, i.e. your word choice, is the very foundation of your message.
Try building a house and choosing either walls OR a foundation and see who wants to live there.
