“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
– William James
Whenever you’re in an argument with someone you love, or even like very much, remember: The Goal is to Resolve, not to win.
Has anyone ever proven themselves right in an argument with you, but yet the argument continues? Or have they expanded the argument to other times when you were wrong? Maybe brought other people’s opinions in that you had no idea about?
When the goal of an argument is to win, it means that someone else must lose. This is never a peaceful goal. It usually results in one person feeling awful, and both people feeling more different and separate than they did at the start of the argument.
Resolving is the only true peaceful goal.
To move toward resolve, both people must:
-speak kindly,
-seek to understand the other’s opinion rather than make the other understand their own,
-dissolve the need to argue about that topic again.
Even if people don’t agree in the end, if they’ve both come to understand the other person’s opinion, they’ve both won.
The argument then dissolves into just a difference of opinion, and both know each other a little better than they did at the start of the argument. Love means allowing others to be who they are, even if some things in them are much different than they are in you.
Love to you, (exactly as you are 🙂 )
Doe Zantamata
Happiness in Your Life
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