Hello Everyone,
One of the important skill to have is to guard against your own emotions, especially when you sense that a discussion is being turned into an arguments. I have witnessed on numerous occasions that a simple discussions are often turned into a nasty arguments leading to adverse impact on our potential growth in many ways.
This is a very unique skill to acquire because it spans across your personal and professional lives.__ JOE
Primarily, I have found that the root cause of this unconscious drift lies in the unclear understanding of these two terms lead us to do, what we end up doing more often ,.? So lets take a dive into this commonly ignored skill :
A discussion happens every time you are talking about a topic with someone, exchanging your point of view. Your point of view might be the same as the people you are interacting with or they might be divergent.
An argument is a discussion gone bad. A discussion can become an argument when the diverging points of view leads to you or the people you are interacting with becoming emotionally worked up. Voices are raised. You or your counterpart start talking over each other. The mood turns tense.
Sometimes, it does happen that you are in the middle of something with other people where one of the party take the lead and are trying to defend his/her view points. You find yourself talking over him and other person is talking over you till such time a third person step in and say “this discussion is becoming an argument”. The third person break the impasse by asking certain basic questions to understand the motivations behind our opposing points of views. Literally, most of the time we do not find the rationale behind our such a behaviour ( although its primarily the Ego).
You can apply the following principle whenever the next time you are having a discussion is:
Just listen even if you disagree with what is being said! Once the other person has expressed himself/herself then you can voice yourself. Getting too excited when the other person is speaking just leads to noise!
Is it even possible to disagree a lot but never have arguments? Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have been partners for 50 years. Here is what Warren Buffet said about it :-
“We disagree on things a lot but we don’t have arguments about it.” __Warren Buffet
So the next time you have a disagreement tell yourself it’s ok. You can get on just fine with disagreements. What you can’t get on with is a shouting match. Just agree to disagree unless you are in a negotiation and a middle point is mandatorily to be reached.
Let me know what you think? I’d love your feedback. If you haven’t already then sign up for a weekly dose just like this.
Get in touch… — JOE’s LIFE SKILLS LAB/Joe Sehrawat
