You're Wrong is *Not* the Secret of Success. Part 1 in the Disagreements series

Do you disagree with other people much of the time? This is not to ask if you're generally disagreeable, that's a separate question for some other point in time.

The Negativity of Disagreements Whenever you find yourself disagreeing with what someone else is saying, or with one of their beliefs, you have several choices.

You can argue with them and maintain you are the only one who is right. You can avoid the disagreement and ignore it. Or you can resolve the differences and deal with it. Yet your disagreement means you're being negative about the position or the belief they hold. And negativity has a deleterious effect on your health, mental or physical, as well as on your relationship.

If you insist: I'm right and you're wrong, neither of you are likely to back down. It'll do nothing to change your life. You'll exacerbate the disagreement, increase any bad feelings, and the relationship has only one way to go, south.

If you ignore it, then your negativity is not dealt with. The resultant negative emotions can fester, and may eventually sour the relationship. And your self-sabotage mechanism has again sabotaged your progress. There's no joy in being negative.

But I am Right!
If you instead choose to deal with it, then you will need to take an honest look at their position, which will initially seem wrong. Your secret of success is to be open to listening to them, I'm Right is not a productive attitude .

There's a dichotomy here. You think your position, your beliefs are right and they think their position, their beliefs are right. But, since you disagree, how can you both be right?

When you disagree over the facts, the secret of success is simple. Check into the facts and ascertain the truth, which may be more easily said than done. But more often the problem lies in your different interpretations of what the facts mean. And that's simply your - and their - opinion.

Disagreement Stems from Your Context In creating your opinion, you bring your world-view, your context, into play. Yet everybody has a different view on the world. You'll change your life when you realize you cannot literally stand in someone else's shoes. Therefore even your physical position can never be the same as another; in some manner, perhaps tiny, it will be different.

Similarly your context is different; your parents, teachers, society, political and religious leaders, education, friends, etc. are unique to you. You interpret all experiences in your own unique fashion according to your previous experiences as well as your current context.

To appreciate context is the big secret of success. It's not what you do, it's where you come from when you do what you do. It's the totality of your previous experiences, as you have interpreted them in your uniqueness. Your context also depends upon the beliefs you have accepted without understanding, what you do understand, what you think you know, and what you actually do know, along with your previous experiences.

So you disagree. Yet how can there anything wrong with disagreeing with others since disagreement is so natural? Are disagreements inevitable as well as inherently irresolvable? Can anything be done about them? Yes indeed! There's joy in truth, that's what we're exploring here.

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought "People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion , that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite to the truth."

- Ann Druyan