Emily, a friend of mine, told me that her husband often says to her, “Why do you always have to be right?” Whenever her husband said this, Emily’s thought was always, “Because I am right.”
But Emily had an insight the other day. She said to me, “I realized how wrong I was and my demand to be right was destroying my marriage.”
I experienced this myself recently. I was with a man named Arnie with whom I often disagree. As usual, the more he talked, the more irritated I became as I waited for him to stop talking so that I could point out the errors in his thinking. I stopped listening to Arnie as I listened to myself screaming in my head, “Shut up, Arnie.”
Then I remembered Emily’s insight and I decided to really listen to Arnie as though I had no opinion but only wanted to understand his. I decided to see Arnie as someone who wanted to contribute to me and not as someone who was an obstacle to me getting my way. I paraphrased what he was saying to help me understand his opinions and I asked questions out of curiosity and not to catch a contradiction in his thinking.
As Arnie talked, I began to notice something I had never really noticed before. Certainly, Arnie would have liked for me to agree with him. But even more importantly, it became clear to me that Arnie wanted to be heard and understood. I knew that Arnie’s bluster had turned off many people who had simply stopped listening to him and, in fact, avoided him when they could. I was usually one of those people who only pretended to listen to him. This only made Arnie more determined to get his opinion across which caused me to want to avoid him which caused him to be more forceful. Here was the self fulfilling prophecy in operation.
To my astonishment, after I had been listening for a while, Arnie stopped talking and asked me what I thought. I gave my opinion, not to prove him wrong but simply because he had asked. Even more to my amazement, I began to enjoy being with Arnie and, it was clear to me, he enjoyed being with me. While we didn’t come to an agreement, we saw that we were not that far apart in our opinions and we definitely improved our relationship.
This experience reminded me that when we change our perception, the world around us changes. Or, more accurately, when we change our perception, we see things that were always there that we could never before see.
Perhaps the people in our lives are merely a reflection of who we’re being.
Was Arnie “difficult” because he really was that way or because I was being difficult in resisting what he was saying? Was Emily’s husband upset because she always had to be right or because she never allowed for the possibility of being wrong (or, more accurately, the possibility of both of them being right)?
Perhaps our most intransigent conflicts occur not because the other person is being intransigent, but because we are.
