Sunday, August 03, 2008
Respect
Due to my religious and family upbringing, I'm always taught to respect everyone, before other people can respect you.
To me, everyone is an individual, doing the best for themselves, and thus doing things the way they do.
Therefore, I try my best to respect everyone as a human being, even though the things they do might not neccesarily be correct in my opinion.
Hence, even though I might bitch about people many a time, I still respect everyone as human beings, with their own experiences and reasons for doing the things they did.
However, while respecting other people's experiences, I do have a mind of my own. I always listen to all sides of the arguments before I decide who is 'right' (this being subjective) and who is 'wrong'.
I respect people, I respect my friends. I understand why you do the things you do.
However, being respectful does not necessarily mean that I have to accept what you did is right.
You know, it hurts so when I sincerely want to treat everyone as friend, want to understand their point of view, and yet I can do nothing to solve the clash?
When something is wrong, the short training stint in my company taught me to 'take action'.
To my friends who are willing to listen, I'm always ready to 'preach', even though I'm not the most experienced, nor the most intelligent.
I'm always ready to provide sincere, and objective (as far as possible) feedback to people, to the point of being critical, and saying things that some people might not like to hear.
However, once I judge that the person is not willing to listen, or responds to negative feedback with very negative
emotions, rather than rebutting them with
reasons, I do give up quite easily.
As I always say, I only preach to people who wants to listen.
And by listening, I'm not saying that you must agree with me (since I didn't agree with you in the first place), but at least we should trash things out with reasons, and respect each other's point of view.
And if people come into an argument with a pre-conceived mindset of what the other party is thinking instead of wanting to make everything clearer with the discussion, then I see no point in the debate.
Between people, arguing can be about who wins, and who has the last laugh.
But between friends, arguments are all about finding out the truth. It doesn't matter who wins or who loses. As long as each other's points of view are considered, even though there might be disagreements in the end, as long as you did consider the other side's arguments, and you become more consicious of your choice, you have benefitted from the argument, as emotionally charged or damaging it might be.
There lies the problem. How many percent of the people are willing to go through vigourious arguments to achieve the best thought-out solution?
People are too stuck in their mindset, or too eager to preserve their ego, or have too much desire to be heard rather than to hear, or too scared to 'damage' friendships by saying the naked truth.
As such, people are always emotionally damaged by arguments, because arguments, to them, are just platforms to vent their anger, rather than the platforms to discuss out the truth.
Well, with such a mindset, can anything be discussed in the first place?
That why for me, I rather people have a heated argument with me, because I won't get heated, as I'm grateful to opposing views (but it doesn't mean I'll necessarily accept them), than to talk about me behind my back, and let half-truths become the perceived real truths.
Well well well, that's how people are isn't it? Afraid of arguments, or afraid to find out that their points of view might not be reasonable, or afraid of their information might not be the truth.
Hence they turn to undiscerning, so-called friends to affirm their points of view, and feel good about it.
Haha but does that help anything? Nothing but that lowly self-comfort.
Stay comfortable in your own world then. =)
lowtide blogged @
11:11 am
