How to be Opinionated WITHOUT Being Judgmental Part 1
The hardest thing you’ll ever do is learn how to be you and nothing but you.
This holds true for most parts of life: from the balancing act between repetition and creativity we all play in our professional lives to the rocky roads of our emotional and personal lives – the hardest part of life is to understand who you are and how to be that person.
Of course, it is also the most rewarding part of life. In those times when we are authentic, we are at our best.
In this instance, we’re going to look at the early stages in a romantic relationship and how to be authentically opinionated without being judgmental. Here are a few specific tips in being yourself without squeezing your companion out of their own identity.
- All You Know is That You Don’t Know: There is only one surviving bit of wisdom which we can directly ascribe to Socrates, the great Greek philosopher and educator of Plato, and it goes something like this: “All I know, is that I do not know.”
The recognition of human limitation – not just your own, but of humanity itself – can pay extraordinary dividends in many facets of your life. For our intents and purposes, we’re going to look at it as a reprieve from “having to know.” Opinionated people almost always feel compelled to know the answers in life – hey, we’re all living and having to make choices virtually every second of every day; feeling like you “have to know” is an understandable habit to fall into!
The real truth is, none of us know. And when you really get that, when you incorporate that ultimate truth into your life, it becomes the great equalizer. Because it means that none of us is so much better or so much worse than any other – we’re all just trying to survive and deal with whatever pops up along the way.
Specifically: early on in a relationship, it means that there is no single “make or break” opinion you can utter or hear. This doesn’t mean that you should abide hate-speak or the like – of course not! But it means that you should be more interested in the way things are being said, then the things that are being said. You should be more occupied with saying what is important to you rather than what you perceive to be important to this other person to hear.
Republicans and Democrats, Mormons and Atheists – people of differing belief systems can comprise fantastic relationships. Likewise, all Catholics do not mesh. The trick is in understanding that in the end, all you know is that you don’t actually know.
Read Part 2 of How to be Opinionated WITHOUT Being Judgmental for another piece of advice in being yourself in the early stages of a relationship.
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