When your friend believes something you think is wrong, ask them to tell you more instead of correcting them. The speaker befriended someone from rural Tennessee who believed in chemtrails and conspiracy theories, and found that listening and validating their points, even on masks and vaccines, kept the relationship intact. Social media trains us to broadcast, not listen, but real influence comes from genuine curiosity.
Chapters
You know, I think change starts at home. And I think very often our politicians are a reflection of us, or we get the politicians we deserve. And to not want to engage with somebody because they have a different political point of view. Even when you find offensive or abhorrent, you can't make peace with your friends. You can only make peace with your enemies. And the only way you make peace is through engagement and to find common ground. And.
I'll tell you a real life story. So I have a friend. She lives in rural Tennessee, grew up poor, and we became pretty good friends. And she came out to visit me in New York, and we went for a long walk. And I discovered that she's a conspiracy theorist. And I don't mean one of them, I mean, like all of them.
And I didn't know this. And so do I abandon a friendship because she sees the world so differently than me? And the answer is no. She's a good human being who cares about me and wants me to be my full self. And I want the same for her. And we went for this walk and she started saying something conspiratorial. And I definitely thought, I'm pretty sure I said, how can you be so stupid?
To which she stopped in her tracks. And to her credit, she didn't just fight with me because both sides think the other side are the sheeple, right?
And she said, you just called your friend stupid. And I was like, I did. And it really forced both of us, do we abandon this or do we work on it? And we made the decision that we were going to work on it and we weren't going to ignore it. It's not like you have that crazy family member over for Christmas and you just. You all agree not to talk politics. You know, it's not that we decided that we were going to learn to talk to each other about everything, and we had to learn not to lecture each other. We had to learn to listen to each other. And we went in on everything during COVID We talked about masks, we talked about vaccines. We talked about everything.
We talked about contrails or, as they like to think, chemtrails.
And it was amazing because what I learned was I had to learn to replace my judgment with curiosity. And I had to learn to listen. And even though I thought something was factually wrong or it was factually wrong or I didn't agree, I didn't have to interrupt and correct their facts. Right? Think of it like your marriage. Right? This happened with. With my ex girlfriend. It's not the reason we Broke up. But I would say, hey, I need to talk to you. You did this thing last week six times that really upset me. She goes, I didn't do it six times. I did it four times. I'm like, it doesn't matter how many times you did it. She goes, well, if you're gonna fight with me, get your facts right.
Well, we do that at work too, by the way. When somebody tells us something, we correct them. And what I had to learn was not to. Not to respond to that impulse because we're listening for the facts as opposed to trying to understand where they're coming from. And she and I learned to listen to each other. And every time, if you keep saying, go on, what else? Tell me more what you know. As a coach, you know this.
You can get to a level where they will say something that is true or that you completely agree with. And I could go, I completely agree with that or that's true. Or let me tell you some evidence of my own to validate your point. And at that point, you become open to everything I had to say. And we could build from there to this day. We absolutely love each other. We very often disagree with each other, and it affects our opinion about the other. Zero. And if we think politics are higher than human connection, we have it backwards. Human connection is higher than politics. And if we, the general public, are incapable of reconciling political differences or views of the world with our friends, with our family members, with our neighbors, then we get the politicians we deserve.
And until we learn that skill set. And by the way, when we learn that skill set, there are ripples, because when somebody is on the receiving end of feeling heard, it kind of makes them want to give that feeling to someone else. And we are more responsible for world peace than our politicians.
But I think that that skill set is desperately lacking. The skill of listening is. You know, my friend Bill Urie, who wrote Getting to Yes is one of the world's greatest negotiators, peace negotiators. Bill always talks about how we have talk shows, but we need listen shows. We have peace talks, but we really need is peace listens. You know, the entire Internet is a marketing tool. Like every piece of social media is just for marketing. If you're not selling something, you're selling, you're not on there. Right? We're selling ourselves. We're selling our happy lives. We're selling. It's all broadcast. There is literally no mechanism in our modern world for listening.
And it's not the comments section.
Good point. I've changed my mind. Said no one ever.
We shout at each other. Yeah. And so we're really good at not listening and shouting at each other and forming our arguments. Yeah.
So I, I really had a lot of respect for the president when, when he said, everyone I meet with Putin, Xi, some of the people who we, we define as our enemies, they're still human beings. And I have to learn to connect with them on that level.
And I have to learn to. I may not come to an agreement with them, but I there, I have to see them as human. I thought that was at that level. If he can do it, then we don't really have an excuse.
