Passion or Doubt?


Hey there everyone,

I'm writing this so late and am not sure this qualifies as a post in this week but... I'll go with it. Happy new month by the way! I think I'm gonna be celebrating my one-year blog anniversary pretty soon :)

This week flew by.... Don't know if I felt that way during the actual week, but I feel that way now. It was majorly uneventful. There were definitely some really great moments that I recall. One of them being games on Wednesday. I was really nervous about playing soccer again cause of what happened last week, but I had to remind myself (and am still reminding myself) that I cannot control anyone but myself and that I do not have to live in fear. Something wrong was done, I spoke up about it, end of story. Making myself uncomfortable will not change anything. It's a gradual lesson, but one I'm embracing more and more everyday. So, I mustered up my courage throughout the day, and ended up having lots of fun.

A little while back, I was talking a lot about the conversations we have with people and how we don't listen to understand but listen to respond. And how it's so easy to stick with what's easier to believe because you don't need to have any hard conversations or you're not attacked during those hard conversations. In line with that, two things I wrote in the notes on my phone come to mind; 'We can't change the world if our love langauge is judgement' and 'We can't bully people into believing something'.

Passion and conviction can be slippery slopes if used wrongly. Being passionate is a great thing. It is. But you can never change peoples' minds or win people over to your way of thinking if your approach is judgement. We as human beings, just do not respond well to being judged. We get defensive, then we harden our hearts and our minds and we have no room to accept reasonable arguments. So it's great to be passionate about things, but it's even better to be compasssionate. It's way easier to say all these things than to actually have a conversation with soemone you think is saying complete rubbish. Whatever the rubbish may be, it can be hard to exercise self-control or patience in those moments. And neither of those things may seem necessary or appropriate. Preserving someone's feeling might be the last thing you want to do in certain situations. So let's focus on this instead. Whatever the conversation may be, in this coming week, let's start with just hearing the other person out. Don't think about your response or how crazy you think the idea, belief or person is. Just listen. That's the first step. Another interesting thing I've found is that people will sometimes say they are not trying to convince the other person of anything... and so my question then is, why are you attacking? Could it be that you are scared that you are wrong? Now, I may be wrong. But I think that when someone is arguing passionately and heatedly, they either really believe what they're saying and are trying to convince the other person, or they don't really believe what they're saying but they don't want to question it. Wherever you lie between these two options (even if you lie in neither), listening will still always be the first step.

I hope this helps.

God bless.
Dera

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