Arguing with your assumptions
At my birthday party when I turned 10 years old, my best friend and I got in a fight.
It wasn’t a fistfight or anything like that. More of a tiff. A spat.
It started after I had opened all of my presents and my friends and I were getting ready to have a water-gun fight while we waited for cake and ice cream.
As we raced to fill our water guns, my best friend, Jared, went off by himself. To me, it looked like Jared was pouting and moping, and I thought he was jealous of my other friends who were at the party who I had been playing with and spending time with.
I got mad at him and told him he was being a baby. Again, I’m 10 years old, mind you.
We didn’t talk to each other for a bit, but then, of course, my mom made us work it out once she noticed what was going on.
I don’t remember exactly what was said or how we dealt with it, but I do remember that Jared told me he was actually upset because I had let one of my other friends use the water gun that he had given me as his present, a really awesome Super Soaker.
Jared had wanted me to play with that water gun because he had been so excited to give it to me as his gift.
We had argued over an assumption I had made about him, and it nearly ruined my birthday party.
Look, disagreements and conflict happen. They happen between 10-year-old best friends about water guns, and while the topics and issues change as we get older, the arguments feel no less personal and important.
Arguments aren’t necessarily bad, and trying to prevent them is a futile exercise in trying to change the makeup of what makes us human.
What is most important is not ending all disagreements but ensuring that we have accurate disagreements with each other.
When you make assumptions about what someone else cares about or what someone else is upset about and how it differs from your own beliefs about the issue, that can be wildly inaccurate, and it can put a conversation in a deep hole before it even begins.
”We’re having, I think, very inaccurate disagreements because we come into them assuming that we know the way in which we disagree, but we don’t,” Mónica Guzmán told me back in episode 81 of The Follow-Up Question. “And so we begin disagreements already at the point of fighting, right? Where we think we know what the other person believes, but do we?”
What if instead of launching into an argument with someone, you take the time to understand more clearly what you actually disagree with? As Mónica suggests, take your assumption and turn it into a question. Actually ask the other person to explain what they believe, how they came to that belief, and why it is important to them. Heck, you can even ask them to consider assumptions they might be making about you.
Doing this creates the space for a much clearer picture of conflict to come into focus, where we can begin to align ourselves with outcomes rather than trying to correct feelings of being misunderstood, misrepresented, and misheard.
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