Understand before being understood
You filter everything you hear through your life experiences, your frame of reference. Everyone has different emotional thermostats and perhaps they have been set by how they were raised and developed by the traumas they may or may not have. I’ve learned how to tap dance around all the mental traps that most people who look like me tend to fall for. I have this wonderful ability to get moved by other people, some of whom I have never even met. I guess this is because I just the beauty in things. I have been training for years and years to develop practical empathy as people don’t know what I know and I don’t know what they know. And I am really comfortable with that - it’s all OK.
I don’t think that we change the whole world but if we try understand it, we will at least decode it and figure out a way to make it better for ourselves. If we can ask the below generic questions enough times, then this will help us change our perspectives and help us to evaluate where we stand:
What do you know?
What do you need?
What happened to you that led you to believe that in this moment you are being reasonable?