Different Drummers

Few days back I attended a training on "Art of Self Management". The course material has following impressive article, which I feel is very much relevant our personal and professional life. I always tend to search myself in the other person, rather than appreciating what he or she is. This article was a great learning experience for me.

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me my want is wrong.

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or, weakly.

Or yet, if I act or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up shaping me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, you parent, you offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right - for me.

To put up with me is the first step to understand me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me, you might come to prize my differences from you, and far from seeking to change me, preserve me and even nurture those differences.