Agree to disagree

We all disagree on things, and that's normal. The most important thing is how we deal with disagreements.

There are two phases of disagreement handling.

First, we must agree to disagree; otherwise, it would be like in totalitarian countries where only one voice exists, and disagreement is not an option.

Then we can proceed to agree on disagreements. Most of the time, there is more than one option, and the options are not mutually exclusive. So we respect others and spend some time looking at the choices and (painfully) make decisions to ditch our own or (painfully) fight for the hopefully better ones.

That’s also normal, and we learn from the results as well as the processes to be better people.

Sometimes this is called compromise, sometimes democracy.

“Yeah, tell me about it.” You might have heard answers like this. It sounds like an agreement with what you said, but oftentimes it’s not. It’s actually a statement of implied disagreement.

Again, we routinely disagree on things, and it’s more healthy to iron out the differences by first admitting them heartily rather than giving a snobbish, superficial yea.

That’s not helping at all, and we are still on different sides of a chasm.