Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. – Tao Te Ching: 56
This chapter of the Tao speaks to me in a particularly loud way today.
Untying My Knots
I’m often told that I have great body awareness, and perhaps I might be fairly adept at reading emotions or a mood in the room. While those skills can aid in helping me relate to others, neither truly translates to interrelational awareness – at least not in the realm of discourse or conflict. It’s not a fun thing for me to admit – but for the sake of advancing my process of self-improvement, I’ll say it: I’m not very tactful.
That is not to say I don’t know how to exercise the skill of interpersonal sensitivity! I’m just really bad with the phrasing and timing. Somewhere down the line, I’ve lost a trust for my own words when they are not backed by actions. At the core of it, I strive to be a person of action – that is how I transmute my feelings, emotions, intentions, efforts, ambitions, and relay it into the world.
My work on improving my utility of dialogue has been overshadowed by my aspiration for embodying my words. There should be a healthy in between instead of moving between extremes. Perhaps I’ve been mistaking words spoken with thoughtful consideration for what people want to hear as the same skill.
Close My Mouth
Words lacking any form authenticity is useless. Actions devoid of the right intention can also be damaging. Spoken to in the right way, you can spark motivation and encouragement; unlock thoughts, memories and self-knowledge.
Caught up in my own practice of sticking to my words, often times I forget that people are vastly spread across the spectrum with their self-development journey. If I don’t remind myself, I quickly forget that my reality is not the same shared reality – I fall right into a self-serving bias that “if I’m doing it, everybody else must be as well.” Yet, I still do just that! It’s my default lens that colours my reactions. It translates into this unspoken expectation I have for others.
There is a tendency for me to subconsciously hold people to the same standard, because “if it’s true for me, it must be true for others.”
This way of being is disingenuous to myself and to others. I’m setting myself up to be either disappointed or worse, I’m forcing my view on how I wish another person should present themselves to me. Where the former is me interacting from a place of expectation, the latter is me doing that as well as not allowing the person I am interacting with to be themselves – or at the very least, I’m making it difficult for them to be who they are.
No matter how good, altruistic, virtuous, noble, and whatever else pedestal I put myself on, my standard for the way to live is mine and mine alone. Close my mouth and give space for others to speak their truth. It’s always better to listen wholeheartedly.
Blunt My Sharpness, Soften My Glare
Here are a couple of reminders:
- Being hard on myself does not give me permission to be hard on others
- Do not force my views and expectations onto others
- Expectations can lead to disagreement if they aren’t met
- Vindictive habits can cut deep
- Anger is harmful when directed at others – disengage and take a time out to let emotions settle before reengaging
Law Of Defensiveness
Speaking your truth can be a double edged sword. The catch twenty two: it’s the quickest way to communicate what you want – it’s also the quickest way to burn bridges.
Robert Greene speaks about a characteristic of human nature he details as the law of defensiveness. We as humans have an intrinsic need for autonomy – that includes our own beliefs and interests. Your truth and intentions won’t necessarily correspond to another person’s beliefs. By introducing your truth in too sharp of a manner, the directness can be mistaken as an attack on another’s beliefs, intentions, and interests.
Understanding that the expectation for others to accept your truth immediately, because “it obviously makes so much sense to you” is a direct attack on their autonomy. People will clam up and react in a defensive manner to protect their ego.
Being tactful is a brilliant way to defuse this intrinsic wiring of defensiveness. It’s much more palatable for anybody to come to a conclusion on their own. Putting your cards on the table and allowing the other individual to piece together the picture for themselves will give them the option to deny anything that doesn’t fit into their side of the story, as well as integrating any new information they had not yet considered from your side of the story.
It is important than to “soften your glare” as you show your hand. In any circumstance, the most steadfast and grounded way to engage is from a mindset of being a part of our circumstances. This way of engaging gives us the space to detach from our emotions and avoid being reactionary. Reactionary interaction is rooted in emotions and have the capacity to cut deep.
Be gentle and choose your words carefully, for we don’t know what can trigger other people.
