Survive in the Debate

Pathways: Dynamic Leadership

Level 2-2: Understanding Your Communication Style

Content

Survive in the debate, after reading this title, you may guess I will introduce some magic debate skills to you, right? Well, please let me share a small story to you first, then you may understand what I’m going to talk about.

It’s a sunshiny morning at about one year ago. I was having a voice call with my girl friend. In the phone, she said: today I got up very early and wiped the floor. I responded: wow, it must be pretty tired to squat and wipe. “No, I used a mop”, she said. “But if you use a mop, it should be mopping rather than wiping the floor”, I queried her. Then she said:”But all of us call that wiping, nobody says mopping”. I debated:”It seems only you use wiping, in my family, we always use mopping”. “Then what, I just use wiping”, she’s a little angry. But I still wanted to persuade her, “it’s wired using wiping, you should use mopping”. Then, she ended the call.

I didn’t understand why she got angry, because at that time, I was a kind of debate elf in the real life. I always tried my best to stand for my point, during the lunch with my colleague, during the evening with my family, or even in the comments of a microblog. I debated with these people and I enjoined it, because on most of time I wo . Maybe these people just didn’t want to argue with me.

At the end, my girl friend left me after a quarrel, I can’t even remember what we were arguing for. Then I got into a heart broken period.

Occasionally, I found a interesting view in a book, It said: The only way to win in a debate is avoiding debate. Because our life is not a debate contest, most of us are just normal people, thus we may have some weakness in our mind. And one of them is that it’s nearly impossible to change one’s mind unless he would like to. If we debate with a person, we are challenging his knowledge and dignity, then he will get into fight mode, and stands for his point from start to the end, even if you are right.

I was little curious if this theory would work for me, because it seemed I didn’t have many friends and good relationship with my family, so I start trying to change my communication style, to be more gentle and approachable, to see what will happen. In the later days, when I had conversation with colleague, even if I knew someone was wrong, I would not point out directly if it’s not that important. While talking with my parents, I just listened and answered their questions, without debating for small things. I suddenly realized, when I was a child, I must made lots of small mistakes, but my parents seemed never arguing with me. Now, they are getting old and some knowledge is out of date, I should do the same thing to them.

Now I’m perceived as patient, amiable and supportive by my friends. My parents like to share their story with me, and even my girl friend said that I am changing a lot, to the good way.

Just like the book said: If you argue and debate, you may gain the victory for temporary, but that is short and useless, and you will never earn other’s favor. We are in a society and have connection with others. Sometimes, it may change everything if we let our customer, lover, husband or wife win us in a small debate.

Evaluation

Photos