Are you having a discussion with a friend, family or colleague? Discussions are very natural and happen very often. Especially a discussion at the workplace seems very daunting. Your peers with more experience and your boss that pays you your income are the ones who knows it the best, right? Not always, having respect for their knowledge and their experience is the best thing to do. But sometimes they can be wrong or you could have better method, even if you haven’t tried it yet.
Refuse to blindly follow advice and to have the courage to speak up can help you and the person giving advice. Despite it may seem unbelievable, your more experienced colleagues can learn from you. This could be from your knowledge of computer skills, words in a different language that they have forgotten or something that you have recently learned during your education. Always be gentle when you are trying to bring your idea across. If it happens to be impossible to let the other see your point of view don’t worry, you can put the discussion behind you and move on.
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress. – Joseph Joubert
It is not the amount of distance between the two thoughts that decides how the discussion ends. It is rather how both of you think about the argument and about the other person. If you are just arguing to see who will wins either no one will win, or someone will feel that they win and the other has lost. A constructive argument can have a winner, but should never have a loser. Both of you should become better of it. A prime example here is at work. If a colleague wants to do something that is obviously wrong you should attempt to advice them to not do it. At this point it really helps if you are persuasive. It is in the interest of everyone that the team manages to perform the tasks correctly.
Discussions between friends or family are the heaviest one there are and more often than not they are unimportant and lead to nothing. The only benefit you can get from it is to sharpen your skills in persuasiveness. Something even better to learn is how to actually listen to the person you are in discussion with. This is something that no one actually is able to do. Besides from these the only benefit to gain is to allow the other person to “win” the conversation. When doing this your relationship will not be hurt as much and could potentially even become better at is.