Best and Worst Times to Agree and Disagree? #190

Jerry Banfield

Will you join me in learning about the ability to be flexible and choose what we agree with and disagree with, and choose it in our own best interest because this is a powerful skill I've found for being happy and for having happy relationships with everyone around me? Thank you for reading about day 190 of Happier People Podcast and I hope you enjoy it Best and Worst Times to Agree and Disagree? Now, some of us may be thinking that we don't have a choice of whether we agree and disagree. We may think that we just have to disagree in some situations and we just have to agree in others. What I found is that I have a choice always on what I agree and disagree with. The question is, am I agreeing and disagreeing in my own best interest or am I actually doing it against my own best interest? Now, this baffles me because what I've noticed in my life is a pattern of agreeing and disagreeing against my own best interest. This means agreeing at a time when it would be better for me to disagree and it means disagreeing when it actually caused me problems. Best and Worst Times to Agree and Disagree? Let me give you some examples to make this clear. Here are two examples of when agreeing and disagreeing worked against me. First, agreeing. I was at SteemFest 2. I was talking with someone there who was proceeding to lay down several different words like psychopath, needing to change and wrongs, and basically laying the "You're not good enough, something's wrong with you" shame opinion on me. I proceeded to agree with that. I proceeded to say, "Yes. This is how I was in the past, I'm struggling with this and working to change on it." What I've learned since then is that it is the time for me to disagree because anyone else's opinions about who I am or how I've been, those are up to someone else. That's essentially someone else's work of fiction. I have no need to agree or to disagree with anyone else's work of fiction, and in fact it's best I don't take one way or another on it, to just let people have their works of fiction and just maybe acknowledge that they said something, maybe not. There's no need to sit there and agree with someone. When someone's gossiping that's often a really good time to disagree, and yet a lot of us end up agreeing just like I did because we feel like we should agree, that it is the right thing to do. We're afraid to stand up and say, "No. That is not how I see the world. That is not how I see myself and you are welcome to create whatever idea you want to of me and the world. That is not how I see it. Here's how I see it. I am a loving person. I am good enough. There is nothing wrong with me and there never has been." The use of words like psychopaths, like shame of not being good enough, like something is wrong, these are judgments we lay down on other people out of a state of not feeling good enough ourselves. Best and Worst Times to Agree and Disagree? A person who feels good enough has no need to go around and labeling their fellow man and woman as a psychopath, that something must be wrong with them because our inner world is what creates our outer world. Now yes, there are things that we can agree on like there are planets, there are different physical laws. Sure, but how we see them and interpret them is a reflection of our inner world. When we're in a good place we have no need to go around judging, condemning, and criticizing people. Everyone is welcome to their opinion and the best time for us to disagree is when someone lays down these negative judgments on us. That's a really good time for us to say, "No. I am good enough. I am not a psychopath. There is not something wrong with me because I have a happy life today that I enjoy where I think of others and contribute. I will not accept those judgments on me today." That is a good time to disagree.