7th June 2021

Be prepared to change your mind…
Sometimes you think that you understand something, but then somebody comes along and presents a different view of the same thing.
Human temptation is normally to think that you are right, so that the other person must therefore be wrong. But you must resist this temptation and be prepared to look at things again from a different perspective. You will then usually find, as counter-intuitive as it seems, that both you and the other person may be right.
This happened to me this week. In my update last week (below) entitled: ‘Don’t let is sound like criticism’, I presented an argument that we should always be careful not to say something to someone else that sounds like criticism.
However, although I thought that I had given it a lot of thought to it before I wrote it, I soon received an email from a reader pointing out to me that criticism can also be constructive and that, in fact, my accompanying cartoon made him think that it is the recipient of criticism who is more at fault than the critic.
Of course, this is also correct (although I mainly chose the cartoon because I thought it was funny!) Like the famous quote says: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do?’




