Agreement Is Optional.

You can listen to me share the introduction and The Principle for this journal entry, read it below, or both!

We waste a lot of time trying to get people to agree with us.

Business owners. Parents. Co-workers. Spouses. Salespeople. Teachers. Civic leaders…

We all do it.

While the squandered time and effort are enough to give us pause, perhaps the bigger slap is the realization that we have missed opportunities day after day because our bandwidth is spent pushing agendas rather than productively accomplishing the work that transforms visions into reality.

If agreement is genuinely optional, how do we get on the same page and work together to make things happen?

When we transcend the need to agree and, instead, focus on higher-level alignment, breakthroughs occur. Contention disappears. Connection happens naturally.

Consider a situation you’ve observed or been involved in recently in which people didn’t agree. What did the conversation sound like? Were people genuinely listening to each other? Did a meaningful resolution unfold that everyone supported?

Probably not.

Now, consider the same situation, looking far down the road at what everyone ultimately wanted. Try to distill it all down to a principle, if possible. Did everyone ultimately want similar results but just didn’t agree on how to achieve them?

Here’s just one example that is likely universal…

Multiple civic leaders are involved in addressing an issue facing the citizens they serve. Opinions about effective solutions vary widely. Everyone thinks their solution is best. No one wants to budge. Anyone who doesn’t agree with a given person is, in his or her eyes, uninformed.

Sound familiar?

Regardless of the topic at hand, the reason these civil servants are addressing the matter has its roots in a common vision; otherwise, no one would be passionately taking a stand.

When we’re savvy (and emotionally mature) enough to see past initial disagreements and find our point of alignment, we identify a focus we can all work toward together instead of exhausting our efforts by battling each other.

In a civic situation like this, some points of alignment might include providing a safe place for families to live, streamlining traffic flow for a more enjoyable commuting experience, providing open spaces for kids to play in the middle of an otherwise heavily developed urban area, and so on.

These ideas aren’t new. We hear them all the time in politicians’ campaign promises.

As often as topics like these are brought up, many of these visions never become reality. Or they come to fruition much more slowly and at considerably greater expense than citizens had hoped.

Why? Because the “my way or the highway” mentality of the decision makers hinders the work.

When we collectively focus on our point of alignment — our guiding star — we now have the capacity to have meaningful, objective discussions about points of disagreement, stepping into each other’s worlds and genuinely working to understand where everyone is coming from in our differing views.

We already align on what we ultimately want. Now it’s our opportunity to discover, through meaningful curiosity and discovery, what we don’t know — what others’ values, experiences, and visions are based on because of their unique situations.

Here’s my iron-clad, 100% guaranteed promise to you: When you make this your default mode of interaction, you will learn more things you didn’t know or fully understand than you ever will by assuming you have it all figured out. Period.

Disagreement — seen as an opportunity for discovery and not the creator of contention — is, perhaps, the most powerful asset any of us can harness and use to create new, more productive realities than any of us can possibly hope for by operating strictly from our own paradigm. As I’ve written about in a previous journal entry: All Creation Is Co-creation.

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Benefitting from disagreement can be boiled down to a three-step approach:

Illuminate. Celebrate. Activate.

Let’s look at how to do this in The Practice…

You can listen to me share The Practice for this journal entry, read it below, or both!