The other day I was with with some friends and we ended up talking about a touchy subject I have strong feelings about. I wasn’t sure if I should bring up said strong feelings because I know my friends don’t share my beliefs. I feel conflicted. On the one hand I feel like I shouldn’t be afraid to speak my mind. On the other hand, no one asked for my opinion or to be challenged. What should I do? When is it alright to rock the boat?

-Quietly Opinionated

Hi Opinionated,

The time to bring up your opinion is when you’re doing it to express yourself, not to change anyone. When sharing your beliefs is about letting your friends get to know you better, they won’t think badly of you–at least they won’t if they’re sane–and they’ll be more likely to come around to your way of thinking.

The reason this works is that expression by itself isn’t threatening. There’s no pressure on your friends to change. They can listen–and later reflect–in safety and comfort. There’s no need for them to expend energy defending their beliefs because you aren’t attacking.

There is a chance that your friends will want to attack challenge you, though. In that case you have two options:

One, you can insist that you’re not interested in debating it right now. This has the advantage of killing the conversation. You get the last word and everyone else can ponder what you’ve said. The disadvantage is you don’t get to test your beliefs.

Two, you can debate but I’d highly suggest that you do this only if you’re willing to change your opinion. If you’re willing to do that you’ll be more able to listen to the arguments your friends make, you’ll have more self-restraint when presenting your side (i.e. you’ll be able to avoid saying hurtful things), and you’ll be able to filter out any mean things your friends might saying while they’re on the defensive. If you aren’t detached chances are someone’s feelings will get hurt. :-/

No matter what, don’t let fear of an argument be the primary reason you stay quiet. You don’t have to argue or defend your beliefs. You can state them and be done with it. No one gets hurt and everyone learns something.

Good Luck!

This post is part of the “Ask Monique” series. Click the link for easy access to other posts in this series.

There are two parts to the process. The first is to be the kind of person who not only gives good advice, but gives it in such a way that it strengthens the relationship. The second step is to use the right words so they take the message the right way. In this post I’ll focus on cultivating the mindset. Next week’s will be on using the right words.

So let’s get to it! Below are things you can do to help yourself BE a better advice giver.

Ask your friend for advice

Chances are your friend has some area of expertise that they’re dying to give you advice on. Maybe they’re an excellent cook, and you have a complicated dinner party you’d like to prepare. Maybe they’re incredibly well organized, and you’d like to improve that in yourselves. Basically, humble yourself by asking them for advice. The idea here is that if your friend sees you humbling yourself, they’ll feel more comfortable doing the same with you.

One caveat: Don’t do it just to improve your chances at getting your friend to ask you for advice. That is, don’t ask them for advice on something you don’t need advice on. If your friend is a master chef, don’t ask him for advice if you have no actual interest in cooking. If you’re more organized than your friend, don’t ask them for advice on organizing… unless there’s something specific they do do that you’d like to do. Just be genuine when you ask for help.

If you aren’t being genuine, they’ll be able to tell, and you’ll get labeled as condescending, which… honestly… would be accurate. Your friendship can’t be very good if you can’t think of any area in which your friend can actually help you.

Again, the goal here is to be humble enough to ask for advice where you aren’t knowledgeable and to value your friend for what he/she is good at. It feels more comfortable to ask someone for advice if they owe you a favor and we like sharing/being valued for our passions.

Actively Work on That Area Yourself

Let’s say there’s something you specifically want to give your friend advice on, one of your first steps ought to do is to work on that area yourself. “Get the log out of your eye before telling your brother to get the speck out of his” and all that jazz. This has the benefit of establishing yourself as an expert (so you can actually give good advice), showing your friend that it’s alright to work on that area, and improving yourself in that area yourself. (If it’s good enough for your friend, it’s good enough for you, right?)

If you’re lucky you might even get some insight into why your friend is still struggling with it, although in my experience you probably won’t. You want to fix it right now, your friend doesn’t. Your experience will be fundamentally different. Resist the urge to get frustrated with them as that will make it harder to listen to them when they try to explain what’s stopping them.

Be Patient; Care But Not Too Much

Detach yourself from the situation. If the person you want to help sees that you care too much, they may avoid you even if you’re the best person to go to. Why? Because you’d put too much pressure on them to change, and not only to change but to do so at your pace. Think about it, why do many of us seek out self-help books or blogs instead of asking our friends and family for advice? One reason, of course, is that our friends and family don’t give great advice, but another is that they want too much for us to follow their advice. We don’t want to disappoint them if/when we fail the first time. We also don’t want to feel obligated to do it their way. Books don’t care if you disregard their advice.

When I’m trying to figure out who to go to for advice, I look for/expect three things in my advice-giver:

1. They’ll be supportive.
2. They’ll give me good, honest advice that’s in my best interest.
3. If I fall they’ll help me pick myself back up and try again.

If I suspected any of these is false, I probably won’t ask… and I won’t appreciate it if they give me their unsolicited thoughts. (Although I am trying to work on the last part.)

The only way to meet all three conditions is to be detached. I can’t really be supportive if I’m clouded by my own expectations. I can’t give good advice if I’m basing it on what I think the situation is. I can’t help them when they fall if I’m too frustrated when they do.

Nurture Your Love

Common advice for married couples is to put some time and effort into keeping the feeling alive. Focus on the things you enjoy about your partner. Do fun stuff. If you don’t you run the risk of only thinking about the qualities in your partner you don’t like.

This advice can be applied to all of your relationships, especially those where you’re starting to see the other person’s flaws. It’s important to remind yourself why you care. Like your significant other, you run risk of focusing on the negatives with your friends too. In addition you might start seeing them as your project, someone you want to fix to give you an ego boost. This is not good.

By nurturing the love, you remind yourself why you’re friends with this person and that they are your equal. They have as much to teach you, as you have to teach them. You respect them.

If you do all of these things you can be pretty certain that your intentions are aligned with good things. I think if any of my friends embodied these qualities, that is,

• They were humble enough to ask for help
• They were experts in or were working on an area I needed help with
• They were detached from the outcome of my situation
• I knew the loved and respected me

I wouldn’t hesitate to ask them for advice, since by doing this they would meet all of the criteria I mentioned earlier. And not only that, if they told me out of the blue that I was doing something that was self-defeating there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack.

So, next week, you can look forward to a post on how to use the right words convey your advice and how to give them unsolicited advice.

Here’s the definition I’ll use, and for clarity I’ll use two generic names: Alice and Bob. When Alice is getting Bob to do something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, she is manipulating him.

It’s a pretty wide interpretation of manipulative. If Bob is biting his fingernails, and Alice tells him it’s bad for him, even that falls under this definition of manipulation. Her technique might not be effective, and she may be saying it for his benefit alone, but that’s besides the point. Alice is still trying to manipulate Bob. Alice is still trying to change Bob’s behavior.

The thing to realize here is that manipulation in this broad sense is part a part of life, and it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, it is often wise to allow yourself to be manipulated. If someone shows you that your behavior is not aligned with what you profess to believe, you’d do well to reconcile that. If someone is calling you to be a better person, you shouldn’t fight it just because someone else suggested it.

So the question is, what’s the difference between positive and negative manipulation? The answer is quite simple: positive manipulation is when someone gets you to do something that makes your life better in your eyes. Negative is when it makes your life worse in your eyes.

As far as your life is concerned the form of the manipulation really shouldn’t matter. If someone uses guilt to get you to do something you already know you ought to be doing, you should still do it. The key thing here is you know it’s the right thing to do. The fact that they used low-blow tactics is beside the point.

Similarly if someone appeals to your higher values–a method of manipulation I particularly like–and calls you to put more time into your non-profit group of choice, the time spent there may not be the best for you. If you already spend lots of hours at your day-job and then spend as many at your non-profit group your family and friends may get short shrift, and you may find that the new use of your time hasn’t made your life better. The fact that the person used a good method of manipulation is, again, besides the point.

In other words, when someone is attempting to get you to change your behavior it’s the content, not the form, that matters.

This changes, of course, when you’re the one trying to change someone else’s mind. The content is still very important, but most of us have a hard time taking advice that’s presented in the wrong way. If you want to be listened to you’d do well to get both content and form right. That’s what this Friday’s post will be about.

1 ) Schedule Regular Get-togethers
This is the number one best way to strengthen the relationships you already have. Schedule a regular time to meet with the people you want to get to know better. Preferably at your home. It doesn’t matter how small your place is. Aaron and I used to invite people to our one bedroom apartment all the time. It was pretty cramped and often not spotless, but people didn’t care. (Or at least they kept coming back.)

The more often you see someone the easier it is to open up to them. But what’s also true is if you invite someone over too often they’ll get tired of the frequency. If you have a scheduled, repeating time to see someone (or a group of people) then it no longer feels like anyone’s time is getting monopolized. It’s an activity you’ve all committed to.

2 ) Call Regularly
Call your important people somewhat frequently. Once or twice a week. It doesn’t have to be about anything in particular. Just share what you’ve been up to, what you’ve been dreaming about, and listen to their thoughts and dreams. I know I love sharing these kinds of things with anyone who seems interested, and more often than not I’ve found other people love to talk as well. These are the kind of topics that keep people interested.

Do this often enough, be willing to talk about deeper things and you’ll find your relationships strengthen, even if you aren’t in the same city.

3 ) Use Instant Messenger
There’s something to be said about being in constant contact with someone all day long. When I’m at work, I have my IM client open with a constant link to Aaron. We don’t talk all the time — in fact we’ve agreed to not have intense conversations while at work — but having the weak link is nice and comfy. Comfy relationships tend to be strong relationships.

4 ) Update Your Personal Blog
Throughout high school and part of college I kept up a personal blog, and so did many of my friends and acquaintances. A lot of what we wrote wasn’t very insightful or helpful, but it was open and honest. I was always amazed at how close I felt to people who regularly updated their blogs, and because of that closeness I felt more comfortable talking to people I wouldn’t ordinarily talk to, just because I read their blog. And with my main friends the relationships grew closer because of how candid we were willing to be in our journals.

5 ) Volunteer When They’re In Need
If your friend needs help–even if they aren’t asking for it–offer it. If your friend just had a baby, offer to do the dishes for a few days. If your friends are moving, offer to help them move. If you notice your friend is feeling down, find a way to cheer them up. Take the initiative. Doing so is an instant relationship strengthener.

For a few of my friends, a major reason I’m still loyal to them is something they did for me many years ago that both needed and didn’t expect them to do.

6 ) Schedule Weekly Activities
This is similar to the regular get-togethers, but with more purpose. If you all like music you could get together and play music together. If you all like games you can get together and play games. If you like exercise you can do your favorite form of exercise together. Etc. I’ve found that sharing things I’m passionate is a great medium for getting to know someone. That’s when you’re all at your best and you learn special specific things about each other that none of you would have known otherwise.

7 ) Take Risks
Push people’s buttons a bit. Family and good friends do this for each other all the time. We all have our sensitive issues that we ought to deal with. Challenge these important people to be better. Doing this effectively is an art. It takes some practice. But if you don’t do it your relationships will stay in mediocre land.

8 ) Learn to Take Criticism Well
Just like how you should encourage those closest to you to be better, you also need to work at being a better person. If your friends know you’re good at taking criticism they’ll both be more likely to give it to you and more likely to listen to the advice you give them. It’s a relationships strengthener.

9 ) Work on Detachment
The deeper the friendship the more valuable and more difficult it will get over time. You’ll know you can depend on your friends, but at the same it will affect you more when they make bad decisions. Also, because you’ve gotten to a point where you’re pretty sure they won’t leave if you say something uncomfortable to them, you run the risk of saying risk of giving them advice that’s more about making you feel better than it is about helping them. Not good.

The way to combat this is by developing detachment and a thick skin. It enables you to keep your friend’s wellbeing at the forefront and to notice when the advice you give is more about you than them.

10 ) Make Roots
If people know you’re going to be around for a while they’ll be more likely to open up to you. They don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re going to be around in a year or two. Stability is rare these days, and is valued more than you might think.

To be clear, I don’t think you should feel obligated to live where you grew up. What I do think is that it’s a good idea to find a place you like and make your career decisions based on location. Pick city first, then pick where you want to work. Or even better, pick a career that can be done anywhere. ***Cough***Blogging***Cough***

You’ll notice that all of these things take a lot of time, effort, and sacrifice. There are no shortcuts. But on the bright side, the journey is incredibly rewarding and the things you learn along the way will help you in whatever you want to do with your life.

9 ) Sometimes People Need To Be Shut Up
No one likes sitting at a 3 hour meeting where the main topic ends up being “whether or not we should require everyone to wear nametags”. Also no one likes being at a meeting where one or two people have the floor and 98% of what they say is meaningless.

On the other hand, a meeting that moves from one topic to another in which everyone has a chance to speak, but not too much time, is great. Everyone feels productive. No one feels that someone’s monopolizing the floor. We want this kind of meeting but most meetings I’ve been to (and unfortunately quite a few I’ve presided over) have been like the first type.

The main reason why my meetings tended to cater to the longwinded was that I’ve had the belief that interrupting someone is the GREATEST SIN EVAR. This is bad and makes all of the succinct people irritated. If this is a problem for you, here are a few simple solutions (some of which I’ve even tried!).

• Send out an agenda ahead of time and ask the longwinded people to send you a summary of their thoughts before the meeting.
• Limit the responses of everyone. Use a timer. This is kind of harsh for the 98% of people at your meetings who don’t have this problem, though.
• When you’re notice someone’s taking a while to get to the point, interrupt and ask them to get to the point, or interrupt and see if you can sum up for them. Ask if your summary is accurate in their eyes. The glory of this kind of interruption is that you aren’t really cutting them off. They still get to have their say, and even more than that they know they’ve been understood.

10 ) Calmness Trumps Defensiveness Every Time
If you get emotional at your meeting, you lose. If you freak out and have a tantrum… you lose. Calmness about your rightness is important. People will respect you more.

11 ) Sometimes People Just Want To Be Told What To Do
Compulsory democracy isn’t necessarily a good thing. The pace of choir practice is a lot slower when I try to get the choir to lead themselves. Not everyone has the time or inclination to spend time pondering how to sing the music or how to pronounce the lyrics. Heck, a lot of the time I don’t really want to put in the extra time/effort either.

Encourage people to be proactive, but don’t force it. Don’t worry too much about being too totalitarianism. If you take it too far, people will let you know and forgive you for it if you fix it.

12 ) Fully Think Through Your Proposals
Going back to that major proposal I passed for Swing Ann Arbor, the fact that I thought everything through helped a lot with getting people on board. People trusted that it would succeed since I’d thought about just about everything.

Another thing I wanted to do was to change the tone of Swing Ann Arbor. I started going swing dancing in Ann Arbor, it was right after I got back from Austin. The Austin swing is (or at least was… I haven’t been there in years) incredibly friendly. I made lots of friends easily and was remembered by a few of the good dancers. It was a great experience. When I got to Ann Arbor, things felt different… and not in a good way. After months of going regularly people I danced with every week still didn’t remember my name… yeah… it just wasn’t that fun. As president I wanted to fix that.

Few people on the board agreed with me that there was a problem, though… and in my mind they were part of the problem. I had no idea how to convince them there was a problem, nor did I have any proposals for how to systematically fix it either. Also, any ideas I did have required more time than I was willing to give. Unsurprisingly, between my trying to cut corners and my inexperience I damaged some relationships. Alas. The main point here is if you don’t have a lot of clarity on an issue, you should be wary about attempting to deal with a problem directly, especially if you can’t convince people on your team that there’s a problem.

13 ) Pass Proposals That Take Sense for Your Group Where It Is Right Now
The SAA proposal to add more classes was a bit overambitious and didn’t fully address the issues the group was facing. I tried to arrange a track of advanced classes so that intermediate dancers, like myself, would still benefit from going to classes. What we really needed, though, was a strong base of dancers who were confident with the basics first. Unsurprisingly the classes that did that were the most successful. The intermediate / advanced classes… not so much.

14 ) Preparation is Rewarded
The days I’ve fully prepared for choir rehearsal have always been the best rehearsals. I’ve gotten a lot done. The choir’s learned a lot. Honestly, I’m amazed that I don’t prepare regularly given how much better things go when I’m prepared.

15) Preparation is Hard to Do
Preparation is kind of like exercise. While you’re doing it you sometimes feel good, and after you’ve done it you feel excellent. But it’s really hard to get up the willpower to do it in the first lace. Convincing myself to focus and figure out a day or two before rehearsal what I need or want to to do at the next rehearsal is not trivial.

Having compelling goals helps this. (Huh, who’d have though…) Having a lifestyle setup that supports this is also immensely helpful. If you and everyone in your household knows and respects that every Friday after work you spend an hour on preparing for rehearsal, it gets a lot easier to take the time to actually prepare. Funny that.

16 ) Leadership Takes Both More and Less Time Than I thought it did
In certain respects, leadership doesn’t take all that much time. With being SAA president I didn’t have to be at every weekly swing dance. I only had to organize the monthly meetings, preside over said meeting, and make sure all the administrative stuff with being a student group was taken care of. Really it wasn’t that much.

Similarly with choir, I only really need to figure out the day of what we’re going to sing, and then be there every week to facilitate the rehearsal.

MOAS, I have 4 reports a year I have to send in, and then I have to organize the weekly workshop, most of which are recurring ones anyway.

At the same time, if you want the group to flourish you will have an invisible weight on your shoulders all the time. You have to coordinate with your executive board. You have to prepare for choir practice. You have to encourage people to come to the weekly workshops. Writing emails can take a while. Doing publicity can take a while. And these are the kind of activities where it’s hare to measure how long they take. Some don’t actually take that long, but they can feel like they take a long time. Some zap your mental energy. (How do you quantify that drain?) In short, it’s complicated.

Do I think Leadership is Worth it?
Absolutely. When something I’ve worked on turns out well it feels immensely wonderful. Working with other people to create something big and cool is also great. It’s a great way to develop yourself and come face to face with your limitations. You meet a lot of people. You become a better person for it. (Hopefully) Really, I’d recommend leadership to anyone who wants a systematic way to improve themselves and the community around them.

1 ) Easiest Way to Make Connections
As a leader, you are visible to your group. People are more likely to remember your name. You’ll have to interact with others in order do complete your projects. Really, it’s a no brainer. As a leader you will meet people.

When I was president of SAA, I presided over meetings. That alone got people to recognize me. I also acted as a bridge between SAA and the other Ann Arbor swing group, so I interacted with the other group too. To this day, I’m still mostly remembered by the Ann Arbor swing people that were around during my tour of service even though I haven’t been dancing in months. More than that, I wouldn’t have any reservation about asking them to help me organize an event or something.

2 ) People who never talked to you before will all of a sudden take an interest in you
This is something that’s sort of distressed me, but seems to come with the territory. People who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you weren’t in a position of power — even if you were an active member before — will now remember your name and talk to you. This happened both as SAA president and as MOAS. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wonder how to treat these people. Is it that they’re attracted to power or something?

I struggled with this for a while until I realized something: Unless you’re in a leadership position you personally aren’t vital to the functioning of the group. You aren’t someone that a general member of the group ought to know. There’s only so much time and energy in your life, it’s best to spend it on important people (and people who you likely to like). A leader qualifies as an important person. I don’t totally agree with this philosophy, but I can understand it… and may even unconsciously act on it too. So, yeah, just because someone gives you the time of day primarily because you’re a leader doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.

3 ) Service is King
People will love you and want to work with you if you do service. With the MOAS position I volunteered to take care of room scheduling and that’s done a lot to endear the other leaders to me. Same thing with being choir director. The more you give, the more get. The important thing here is not to do service with the expectation that you’re going to get anything out of it other than the joy of seeing something work well. People will sense your ulterior motives and won’t like you all that much.

4 ) Detaching Yourself from Your Ideas is a good thing
I mentioned this in my last post on detachment. Basically if you want to get a proposal passed you have to be detached from most of the details. For example, in SAA I wanted to try a totally new schedule for classes. I wanted to turn SAA into more of a teaching organization than a social dance organization. That took quite a bit of doing. I made an extensive proposal that took account of everything, but most importantly I left lots of areas open to adjustment. I didn’t care how we phased it in or where the extra practices took place. What I cared about was that that there were more classes and that we changed things fairly soon.

The proposal got passed, and of all the things I tried to start while President, I think that was the most successful.

5 ) Contempt is Bad
In Gladwell’s book Blink he has a chapter that discusses an instance in which a scientist/psychologist type person takes a look at a video of a newly married couple and can tell in an instant whether or not a couple would stay married or get divorced. The primary factor he looked for was contempt, a state where one partner does not respect the other.

Unsurprisingly, if you have contempt for the people you’re working with you’re in for a bad experience. Within a few months of being the head of SAA I developed contempt for my fellow board members, and unsurprisingly things went downhill from there. Ah, hindsight. Whatever you do, when you notice yourself developing disrespect for your anyone in organization WATCH OUT. Chances are there’s been some misunderstanding.

6 ) Criticism comes with the Job
When you’re in a leadership position, someone’s inevitably going to criticize you. It’s OK. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad job. What it does mean is you need a method for dealing with it. If you take it personally, feel sorry for yourself, and ask why they aren’t attacking other people in the group… you’ll be doing a disservice to everyone else you’re serving.

7 ) No matter what you do not everyone will be happy
Going on #6, not only will you be criticized, but not everyone will be happy with your decisions. Even your good decisions. The way to know if your decisions are actually good is to ask yourself “is this aligned with where the group wants and/or needs to go?” You also need to look at the criticism you receive, see the criticism.

If you’ve determined the criticism is misguided, should you try to convince the other person of their wrongness? It depends mostly on how much you need to have them on your side and how much time you have. And even then, if you explain your position carefully and well and explain why their response doesn’t make sense and the response is to reiterate their position… it’s probably not worth your time to pursue it further.

8 ) The Loudest Person does not necessarily represent the whole group
This can be really hard to remember. In the choir the majority of the people there don’t have a strong opinion on the music, but one or two people do. I want people to feel welcome to give their opinions and know that it will be heard and acted upon. At the same time I know that it’s not always a good idea to obey what those one or two people suggest just because I’m trying to be amenable to other ideas.

It’s a balancing act. Sometimes it’s wise to listen. Sometimes it’s not. Again, this is best when you have a clear idea of what to measure up suggestions to. Is it aligned with what the group wants to do? How much time is being spent arguing points that don’t have clear answers? Etc.

More to come on Monday!

First: What is detachment? Why is detachment a good idea?

Detachment is not letting your primitive brain get emotionally involved with a situation. It’s not letting emotion be the sole driver of your decisions. It’s pretending that you’re an outside observer watching what’s happening. Here are some examples to illustrate the concept and show you when it’s a good idea to be detached.

Buying a house When you’re buying a house (or making any large purchase or big decision) it’s a good idea to not be too attached to it. Meaning it’s a good idea to not care about what your buying or at least remind yourself constantly that it’s not yours yet. If you fall head over heels in love with it you run the risk of not seeing the flaws it has or of getting incredibly disappointed when it fails the house inspection or when your lender refuses to give you the money you need to buy it. On top of that, the house is a physical object. It could burn down. A meteorite could crash into it. It’s impermanent. The more attached to it you are, the more unnecessary disappointment you risk.

Your kids Or more specifically, the dreams you have for your kids. The truth is your children are not what you dream, hope, or wish them to be. You may envision them as captains of industry when really all they want to do is teach. You may envision them as staying nearby forever when they really want to travel the world and go on adventures. The more attached you are to what you want your kids to become, the more difficult your life will be. Your kids either won’t fulfill their potential and will resent you, or they’ll go off and live the life they were meant to live and you’ll mourn the loss of something you never had. The less attached you are to the dreams you have for your kids, the more able you are to help them flourish. By being less attached, I mean you still care and love your kids but you’re willing to put aside your expectations of them. You’re willing to remind yourself that your hopes are not necessarily reality.

Beliefs Your beliefs are based on the experience you’ve had until now. In the future you may find that beliefs you’ve had no longer make sense to you anymore. The less attached you are to your beliefs the easier it will be to live in keeping with where you are at any given moment. This is where things get tricky. What does it mean to be detached from your beliefs? They make up your identity, after all. The trick here is to be attached to truth. That is, be attached to what’s real, to what is. Our understanding of what is true changes over time, but the commitment to truth doesn’t have to change. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, want truth in our lives. Identify yourself as a truth seeker, and you’ll almost automatically be detached from your beliefs.

Proposals Let’s say you’ve made a proposal for some project that you need to get approved by an executive board. The more you attached you are to each of the details in your proposal, the less likely it will get passed. And if it does get passed it’ll be with a lot of changes you feel uncomfortable about. On the other hand, if there’s a goodly number of aspects you don’t really care about and only a few things you can’t compromise on, the more likely your proposal will get passed and the more likely you’ll be happy about what got passed.

Detachment is not about suppressing emotion

Whenever I heard or read about detachment I’d always felt uncomfortable about it because I was afraid it meant I was supposed to be totally and completely rational. That my having warm attachment feelings was bad. That it was a bad idea to let those feelings have any say in my decision making. Whenever I thought about it I’d see that actually doing what I thought detachment meant would be stupid. If you’re choosing your career based solely on what’s practical you may find 9-5 schedule unbearable. If you’re choosing a partner based solely on practical rational things (How much debt does he have? How much money does he make? Do I like her parents?) you’ll find your home life lacking. It’s often an excellent idea to follow your intuition.

On further examination and after practicing detachment anyway, I realized that’d I’d misunderstood what was meant by detachment. Detachment is not the same as not feeling anything at all. When you’re detached from your emotions, you still feel them. They even can play a part in your decision making (Acting on intuition, anyone?), but your emotions do not control you. They’re a source of information.

Take the house, for example. Aaron and I are buying a house right now and it has been a fairly emotional process. For one thing the house I’d sort of been eying since the summer turned out to be in our price range, was still available in the fall, was one of the first houses we looked at, and when we went to see it it fit a lot of our wants. I basically fell in love with it. But I didn’t let that attachment feeling drive me to make an offer right there. I acknowledged the feeling, made a mental note, and then Aaron and I got a buyer’s agent and looked at 20 more houses.

Waiting to get a buyer’s agent and looking at more houses was a great idea, and something I could only do by forcing myself to be somewhat detached from the strong warm feelings I first had toward the house. By getting a buyer’s agent that meant that we weren’t the ones doing the negotiating, and by looking at all those other houses we really appreciated what the house had to offer. Also by being at least somewhat detached, I was mitigating the disappointment I’d feel if the house failed the inspection or we couldn’t get a loan or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be disappointed if it doesn’t go through, but it won’t be nearly as bad as it would be if I let myself be totally attached to it.

In short, detachment is a really good idea. It gives both sides of your brain a chance to work out a problem. It lessens the pain you feel when things change unexpectedly. It makes you feel happier because it aligns your life with truth. Yay detachment!