Pages

Friday, July 9, 2010

Don’t Suggest but Break the Cloud

We live with three things people, things and events. Our knowledge about the world is mostly confined to our assumptions or beliefs about people, things and events. These assumptions influence our perceptions and may reinforce the assumptions.

If there is any conflict in life with the way we are living that is because of our untested assumptions about people and the reason behind those assumptions. So, when people come up with their troubles (Basically conflicts with certain situations) we try to provide them with readymade solutions which we may have with us from the past. And we assume it will work because of the similar situation we encountered in the past. However, we do not understand the assumptions on which the situation is based and the assumption on which the people in that situation are involved in.

The problem comes when we are completely different individual from the other person, which is true in most of the cases. So, how they live, how they behave, how they deal and how they respond is completely different from how we do it. Generally people ask suggestions, when they don’t have clarity on the situation or when they are in some conflict with the situation. So, our suggestions do more harm than help to those people if we follow our intuition and experience and give them the solutions when the reality is completely out of sync.


However, considering the intellectual capabilities you can help them without making any suggestions. This can be done by providing with the clarity of the situation they are facing, what are the assumptions on which the situation became conflict and examining those assumptions. You can give the clarity by reiterating what the other person said and you can make them understand their situation better which led to the conflict by questioning the assumptions and hence you can break the cloud and help them to help themselves in finding solutions.

2 comments:

ramya ravi said...

You are right. We often think what we experienced in our past can be easily applied to anyone in that situation. And that solution we have come up with feels generic in application. The point is rightly observed that as individuals our treatments of problems and solutions and the genesis of the situation maybe different..which is a case to case basis. If you remember our discussion from Subway...it was along the exact same lines. In any situation...there is only perception and on that perception there is an assumption...and on that there is choice to either take it or leave it. But that is the plethora that the human beings enjoy. And will never be devoid of.

I think you have analyzed many such instances before arriving at this. It is interesting to note that we learn from what experience and decide if its wrong or not.

Gurava Reddy said...

True..

I strongly believe knowledge is about awareness and skill is about application of knowledge.

Till we master the skill .. we are devoid of these things.

This is what, i learned from sociology and made perfect sense wrt the experiences i had Ramya.

Thanks for you comments.

July 11, 2010 8:44 AM