Try exercising a new muscle--support, uplift and ask how you can be a part of making their ideas reality.
For me this has been an extremely difficult habit to break -- I've been born with the gift of analysis. Since I was young, people around me have encouraged and rewarded me for my analytic nature. It helped me to become an engineer.
I spent decades striving to be right, to prove my point, to win the argument. It became so ingrained in me that I even to this day I sometimes cannot separate myself from it. My language, how I view the world, my judgments, all of it is framed through analysis, winning, proving and justifying.
Is it any wonder? What methods are used to assess students in school? What is prized at work? Who are our heroes in popular fiction?
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
We have all been equipped with so many tools. From my own experience I suppose that the least used tool for many of us is our heart.
Our heart would have us feel love, support and compassion. Our heart wants us to follow our intuitions, live with passion, be open and vulnerable.
If you are anything like me, you probably haven't really used your heart most of your life.
One way to exercise it is to make a different choice with respect to other's ideas and dreams -- just get on board with them no matter what. Be like a kid in a sandbox -- help build that cool town... Or create that grass and mud soup.
Who cares what "people" think-- just play with your friend and see what you can create together.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Aristotle
(image from http://www.happyfromwithin.com/blog/head-to-heart-connection)
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