When I was a small kid, I was taught by my parents and by my church to hold strong to your beliefs. To not let anything change your mind and to remain firm in them. Let them not be shaken and to remain true to God’s word. This is not necessarily wrong but I feel like it’s not right. With this mindset that I was pounded into, I was stubborn when it came to other people’s views. I wouldn’t consider them at all and I wouldn’t listen to them when it came to discussions because my mind was set that I held the core true beliefs and everything else was automatically false. This was when I was not the most open minded.

Now, there’s a difference being loose with your beliefs and listening to the other side. You should know what your core beliefs are and stick to your morals and such but as you discuss topics relating to them, you should go into the conversation with the mindset that you could be wrong. That’s right, I said that YOU could be wrong. Now, just because you are going in with that open mindset, doesn’t mean that you wrong. If you analyze their argument and listen to their side and still come to the conclusion that you are right, then maybe you are. However, listening to the other side is way more than just hearing what they have to say physically.

Listening to someone’s side of an argument means putting yourself in their shoes and trying to understand their argument from their point of view. Some people may say that they do that but in reality, they don’t. In reality, we shouldn’t be putting ourselves in their shoes because that still leaves us, ourselves, in a different pair of shoes. Really, we should be putting ourselves in their person and not just the shoes. We need to look at their side of the argument and look at it with their morals and their priorities until we can see why they believe what they do. Until you do that, you have not started on listening to them. The next step in listening to the other side is to not just see how and why they believe what they believe but also to try and see if you can argue for their side and by doing so, in the process, argue against your side. After doing all of these exercises, you should have a good idea of why they believe what they believe and if you don’t then you messed up in the process or you are to single minded and dogmatic to see another side. Even if it is something that goes completely against your own beliefs, your goal isn’t to convince yourself that you are wrong, your goal is to see things through their eyes.

It is now at the point where you again ask yourself, is your original argument still the same. I would say that most of the time, your opinion should change a little bit. However, it doesn’t have to. I’ve been in multiple situations where I have realized half way through my conversation that I am slightly off. There have been rare amounts of time where I have been not swayed form my original argument.

Here’s the thing with holding strong to your beliefs. They could be wrong. If you can’t question your own beliefs, they are probably wrong. If everyone walked through life thinking that they held the truth then we wouldn’t get anywhere. We have to be unafraid to see the other sides of a situation and be able to understand one another. The goal of a discussion should not be to win, but to make progress.