You are both 100% right, even if you disagree…

Next time someone insists she is right, when you know she’s not, remember two things:

1. She is right.
2. Her being right does not make you wrong.
3. You can both be right while holding opposing views.

That’s probably not what you learnt in childhood, at home and at school, but the reality is, we each have our own version of world.  We create our individual reality by the way we filter out the information coming in through our senses.  No one else has exactly the same values, memories, beliefs and experiences filtering information as you, so no one has exactly the same reality.

You experience it every day in many small ways:  when someone orders something from the café display you hadn’t noticed, when your colleague spots the good looking man that happily married you hadn’t seen in the room, when you hear your child yelling before anyone else notices, and when no one else notices that plant dying for lack of water while you’re away.

So you are both right in your own realities.  Being comfortable in that, feeling secure in your own personal identity, opens up opportunities for calm negotiation for common ground.  It’s quite liberating as you can stop fighting to prove yourself right, or them wrong, and use all that energy for creatively sourcing options for moving forward.