We’ve probably all had the experience of walking away from a relationship because the other person held an opposing view on an issue important to us. The basis of the relationship was undermined, and so we walked.

To our tribal reptilian brain, that makes sense. After all, you’re either with me or against me. Part of my team or part of the other team. But an honest look at the world today would tell us this reptilian brain logic doesn’t hold up. By walking away from each other, our divisions are deepening, our problems are mounting, and our conflicts are getting more heated.

So what’s the alternative?

Now I could say it’s to see we’re all on the same team — the team of humanity. But what does that really mean?

To me it means that we all carry — and at some level manifest — the same set of human attributes, the good, the bad and the ugly. Think about it: the root of every problem we face comes down to some set of universal human frailties, including fear, ignorance, pride, selfishness, arrogance and greed. Frailties that, if we’re honest, we’d admit to knowing intimately.

Prioritizing the relationship over being right — the first of three “new survival strategies” I talk about in my workshop and book — is an acknowledgment of this commonality. And when we clearly see how these frailties operate in our own lives, we can’t help but replace our harsh judgements of “the other” with something else we all have in common: humility and compassion.

And rather than walking away in rejection of the other, we can instead demonstrate what’s so sorely lacking in the world right now: acceptance, respect, and kindness. Not toward their views or actions, necessarily, but toward that which we share: our humanity.

Will that solve our problems? No. But it will create the only foundation from which they can be solved.