The other day I received this email:

Good Morning, Kern

Our discussion group selected “Difficult Conversations” for our weekly gatherings.

My initial reaction was “Are you kidding? I don’t need a book. I have been talking just fine for many years!“  

However, after 6 weeks of in-depth consideration and discussion, I saw that I still have much to learn. I am grateful for this experience. Your book made me realize the great impact my “story self”  has on my perceptions and conversations. Your survival strategies are invaluable and certainly have enhanced my awareness of others. 

That was a nice email to receive, for sure. But what I really loved about it was finding out that Audrey, the woman who wrote it, is 80 years old. Talk about having a growth mindset!

Adam Grant, in his new book, Think Again, writes: “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.” Audrey has those skills. I believe we all have them. They can just be difficult to access. 

As Grant goes on to say: “Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable…. Reconsidering something we believe in deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.” (This threat to our identity is the dynamic I talked about in an earlier post, The Hardest Conversation.)

So what do we do? What does it take for us to put our identity on the line, to open up for reconsideration our cherished convictions and judgements? 

For my cousin, Jon Karpilow, the motivation came when he realized the bubble he’d been living in for so long was running out of oxygen. While he agrees with just about every liberal position you can think of, he was getting tired of the constant vilification of those on the right:  “I was just tired of listening to the same message over and over and over again, and I just had a really difficult time believing that all these people were bad people and that there was no saving element to their personality.”

So what did Jon do to burst his bubble? He and his wife Lori moved from liberal Boulder, CO to Trump-friendly Arnold, CA, where Jon ended up taking a job in — wait for it — a gun shop. He stepped into a situation that forced him to challenge, not so much his views on gun control policies, but his views of the people he saw as standing in the way of those policies.

You can listen to Jon’s story in my new podcast, but here are a few edited excerpts to give you a flavor of his experience:

From day one they nicknamed me “crunchy granola” because of my Boulder origins. Everybody in the community knew that I didn't carry a gun, that I didn't own a gun, that I probably shouldn't be a guy selling guns in a gun shop….But we developed relationships and there was no animosity between me and anybody in the community that was tied to the issues of politics. 

I suspect a lot of the division that exists within the country today is amplified simply because we're not listening to our neighbors, we're not talking to our neighbors. We're listening to the voices in the media instead of actually making our own decisions about who people are, and whether or not they can be our friends and colleagues. 

I think it's really essential for us to mix, to get to know the people who disagree with us, or we think disagree with us. And once we start doing that we’ll find they’re more like us than we thought.

I was paid to come to the shop two days a week, but I ended up coming five days, just because I enjoyed being with this crowd so much. 

I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast. Even if you think working in a gun shop is several steps too far outside your bubble, Jon’s story might encourage you to find your own, more modest version of bubble-popping.

So with that in mind, here’s a suggestion:

Think of a person you’ve decided you don’t like or don’t want to get to know because of a belief they hold, or an attribute they have that you find objectionable. 

Then — unless your reason has to do with something like the threat of physical harm —  see if you can tell yourself, this issue is important to me, but I don’t need to make it the entire basis of the relationship. I’m going to get to know this person in greater dimension, and see if there’s a basis for a different kind of relationship. One that might actually allow us to be friends.

You might find, like Jon eventually did, that by focusing on the relationship you build the trust you need to talk about what matters most to you, and do it in a way the other person can actually hear.