Can We All Get Along?

 

"Can we all get along?"   This question, posed by Rodney King, continues to stump us.  In all fairness this failure to all get along goes back to the origins of man.  Survival, or the sense that survival depends on specific conflicting outcomes, certainly fuels not getting along.  What I'm speaking of here, is not about those kinds of choices.  What I'm speaking about here is how we've distorted our differences into the art of using differences to self justify.  Our politicians do it, our special interest groups do it, and we do it.  This approach is evidenced in bullying, and in us and them thinking.  So let's look at the countermeasure for this faulty thinking...common ground...that's right...common ground.  So here's my story that lead me here.  I have been challenged with how different I was from one of our leaders at work for years, absolutely years.  It has been a contentious relationship at best, and downright antagonistic at worst.  The conflict has almost cost me my job along the way.  Then something happened.  He and I made a mind boggling discovery: we were different, we communicated differently and understood differently.  Even more astounding was the discovery that this condition wasn't a deal breaker: we could be different and still get along.  For myself, I was amazed to find out that he wasn't intentionally trying to get on my last nerve, and that he did want to connect in meaningful ways in order to enrich each of our lives.  In truth, he discovered the same thing about me.  We had, up until that moment, been of the belief that we were each out to make the others life a living hell.  We found out that we were very wrong about each other.  This discovery occurred because he attended a Communication Skills Class that I was facilitating, and we came face to face with our challenge in the middle of the class.  What we discovered is that it took a caring "village" to work through our differences.  As this person and I were starting to spin out of control in our habitual non-getting along behavior, a young engineer in the class called a time out on us, and shared his observation that we just didn't get each other.  He then, miraculously, translated what I was trying to say into a format that this leader could understand and, VOILA! for maybe the first time in a long time we finally got each other.  Even more importantly, we read in each other's faces and body language that this was something that we had collectively never considered.  From that point forward we were each more willing to give the other the space and grace to be different, and instead of going at each other's throat, we got that we simply didn't get each other.  We learned to slow down and not judge, but to give the benefit of the doubt and seek to understand.  It made all the difference in the world.  Just today, this self same person, who I would have framed as my nemesis not that long ago, came to my defense and had my back.  WOW!  So when I face Rodney's question of, "Can we all get along?"  I am inspired to say, it certainly is possible, but it's going to take a collective effort and a willingness to accept differences, and assume good intentions, and then slowly and carefully explore where communication and understanding may be getting off track.  Finding the common ground amidst the differences provides a point of alignment to start developing understanding.  Identifying common ground and common understanding is the key to evolving a sense of connectedness and a sense of "getting" each other.  Focusing on our differences isn't going to get us there.