We do the best we can until we know better, and then we do better.
This is as true for you as it is for me. The more we learn the better we do. What if we simply assumed that were true for every person that we meet? We hear a lot of complaining on social media about people not acting the way that we wish they would act, or the way we think we would act in their situation. I see people being shamed all the time for not doing what someone else thinks they should be doing.
But what if they don’t know what you know?
What if they received the same information that you did, but they didn’t perceive it in the same way? What if they could not comprehend its true meaning? What if they have other influences in their lives giving them conflicting information? What if their lives created certain filters through which they see the truth, which makes their truth different? What if they’re confused about what is right and are simply afraid to admit they don’t know because they don’t want to be shamed for not knowing?
How certain are you that what you know is right in the context of their lives? Even if there’s something that 99% of us agree is right, how can we say that ANYTHING is right for EVERYONE? How important is it to you to be right? How open are you willing to be to the viewpoints of others?
Instead of condemning others for viewpoints or actions that are not identical to our own, what if we simply assumed that they’re doing the best they can with the information they have to work with? What if we simply assumed the best of everyone we meet?
One way that we can do that, is to not label other people. If we use the sentence, “Did you see what that jerk did?”, then the person that were talking to is going to look for the behavior of a jerk. What if we replace that sentence with, “Did you see what that human did?” This leaves the person that you’re speaking to free to see what they see instead of foreshadowing what they’re looking for.
And if I’m willing to label somebody else a jerk, doesn’t that kind of make me a jerk?
What if we just give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are doing the best they can with the information they have in this moment.
We can even choose to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt! Instead of beating ourselves up for something that we have done in the past, what if we just choose to believe that we were doing the best we could with what we knew then. If we stand in our present, now knowing better, and we realized that we would like to have done something different in the past, we can use that information to inform our choices moving forward without first wielding it on ourselves like a baseball bat.
What if we just assumed the best?
Grow on!
How would it feel to give yourself the benefit of the doubt?
How much less stress would we feel if we gave everyone the benefit of the doubt?
What would the world be like if we each realized that every one of us is greater and wiser then we appear to be?
