It's okay to be opinionated.
IF you have good research and listening skills, know how to express your arguments tactfully, succinctly, and elegantly, and know when to keep your peace.
Having research skills, and putting them to use, reinforces your opinions with (at least some) facts.
Listening skills helps you to make sense of what other people are saying and not saying.
Being able to express your arguments well not only keeps you from turning your argument into an unnecessarily long rant, it also helps others keep track of what you're saying.
You may even convince a few.
Finally, knowing when to yield ground, when not to belabour dead ends, and when to just let things slide, keeps you from becoming too uptight, and keeps your relationships intact.
Please don't become that contrary, obnoxious person who butts into everyone's conversations and doesn't know when to shut up or concede.
Sometimes, keeping it light is the smarter way to go.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
Learning the Hard Way: Who vs How
I was brought up in a family that espoused independence and valued self-reliance.
From a young age, I heard things like,
“Don’t rely on others,”
“The world doesn’t owe you a living”,
“God helps those who help themselves” (Slightly odd, because we were not a spiritual / religious family).
I rarely accepted help and even more rarely asked for it.
My worldview was that nobody was going to “save” me. I had to figure out where to go and beat my own path.
It certainly didn’t help that social skills weren’t my strong suit. Yet, I didn’t feel that much of a loss because I thought that I didn’t need help anyway.
I never thought that this was out of the ordinary.
The trouble with having such a mindset is that you start to question the motives of people who may genuinely want to help - not out of selfish desire or personal gain, but just to be helpful.
I certainly had these thoughts. If I didn’t want to help others, why would someone else want to help me?
Even today, this question enters my mind.
I am skeptical of others and their intentions, and I see extending a helping hand as having the effect of disabling the other person’s resilience, i.e. helping others makes them / keeps them weak.
Troublingly, this fed a fear of weakness. I feared that accepting help would make me weaker or cause others to think that I am weak.
Through reading a number of books and my involvement and participation in a Men’s Group (which I talked about in an earlier post), I started working through the latter issue.
The former issue - that of my fear that accepting help would make me weaker - is still an issue. As I think on it, I find that I don’t apply this as much to other people now, but I still apply it to myself.
It’s something I definitely have to work through because it’s starting to become problematic, especially in my current journey to validating and launching an online workshop - currently aimed at fellow introvert teachers / trainers who are new to the craft.
I will talk to someone who already has a sizeable online community, who is also an introvert, and who has previously offered to help promote useful content to his community.
I don’t know how it will go, but let’s try. One step at a time.
