Lynn Toler Instagram – I used to be the biggest curmudgeon. I thought the world was a scary place and for the life of me I could not figure out how everyone was just out there smiling and laughing when there was so much to worry about. Naturally anxious I had the good fortune of having an extraordinary emotionally intelligent mother. She talked about everything people did in terms of how they felt. And if you want to be in the business of understanding others you have to be able to understand how they feel. Here’s the hard part, you can’t judge them while you’re trying to understand them. If you tag them too soon with a label that doesn’t fit you will consume all new information about them from the skewed perspective of your opinion and you will get it wrong. I went to an all girls high school. I was an anxious kid who went off to college at 17. All the guys thought I was stuck up and snooty. I was simply scared of them. The first guy I ended up dating was the first one to look past the perception and talk to me. We are killing nuance these days. People who have nothing but a platform and an opinion are giving full throated psychological assessments of people based on a ten second video. And those assessments are made not by inquiry but by running ten cents worth of information through a million dollars worth of stuff you don’t know, that bears interest born of bias. Let’s not be so anxious to wag fingers. Let’s not make every social sin subject to the death penalty. Let’s not pile on other people’s pain just because it’s good fodder. Enjoy people who are different. Get interested not anxious. My #life got a lot better when I sat down my predilection to judge hastily based on how I felt and learned to assess accurately because I understood how others did. Relevant #Tolerisms: Everyone sees through the prism of their past. Don’t come to conclusions about what you see until you understand how your history bends the light you shine on it. Think twice before judging people stuck on the side of a mountain you haven’t been required to climb. #emotions #emotionalintelligence #grace #peace