Words that HEAL

Develop the art of active and empathetic communication as this helps deal with heated discussions more easily, and it also improves relationships

- Col Rajesh Bhukar

In our day-to-day life we deal with some topics that are lighthearted and easy to chat about, while others are loaded with emotions and people have divergent views. Conversations are very common and frequent in everyone's life, some are casual and others are serious that tend to attract stronger response, so what can one do to have serious conversations without ruining relationships.

To save effort, we continuously assume things about others and our brain does this automatically, using cognitive heuristics, to make broad assumptions or judgments about people based on little information. This leads to many discussions ending in conflicts.

Civil disagreement seems like a lost art nowadays. Hot-button topics that people avoided discussing in public earlier are now becoming favourite frontal topics. In the past, people didn't talk about charged subjects like religion, politics, sex, caste or creed equality, corruption, and income inequality, etc as this was likely to cause arguments and resulted in discussions ending in conflicts. But, society has changed and we often talk about these things more now, this leads to a rise in tempers and is impacting the peace and harmony in society. Civil disagreement remains a challenge with so much chaos and animosity between people.