Pick Your Battles and Win

I was about to write this post about the importance of “picking your battles”, when I read Michelle’s 5 Tips For Better Communication and saw that this was one of her tips!  It is obviously an important issue to be addressed in relationships with significant others, spouses, children, friends, or anyone that you have ever disagreed with.

I have observed, and experienced personally, many times the problem of spending too much time and energy arguing about issues that those involved should probably just let slide.  Think before you speak and don’t worry yourself over small issues!  It sounds easy to offer this as advice, but I know that is much harder in practice.

The main difficulty in addressing this problem is that it’s much easier to see what’s going on in an argument from the outside.  I observe couples and parent/child relationships all the time where one is arguing with the other and I can tell that the discussion is going to go nowhere.  Both parties involved get all heated up about something that probably didn’t even really need to be addressed and should have been avoided.  But would I know that it was a trivial argument if it was me that was feeling irritated?

This is also difficult because everyone has trouble controlling their anger.  If you feel it, you want to just let the steam out and express yourself!  But give yourself a moment to take some deep breaths and intellectualize the situation.  Is this an issue worth starting a fight about?  Am I just feeling irritable?  Will it achieve anything if I disagree right now?  Have we already discussed this and reached no resolution?  Are there bigger underlying issues that are causing me to be upset about this small issue?

If you have developed an argumentative relationship with someone in your life, think about the idea of picking your battles.  It’s a really difficult issue to tackle because it involves pulling yourself out of the moment and addressing the larger situation that you are in, but I guarantee that it is the healthy and smart choice for you and the people in your life.

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