Hi, from Cowboy Country! I'm not at some western cowboy ranch... I'm roughing it, sleeping in a horse trailer, herding over 300 cattle on horseback, eating salads with my hand out of a bag, taking crap for being a vegan, using hay at times as a bathroom, checking my clothes for ticks, digging fence post holes, shooting prairie dogs and a lot of other things. I've only been at it for a few days and my brain is tapped out. My body is beaten up, sore, blistered, and tired. When I was a kid cowboy stuff looked so cool, I had no idea how hard the work actually was. This trip as been a blessing and a lesson for a few reasons:
1) I've learned more in a week than I have in a long time. Out on the ranch problems happen constantly and solutions need to be created just as fast.
2) I realize and see how nice, comfortable, and easy my life is.
3) I'm getting to see other perspectives on economics, poverty, agriculture, politics, guns, religion, etc and while I don't agree with all of it, that's ok, it would be a pretty bland, uninventive, and boring world if we all agreed on everything. Through this I get to learn and understand why people believe what they do. Why their lens on life has taught them what it has.
And need more understanding. We need more empathy, compassion, getting in other's shoes to understand why they think the way they do. We need less agree/disagree conversations, less I'm right you’re wrong conversations, less you should or you shouldn't conversations. That is getting us nowhere except dividing us more and making us see our own countrymen and women as enemies and even other humans everywhere as enemies.
We need more understanding. To understand someone doesn't mean you have to agree with them or even believe they are right but it does mean for a moment you try and understand them, where they come from, why they believe what they believe, what their experience has them and how it has informed their beliefs.
What I've learned from doing this is that most of us want the same things for ourselves and others, health, happiness, prosperity, freedom, to be safe, a chance to earn a good living, and opportunity. And most of us just seem to disagree about the road we need to take to get to those things.
Fighting about who’s right or wrong isn't bringing us closer to a solution but doing the opposite. Maybe asking questions, being curious, stopping yourself from sharing what you know, or what you believe for just a minute, and asking someone else questions, not to judge or correct them but simply to understand them. I wonder what would be possible in a world where people worked as hard to understand each other as they currently do to be right about what they believe would look like?
Alex Terranova is a DreamMason and knows you are one too. He’s the Author of Fictional Authenticity, Creator of Fictional Authenticity-The Course, Hosts The DreamMason Podcast, Co-Hosts The Coaching Show Podcast, is a successful Certified Personal & Professional Performance Business & Life Coach who supports strong and successful high achievers to unmask convention, embrace the rebel within, and more deeply explore the complex and agitated edges of our existence to create more clarity, freedom, and success in their lives.