I’m sure we can all imagine a time when someone made a recommendation for a place to eat that we felt repulsed by. “You know I don’t like that place, I hate Chinese food, how about….”
Of course it’s not just food, we all express preferences in many aspects of life. We have our favorite grocery store. We have our favorite route to get from A to B. We have our way of doing things at work. All of theses things we like.
Unfortunately, others tend to have other preferences. And collectively our preferences occasionally clash. And we wind up arguing over the best way to stuff an envelope.
Fortunately, I believe the conflict is largely semantic. The words like and dislike, hate and love are expressions of strong feelings. But, when we use these words we’re often just expressing preferences. Preferences based on familiarity.
So when you say “I don’t like Chinese food” you are really saying “I’m not that familiar with Chinese food.” If you understand this, you’ll have a tool to influence yourself–and perhaps others–in a positive way.
If you start saying “I’m not familiar with your way of doing things” instead of “I don’t like your way of doing things” you might be surprised that you’re more likely to want to become familiar with another way of doing things that proves fruitful.
Try it out, the next time you catch yourself saying “I don’t like ___,” take a moment to pause and instead restate this as “I’m not familiar with ___,”
Sometimes you’ll have the bandwidth to invest in becoming familiar with something foreign. Sometimes you’ll realize you’re exhausted and for now you want to stick with the familiar. At least you won’t get caught up in passionate statements of like and hate, statements that can alienate others that feel quite the opposite.