Guest Post: 5 Ways To Avoid Thanksgiving Dinner Fights

As we take our attention off disagreements with others, we can watch the quality of conversation change.

by Barry Brownstein

Political divisions are ugly, and those divisions have spilled over onto the Thanksgiving table. One study found that “partisan differences cost American families 62 million person-hours of Thanksgiving time.” Presumably, those same differences are impacting the quality of family time throughout the year.

Time to count our blessings has become another opportunity to count our grievances.

Here are five suggestions to help bring harmony to your Thanksgiving table.

1. Begin with Your Purpose in Mind
Our mind selectively interprets our experience, in part, based upon where our attention is focused.

When our purpose at the dinner table is clouded by wishes to feel superior to a relative who “just doesn’t get it” we are setting ourselves up for an unhappy Thanksgiving. Since our attention is directed by our purpose, our mind will jump on every shred of evidence to confirm that our relative is a “problem.”

By allowing our mind to gnaw on irritations and grievances, we have made harmony dependent upon others behaving as we think they should. Notice, as details of our complaints fill our mind, we suffer more.

We can lead by going first; we can find our higher purpose for this year’s Thanksgiving gathering. As we take our attention off disagreements with others, we can watch the quality of conversation change.

2. Ask Yourself: Would I Rather Be Right or Happy?
Is it important to have an opinion about everything?  How often do we look for a pause in the conversation so we can tell others why they are wrong?

When we express an opinion that doesn’t need to be expressed, we are saying to the other person: My function is to correct you, and your function is to accept my correction. Should we be surprised if others resist us?

Ryan Holiday, author of several books on Stoicism, writes of the price we pay for our opinions:

“If you were to think of the worst punishment you could inflict on a person it would be to cast a spell on them that says, ‘You will now have a strong opinion on everything you see and hear.’ Why? Because inevitably they find that much of what happens to them is disagreeable to that opinion, and worse, they will find themselves in many pointless disagreements with other people about those opinions.”

Here is the good news. We can be grateful for our opinionated relatives; they provide us an opportunity to practice not having to always be right. We can choose, instead, to be curious about the opinions of others.

3. Practice Ben Franklin’s Humility Rule
In his autobiography, Ben Franklin writes of learning of a flaw in his own character revealed to him by a friend: “I was generally thought proud, that my pride showed itself frequently in conversation, that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing and rather insolent.”

Franklin realized he was lacking in humility and, despite practice, he could not “boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue.” So, Franklin added a rule to his life:

“I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so, or it so appears to me at present.”

Franklin noticed how contradicting others gave him pleasure: “When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition.”

This Thanksgiving, we can practice denying ourselves the “pleasure” of contradicting others.

4. Understand the Nature of Feelings
We believe that the intensity of our feelings is a signal that we are right and others are wrong. Upset feelings are a guide to the quality of our thinking and not the correctness of our position. When we experience intense emotions, we commonly attribute our emotions to what is external. We are certain that “obnoxious” Uncle Joe has caused our discomfort by expressing his flawed opinions.

Full stop! Being irritated, being annoyed, being angry are pre-existing qualities in us and are not caused by Uncle Joe. Our reaction to Uncle Joe reveals to us a flaw in our own character.

Instead of irritation, we can cultivate gratitude by remembering how the sacrifices of the family members sitting at our table have improved our lives.

5. Reflect on Our Shared Human Experience
Politics is divisive, but all human experiences have common elements.

Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning also wrote The Will to Meaning. In it, he describes a “tragic triad” of human experiences. He observed, “There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die.”

Before a cosmic moment has gone by, everyone at our Thanksgiving tables will experience Frankl’s “tragic triad.”

We can look at the faces around the table and let our hearts melt with the truth of our common journey.

When we focus on what we share, and not what divides us, Love comes to the forefront of our experience.

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. He delivers leadership workshops to organizations and blogs at BarryBrownstein.com, and Giving up Control.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

America Asks: When Does Daylight Saving Time Begin?

In the spirit of my February 2014 post, "America asks: What time is the Super Bowl?," today I help Americans who inquire about the start of Daylight Saving Time.

The answer, according to iDigital Times:

The spring Daylight Saving Time change in the United States begins on the 2nd Sunday in March. This year, that date is Sunday, March 8, 2015 at 2 am. Therefore, Americans in most of the 50 states should prepare spring forward, setting their clocks forward one hour at 2 am on Sunday, March 8, 2015

For the answer to a different form of the question -- when did Daylight Saving Time begin? -- let's turn to Backstory with the History Guys (Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf). In an episode of the radio program rerun this weekend to coincide with the onset of Daylight Saving Time, they discuss the origins of the concept, by Ben Franklin in Paris:

BRIAN: That’s exactly right. I mean where did daylight savings time come from in the first place? I mean I don’t think it was around back in my time, where we were in perfect synchronicity with the world around us. So why did you guys invent this?

ED: Well, I think we’ve got to throw that to Peter because we know who came up with the idea for daylight savings time.

PETER: Well, it was that visionary Ben Franklin. He was all over daylight savings time.

In 1784, in the Journal of Paris, he was writing about well, the way they kept their time in Paris. And what they did is to sleep all morning because they were up all night. And Franklin did one of these calculations, a characteristic Enlightenment thing. And he’d count the number of candles that had to burn to sustain this misuse of daylight. And it would be an immense savings to the French people.

And they were going into debt at this period, badly into debt. And it led to the French Revolution. So no French Revolution, if they had had daylight savings time.

ED: And they might not have sold Louisiana to us if they wouldn’t had to pay for those candles.

PETER: Absolutely.

... and the origin of the practice, in the early 20th century:

ED: Franklin was the first to admit that he didn’t have the means to implement daylight savings time. So Karin, let’s put it Ed out of his misery. Daylight savings time in the United States started in 1918.

And there’s one thing that consistently in the 20th century got the whole country to go on daylight savings time and that was war. It was actually the Germans who first started daylight savings time in 1916.

BRIAN: So if we were going to fight, then we had to be on the same streets.

ED: Exactly.

PETER: Because you show at a battle and they wouldn’t be there.

ED: Well quite literally, the British did go on daylight savings time, a month later or very shortly after. The real point, Karin, is that Germany, Britain, the United States, go on daylight savings time because we can save energy. It was all about well, where are we spending most of our money on energy? And a lot of it was being spent on lighting when daylight savings time was first introduced and even during World War II.

Then we have this thing called air conditioning that comes along. So that when Richard Nixon, at the height of the energy crisis in the early 1970s, calls for extended daylight savings time, it’s not so clear that we’re really saving that much energy because people have started air conditioning their homes. They come home after work and if they’re in Dallas or Houston or Jacksonville, they turn on the air. And that uses a lot of energy.

When I was younger, Daylight Saving Time began in April and ended in October, so it was about (or a bit less than) half the year. Now it begins in March and ends in November, so Daylight Saving Time actually makes up a greater part of the year than Standard Time. By that standard, so to speak, shouldn't the period of the year now known as Daylight Saving Time be called "Standard Time" and what's now called "Standard Time" be called "Winter Time"?

We'll have an extra hour to think about it next fall.