Do you have a friend whose judgement you trust implicitely? Lately I’ve been dealing with a situation that posed both a strategic and ethical dilema. I was having some problems deciding how to approach the situation, how to frame it, and how tackle it. I talked about it with several of my friends, but more in a thinking outloud sort of mode. I often use people as soundboards, to help me clarify my thinking. But this time it wasn’t enough. And I realized that, sad as it is, I don’t really have many friends whose judgement I trust implicitely. I have many friends who are smart, who are ethical, who are committed, whom I love… but it’s hard for me to trust, in part because I don’t necessarily trust myself to communicate what I mean correctly, and in part because I’m not always good about explaining where I come from and thus finding a common ground from where to look at the situation.
But then there is my friend Charlotte. She is great, one of my favourite people in the world. She is without doubts one of the smartest people I know, one of the few people I’m readily willing to admit is smarter than I. But she’s also one of the most thoughtful ones, someone for whom ethics are so intrinsic that they’re really discussed as such, I cannot imagine her doing anything unethical. She has the amazing gift of being able to disagree with you completely, and neither put you in the defensive or make you feel like an idiot. And she is completely non-judgemental.
So, faced with this problem, I talked to her. And she put it all on perspective for me, she helped me phrase what I was saying and thinking and finds its moral/strategic framework and now I know what to do.
If just everyone was so lucky to have someone like her around šŸ™‚