How To Give Someone the Benefit of the Doubt

Sometimes, giving others the benefit of the doubt can feel like the most daunting task. And truthfully, if it doesn't, then chances are you're doing it completely wrong. The truth is: The best things don't come easy. To honestly and wholeheartedly give someone the benefit of the doubt is really a difficult task and we'd just be fooling ourselves to say otherwise.

Let me explain why giving someone the true benefit of the doubt is so stinking hard...

In society, we are conditioned to believe that even the smallest amount of humility is a terrible, terrible thing. Think now about that time when you just couldn't handle being wrong. You fought that fight 'til its absolute death. In the end, there really are no winners, but you had a persisting need to prove that your view was the correct view. It's okay, we've all been there. We've all done it more than once too. It's a pattern that reveals itself again and again in society. And there's no escaping from it until you recognize its presence and make a conscious and persistent effort to change.

I remember hearing one day that in order to break a habit, you have to do that thing at least 1000 times the "right" way before your brain would finally stop resorting to the default knowledge it had prior. That's honestly a lot of arguments, mess-ups, and mistakes, so you must be just as persistent as the conditioned thought. Maybe in the process, you'll realize that humility is actually a beautiful thing. Humility gives one the opportunity to assess exactly how their behavior is affecting others. Humility truly means to be humbled - it's in the word.

We shouldn't be putting ourselves or anyone else on a pedestal so humbleness is exactly what we actually need. When we can embody humbleness, we no longer look at situations with disgust for humility. You've been humiliated. I bet that sentence just bought a sickening sensation to your stomach. We need to remove the negative connotations we've attached to the word humility, but use humbled if that feels better for you for now.

Allowing myself to be humiliated means I don't have to be so rigid anymore. I can release some of that tension and defensiveness. I release the rigidness of my past beliefs. I release all the tension that invokes defensiveness or ill-feeling. I release it all to understanding. I'm realizing that I don't want to be so rigid anymore. I don't want to be right anymore. I want to be understanding. I don't want to be defensive. I want healthy boundaries.

Unfortunately, one of the hardest things about reality to accept is that we can't do any of the work for another person. No matter how much we love them and we care about them, we can never change their perception of humility or anything at all. Just as you are the only one who can do this work for you, you cannot embody this energy for another as well. We can get a little less defensive when we take the responsibility of another out of the equation. It's not our job, so it's not our problem. There's no rudeness when that's said because it comes from a space of healthy detachment.

Set healthy boundaries in your life by understanding your part in each situation without any judgment. People are who they are and you can't change that. You were who you were in that moment as well, and you can't change that either. But the knowledge and understanding you've now gone on to gain have allowed you to reflect on the situation with a higher perspective and you can now keep the insight you've developed in mind for the future. And hey, maybe that person might wake up one day and figure all this out too and do the same. Maybe they'll realize and reflect and say sorry, maybe they'll never apologize and just go on their way, perhaps repeating the same pattern or maybe not. The point is, it doesn't matter at all where that person ends up because wherever they are is exactly where they need to be. We are all always exactly where we need to be, learning exactly what we need to learn.

So I realized that giving someone the benefit of the doubt actually does no harm to me when I'm in this space. I've been humiliated, so I know that no one is without flaws, even myself - and I also know that everyone has the potential to be just as humiliated (humbled) and see for themselves this empowering reality as well. And maybe now instead of being angry or upset, I'll actually send out a wish or prayer that someday they do - I'll give them that benefit of the doubt...