Hi there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 235 when you disagree on what matters. This is an episode dedicated to the hundreds of you who have asked me over the years how you handle disagreeing about what matters with someone you love.

So in this lazy genius way of living, we seek to support what matters most in our own lives. And those things are different for everyone, right? We know that. We don't argue with that.

In fact, maybe we even embrace those differences sometimes. But what if the difference is with someone you live with or work with every day?

What if you're trying to make decisions about something important and you have different priorities and opinions than the other person making the decision?

It's tough. So today I'm going to share three simple questions to ask when you disagree on what matters.

Now, before we get into the questions, I want to make a couple of clarifications to kind of set up the context here. When I was preparing this episode, my first thought was, well, you have to talk to the person about the disagreement.

And then I thought, oh, wait, that's actually not true. There are relationships where you actually don't feel comfortable talking to the person about the difference in your priorities. Maybe it's a boss. Maybe it's someone in your family who is not emotionally safe and dismisses you.

Maybe it's like, maybe it's how the school pickup line works. And you have better ideas based on your priorities, but the school administration is not going to listen to you.

There are absolutely scenarios where you disagree with someone on what matters and talking it through is not an option. It's just not.

And this is where boundaries come in, right, which makes me even more on the ball to do a boundaries episode soon. Like we really need a separate episode and a separate set of principles even and thoughts around this around having what matters to you be respected, especially by someone who you're more or less like close with in terms of proximity.

But maybe not in vulnerability, right? You shouldn't just tell anyone and everyone that you need to talk about priorities.

Instead, some people require that you set boundaries for yourself. So that episode will come. I promise I promise. But today, I want to talk about disagreeing on what matters with someone who cares about you, who is emotionally safe and who will listen to you.

Now, am I saying that you might not get into an argument and therefore that person is not safe or it like that needs to go in the boundaries episode? No.

Like arguments do not equal a lack of emotional safety. But in general, I mean, I think you know what I mean, right? We need an approach to talking through different priorities with people we love. It's a different process.

And these are what the three questions are for. These three questions you can ask in that process. Okay. So let's imagine a scenario. Imagine a scenario with a partner, a family member, a friend, a coworker, where what matters to you and what matters to them are different.

The example I get a lot is when a couple that lives together has different priorities about mess. One person likes things clean and tidy and the other does not care.

This is this is like a very like niche example. But when Kazan, I first got married, he would get undressed after work or whatever and he would lay his clothes out flat on the floor, like just lay them there because they weren't fully dirty yet, but he didn't want to hang them back up.

And this is the niche part I used to I used to joke with him that it looked like our house is full of people who had been raptured because of all the neatly laid out outfits on multiple floors. It was like it was a whole thing you guys. So I don't remember how we resolve that because it was almost 20 years ago, but I know it drove me crazy.

Now, when something drives as crazy and someone we love is either like contributing to it, a little causing it completely or just doesn't care about it as much as we do, the crazy grows, right?

It might be internally processed crazy, where you just get more frustrated on the inside and you isolate, or it might be external, where you just like suppress and simmer and then you blow up because why can't he put his clothes on the chair instead of the floor or whatever it is.

So what do we do? We need to call him that crazy down, right? So here are the three questions. Here they are that hopefully can help you do that.

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