When compromise means no prize…

So… I was reading for a lady a couple of days ago… and out pops this card…

And I won’t go into the ins and outs of her reading other than to say that I said something to her along the lines of –

You need to find a way to reach an optimum outcome for both parties…

She said to me – Oh… do you mean a compromise?

And this is where I surprised myself because I did something that I very rarely do when reading and I let out an emphatic NO! No I do not… I don’t mean compromise… I mean negotiate a solution…

And I thought about it and it seems to me that often  a compromise turns out to be a lose lose scenario rather than a win win…

Ok… sometimes it quick and easy to reach a compromise… say over something simple that you don’t really have much vested interest in the outcome of… things that you feel in the grand scale of things are just not that important or maybe you know that ok… I can give a bit this time as next time things will swing in my favour… But that quickly falls apart if you find yourself dealing with someone who has repeatedly let you down in the past or with someone who fails to see your core values and perspective…

After all… how long can you remain happy if you’ve got 80% of what you wanted but in the 20% of what you’ve ceded there lies the 1% that you truly felt strongly about…

So it seems to me that often a compromise is merely sowing the seeds of discontent to sprout at a later date…

And then I cast my mind back to a situation that I had drag on for way too long over my son’s education and repeatedly I was told that I was uncompromising and therefore unreasonable…

How often is that equation tossed around…

uncompromising=unreasonable

Really? Where’s the logic in that?

See from my perspective… my unwillingness to compromise was more than reasonable as it stemmed from talk  after talk after talk,where ‘solutions’ were offered that were ineffective and failed to actually solve anything…

And conversely… does that then suggest that…

compromise=reasonable

Well… maybe? maybe not?  With a few exceptions, I’m mostly inclined to say it means lazy… or inept… or not that fussed…

I laugh as I remember watching an episode of Child of Our Time a few years back and I can’t find it but there was an experiment with pairs of children. One child was given a pile of 10 sweets and told to divide the pile between them and another child. If the second child agreed to the split then they both got to keep the sweets… however… if the other child refused then they both went without.

So most of the kids split half and half and those offers were gladly accepted… as were the few cases that were split 6:4… though there was a bit more thought there… Interestingly when a child split 8:2, the other child would outright refuse the deal and would sooner have none than suffer the injustice of the unfair split…

And I think those kids with a pile of sweets demonstrated pretty much my NO! NO… I don’t mean compromise…

I mean something that works!!

Not something that leaves me wanting to cut my nose off to spite my face!! 😀