September 21: Weekly Reflection - How We Can Make More Room For Others
Weekly Reflection: How We Can Make More Room for Others
International Day of Peace gives us an opportunity to think about what peace looks like in our everyday lives. We might naturally associate peace with the absence of conflict, but respectful communities are built on something much richer than simply getting along. They are built through listening, understanding, patience and a willingness to recognise that other people may experience the same world very differently from us.
Whether it is in our workplace, our families, our friendships or the wider communities we are part of, peace begins with the way we make room for one another. Making room does not mean stepping aside or making ourselves smaller. It means creating space for different experiences, opinions, identities and ways of seeing things. It means being curious rather than immediately dismissive, listening without always preparing our response, and recognising that we do not have to agree with someone in order to treat them with respect (although some POVs are to be disrepected!)
Sometimes, making room can be as simple as noticing who has not had the opportunity to speak in a meeting, inviting someone into a conversation, giving a colleague time to explain their perspective or being willing to reconsider an assumption we have always taken for granted. These moments are the building blocks of respectful communities.
This is particularly important in workplaces, where we bring together people who may have very different backgrounds, beliefs, personalities and experiences. A respectful community is one where people feel able to be different without being diminished because of it. That takes intention.
It asks us to think not only about whether we feel comfortable in a space, but whether the people around us have enough room to feel comfortable too. Peace does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. In fact, respectful communities need people who are willing to have them. It’s about approaching these conversations with curiosity rather than hostility, with the intention to understand rather than simply to win, and with enough respect to remember that there is a person behind the opinion.
When we make more room for other people, we don’t make our own space smaller, we create a community where more people can participate, contribute and feel that they belong.
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