Do You Want to Understand Others Better? - Lisa E Betz

Sometimes we learn valuable life lessons by playing silly party games. My husband gave me a new game for Christmas that we’ve played several times. It’s simple, fun, and good for a few laughs. But it also brings to light an interesting fact—that even couples who have been married thirty-plus years don’t know each other as well as you’d think. Because we each see the world through our own unique lens.

How does a party game bring this up? Let me start by explaining the game.

The game that started all this introspection

Here is a photo of the game, called PRIORITIES. It’s basically a variation on The Newlywed Game. One player is dealt five cards like the ones shown. They silently rank these five random topics in priority from Love to Loath. Then they shuffle the cards and set them on the table. The goal of the game is for the remaining players to correctly guess what the first player’s rankings were.

Everyone wins when the correctly guessed cards spell “priorities” before the incorrectly guessed ones do.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. As we’ve played with various people, one phenomenon I’ve observed is that while a player’s spouse is mostly good at guessing the right order, occasionally they are way off regarding a particular topic.

In other words, we are sometimes surprised at what another person finds very important (or unimportant), even when we’ve known them for years. I find this fascinating, but also a challenge that there is always room to understand others better.

How do I understand you better?

In addition to playing the game, I attended a weekend virtual workshop on using the enneagram as a tool for personal growth. One of the main lessons of the weekend was that everybody is unique. We all march to our own drum for our own reasons.

I don’t see the world the same way you do. I notice different things. In fact, I may be totally unaware of things you find glaringly obvious. My ingrained beliefs, coping mechanisms, and past history will cause me to react to a situation differently than you do.

And all of this means that my life priorities are different than yours are, for a whole host of reasons.

This is why I intentionally learn about why people think and act the way they do. I want to do a better job of understanding them, so I can have fewer misunderstandings, and become better at showing them love, compassion and respect.

The more I understand you, the stronger our relationship

As a result of both the game and the retreat, I’ve had some really good conversations with my husband, where we’ve learned a few things about each other. I realized that I was interpreting the stories he tells about his life from MY frame of reference, rather than asking questions to help me understand what those situations meant to his heart, and how they informed his values.

We didn’t learn anything earthshattering, but we did discover some nuances about each other. We both feel a little more seen and understood. We can love and support each other better. And we understand each other’s priorities a little bit better.  

Who do you need to understand better?

You don’t need to buy a party game to get to know your friends and family better. Simply start with the mindset that you don’t know all there is to know about someone, and that you want to understand them better by giving them a chance to explain how they see things, feel about things, and value things. Honor the differences instead of feeling threatened by them.

You can start with something silly (similar to our game), such as: Which do you like the most, banana bread, singing in the shower, or accountability?

Or, you can gently bring up a situation where your friend had an 8 response to a 3 issue. For example. “It looked like what Linda said in the meeting really upset you. Can you tell me why it upset you so much?”

It may take a little digging, but if you’re patient and sincere, you may learn something significant about your friend that helps you appreciate and support them in new and better ways.    

In closing, I’ll let you ponder these six cards. How would you rank them from “like the most” to “like the least”? If someone asked you why, how would you explain?

You can find the game here. Just FYI, we oldsters decided to relabel some of the cards to make the game more relevant for people of our generation. I used address labels.