Different Drums and Different Drummers

This last week, I was in training.. For the first time in my life, probably, I was in non-technical training. And, for the first time in my life, I was actually influenced by the training. It was the usual, managerial type training, "Influencing without Authority" or something like that. I went with a slightly cynical mind, so I don't quite remember the exact title. But I did come out of it, slightly converted. Some things in the session hit me real hard. This following passage was one of those things. So, in the spirit of what I learnt, and want to share, I am reproducing it in its entirety:

Different Drums and Different Drummers

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong

Or, if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or, if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or more weakly

Or yet, if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or belief, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right - for me. To put up with me, is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me, you might come to prize my differences from you, and far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.