Biola University
There are a handful of bedrock principles and practices that inform having a winsome conviction, and a big one is perspective-taking. Tim digs into his graduate education in communication studies and draws out the difference between listening to evaluate and listening to understand. Usually, we jump right to evaluation before seeking to understand, and this often results in communication gridlock. So, they explore practices for listening to understand, ways to embody perspective-taking and whether perspective-taking is biblically-based.
Transcript
Rick Langer: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Rick Langer and I'm a professor here at Biola University in the Biblical Studies and Theology Department. I'm the Director of the Office of Faith and Learning, and also the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project, along with a good friend of mine.
Tim Muehlhoff: Rick, great to be here with you. I'm a Professor of Communication here at Biola University, teach classes in conflict resolution, family communication, marriage and family. I'm also Rick's spiritual mentor. He doesn't mention that much.
Rick Langer: That's true.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes, this is true. It's a little hurtful.
Rick Langer: I don't mention it much.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rick Langer: Go ahead.
Tim Muehlhoff: I'm also the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project, and we so appreciate you taking time to join us as we think about how to communicate with people that are different from us. We thought we would take some time, Rick, in this segment, to talk about bedrock principles that inform our thinking when we do think about winsome conviction and being a communication professor the one that comes to mind is perspective taking, which is temporarily setting aside my perspective, my convictions, and stepping into your world to see the world both on a cognitive level. I want to understand your passions, your convictions, your arguments, but also equally important what are the emotions attached to your perspective? To feel those emotions and not just strip it of emotions.
Rick Langer: I think I'm seeing where you're going on this, but clarify how is that different than just good listening?
Tim Muehlhoff: Listening can, we have different kinds of listening. There's listening to evaluate and listening to understand, and they're both crazy important, but if you get the order mixed up, we have problems. Listening to evaluate means you are making an argument, and I'm listening to that argument and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, can you clarify how you define that word? Then you made a pretty important claim. What kind of justification do you have for that claim, be it statistics, the study who's informing your thinking and things like that?" That's listening to evaluate.
Rick Langer: This is engaged basically at the head level.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rick Langer: Okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: I was on a debate team. They trained us to do this. The words are coming out of your mouth and I'm putting them in categories, and that is legitimate. We don't want to get away from that.
Rick Langer: You have to listen in order to be able to respond but the goal of your listening is your response.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes. Now the second form is what we call listening to understand, which means I want to get the backstory. I want to hear not just what you believe, but why do you believe it? What's happened in your life? Tell me about the community that informed your thinking, tell me about your family. Tell me about experiences. Historians talk about hinge moments. These are crazy important moments within the history of a country or a civilization. Well, people have hinge moments.
Then one other philosopher added this interesting concept called a narrative injury. A narrative injury is something happens in my life that causes me to view life in a distinctly different way. We can think of CS Lewis with the death of his wife, Joy. He didn't leave his faith after her death, but he saw God and faith very differently post the death of his wife.
Rick Langer: The best way to understand those changes are not that they were simply cognitive, but rather they were in response to profound, what did he call it kind of a narrative?
Tim Muehlhoff: Narrative injury.
Rick Langer: A narrative injury. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. All right.
Tim Muehlhoff: The problem is if we don't get the order right. Imagine you and I having a disagreement. We're talking about an issue, but I kick right into evaluation. You say, "Well, most Americans would say, myself included..." I go, "Wait, what? All right, stop. Really? Most Americans, where are you getting that from? Where are you? Well, I don't buy that news source. I think you need to be reading..." Do you see how we just got into the cognitive lane and now we're talking about the validity of certain news sources? I think that statistic is wildly over exaggerated. Yeah, I don't believe that ideology. I don't believe that political perspective. Not that isn't important, but we just went on one very specific lane where we're now debating facts.
We're listening to understand as I step back and I say, "Okay, where did your life shape you the most? What must it have been like to grow up in that family? What must it have been like to grow up in that community?" I think we start with listening to understand, and that opens the door to us to get to the evaluation. Remember we had that one great guest on our show who did a lot of great community work in LA County with more liberal organizations. Remember him? Remember what he said?
Rick Langer: Yeah. Dan.
Tim Muehlhoff: Dan.
Rick Langer: Dan Broyles.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Remember he said this phrase that was like a drop the mic moment. He said, "Connect then correct."
Rick Langer: Oh yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Remember that?
Rick Langer: Okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: He said exactly the same thing. Listen to understand and then listen to evaluate.
Rick Langer: The perspective taking is listening to understand or is it something even beyond that?
Tim Muehlhoff: I think it's listening to understand, but not just kicking it into the cognitive. Like if you say to me, "I grew up in a broken family and that has really shaped how I view the nature of divorce." I kick into understanding and say, "Okay, what if that was my history? What if I grew up in a family that at a very young age, the parents, the primary caregivers, went their separate ways? How does that affect me not just cognitively, but how would that affect me emotionally?" That is what we call embodied perspective taking. I literally sit in your perspective and try to understand it on a cognitive emotional level.
This is what Paul says when he prays for the church at Ephesus, "I pray that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened." What he means by that is all of you.
Rick Langer: Not just your head.
Tim Muehlhoff: Not just head.
Rick Langer: Not just the [inaudible 00:06:11].
Tim Muehlhoff: Not just your heart, but all of you. We call that perspective taking. Honestly, Rick, that's the heartbeat of all my graduate education. My Master's thesis was the gay Christian dialogue where I asked three participants, self-identified members of the gay community, and three members of a very conservative Christian group on campus, "Hey, let's get together and do perspective taking for seven weeks and in week eight we'll talk about our differences."
Rick Langer: You did an awful lot of work before you had the cognitive analysis debate.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rick Langer: Usually we just leap right to that and leave the other out.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right to it. That's one of the byproducts of social media. I think we just launch right into what we think, not how we feel.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: That's interesting. It's like social media is built to maximize that. You only have 160 characters, so you better get right to your claim, your point, your whatever.
Tim Muehlhoff: Then my dissertation was, let's take that thinking we did with the gay Christian dialogue and let's kick it into marital communication. Noreen and I have been speaking at family life marriage conferences for 28 years, Rick.
Rick Langer: Wow.
Tim Muehlhoff: I had hair when we started.
Rick Langer: You've been married for about three weeks before you started.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, three weeks, which meant we knew everything.
Rick Langer: Yeah, I can only imagine. That's the time to start. You have so much to share.
Tim Muehlhoff: You know everything. I kicked it into, it was a qualitative study of two couples who felt like we're at gridlock, which means talking about this makes it worse. I know your perspective. I know it inside and out, and I can do your perspective. I really disagree with it. I was like, "Okay, well, let's not start there because we know how this will end. Again, give me this time it was five months of perspective taking and then doing each other's narratives." That was really interesting. We can talk about later. One page, put your narrative, this is my one-page summary of what I think is dividing us right now as a couple. Then they swapped narratives with each other, and you lived in that narrative. Then there came a moment where I actually presented your narrative to yourself, but I do it first person. I don't say, "Well, Rick, you said..." I said, "No, no, I grew up in this family."
Rick Langer: You act it out, so to speak.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.
Rick Langer: You embody their narrative.
Tim Muehlhoff: The cool thing about that, Rick, is you get to coach me. If I'm coming across slightly upset about an issue, and you can literally stop me and say, "Okay, I appreciate that you're trying to show that I'm upset. Yeah, triple that. I'm not just upset. I'm deeply hurt and I am angry." Now I go back and do your narrative to reflect that. I don't debate it. I could debate it. I could go, "Are you serious? You are that upset about this?" It's like, no, no, no. That is not the... See how we just did evaluation?
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, no, no. Now's the time for me just to try to match the emotion and sit in the emotion and your story, your narrative. That's what the PhD in communication theory was like.
Rick Langer: See, that's interesting. I'm thinking of a conversation I had and actually a whole set of them over the course of the years. One more recently where a person was talking about their experience, they are a person of color, they were talking about their experience with the police, and they talked about being stopped for no particular reason, let me just put it that way, driving while Black, this person was Black. The point is that kind of experience. I think as we were talking back and forth, I realized that I needed a coaching moment to capture what he's saying. It's like when you say, I can imagine that being irritating, that isn't exactly what I said. I can't remember what it was. The point is, it's like no triple that, just like you said, it's not like just having a rock in your shoe.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: I think that kind of a process is, and at the end of the day, it's not like you get it per se, you're disabused of your notion that you began with, which was that you had already gotten it when you'd articulated at level one. You realized for whatever set of reasons this person's lived experience is level three.
Tim Muehlhoff: My favorite comment from a Master's thesis, because the time came, it was dinner at my house. Noreen made dinner, she laughed-
Rick Langer: Bring the flack jacket.
Tim Muehlhoff: We just sat there and we got into it, Rick, after dinner. I mean, we got into it and voices were raised. One comment I'll never forget from the person who self-identified as being part of the gay community said to a very conservative Christian who did not back off on his belief that homosexuality was a sin. He said this, "Listen, I know we disagree, but thank you for feeling."
Rick Langer: Huh? Thank you for feeling.
Tim Muehlhoff: Feeling. Isn't that powerful?
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thank you for feeling it. Now we disagree. What a great way to launch the conversation with, okay, I can't imagine. One other participant from the Master's thesis she's married. They're married [inaudible 00:11:26] Christian organization. She said this and broke into tears, which was such a powerful moment. She said, "Listen, I can't imagine somebody saying to me, you can't be with your husband. I could not imagine that." Yet, this was before gay marriage was legalized. She said, "To have somebody say to you, no, you can't marry the person you love." She goes, "I can't imagine that." She burst out into tears. Rick, the effect it had on the conversation was palpable. You could feel it. People were like, "Thank you. Now let's have a disagreement."
Rick Langer: That's a great example. Something more than mere listening was taking place in that exchange. Whatever the point, however you describe it, touching the heart, whatever it is, that image is a great one for saying, okay, that goes beyond mere listening. That's good.
Tim Muehlhoff: Whenever I talk about this topic of perspective taking, I always get asked the question, "Okay, where is that in scripture? Come on. I mean, where's perspective taking in scripture?"
Rick Langer: Tim, where is perspective taking in scripture?
Tim Muehlhoff: Yes, thank you for asking. I don't mind the question. There's part of me that wants to say, "But it doesn't need to be in scripture." Like God's common grace, we don't get mathematics per se from scripture. It did cause me to go back and reread scripture to say, "I wonder if we have these examples?" Very quickly, and we won't do all of these, it's a book that I'm working on with another Biola professor, sorry for cheating on you, Rick.
Rick Langer: Wow.
Tim Muehlhoff: Let's start in Old Testament with a book of Ecclesiastes. When one of the smartest men in the ancient world asks you to participate in a thought experiment, we'd be wise to follow him up on it. You know that in the book of Ecclesiastes, the phrase under the sun is mentioned like 38 times. This is what Solomon, and again, it's debated whether it's Solomon, but we're fine, Solomon says, "I want you to live under the sun, which means there's no God, there's no ultimate purpose. I'll tell you what, sometimes good people succeed and sometimes they don't. Sometimes bad things happen to really virtuous people and the bad people get scot free. Well, I want you to live there."
Rick Langer: We all die like dogs, and all of that.
Tim Muehlhoff: We all die like dogs.
Rick Langer: Okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: I'm feeling a little dismal here, but go ahead. Just so you know perspective taking. I'm feeling dreary on the other side of the mic.
Tim Muehlhoff: I want you to live under the sun where relationships, success, power, sex, death is always in the background. Death is a reality and you have no idea if you're going to see the end of today. Live there and tell me how that feels. Then he sprinkles throughout the book, the above the sun, but no, remember, peace, hope, wisdom comes from God and even the toil you do, the hard work is a gift from God. He invites us to do perspective taking. I want you to live under the sun, and I want you to periodically pop your head above the sun. Which one do you want to pursue in this life? I have my students do this, Rick, in one of my classes called Engaging Diverse Perspectives. We actually live for a week under the sun, which means is studies important? Of course it is. Is my relationships important? Of course it is. I'm putting all the pressure on them to give me ultimate happiness. That's what Solomon is saying, yeah, that's not going to work.
Rick Langer: It isn't going to support that. It won't bear that weight.
Tim Muehlhoff: But you try it. Hey, you go for it. Maybe you'll do a better job than I do. That is interesting in the Old Testament, you get perspective taking.
Rick Langer: Okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: Again, we'll jump around a little bit, but let me give you a walk on the wild side. These are my two favorite. Song of Solomon. Carol Gilligan, a psychologist at Harvard University notes that to have a voice is human. What's really wild about the Song of Solomon is that most of it, almost 65% is the female perspective.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: When you add the maiden and then you add the female chorus and add it all up, you get 65%. In an ancient world where quite frankly, people did not care what a woman thought, particularly about passion and sex, you get this crazy book that says, "No, I want you to see passion, sexual desire from the woman's perspective, and what can you learn from that? What can you experience from that?" We often think the Bible is a prudish book, but God goes, "No, no, no. Sex is incredibly important and let me give you the female take on that, and I want you to live in that perspective and understand it."
Now, let me give you the wildest one. The time has come for God to rebuke the very people he's called to love and follow him. He's going to call out Israel that you have gone after false idols. You actually are hurting the foreigner rather than protecting the foreigner. How in the world is he supposed to convince Israel to repent? Enter Hosea where he says to Hosea, "I'm going to prepare you to be my spokesperson. The way I'm going to do that is to have you jump in on the ultimate perspective taking exercise. I'm going to have you marry a woman, Gomer, who is going to become unfaithful, repeatedly unfaithful, habitually unfaithful. The pain you feel every time she's unfaithful is exactly what I feel when the nation of Israel does that." Hosea now goes, "Got it. I know exactly kind of what God feels like because that deeply is hurtful every time Gomer strays." Now he turns around and says, the nation of Israel, "Listen, we are Gomer to God and we need to repent."
Rick Langer: Yeah. Well, there's actually a lot of that in Old Testament prophets. You have Isaiah walking around naked and barefoot in Jerusalem for three years or whatever, and you have this sort of, I mean those images, Jeremiah you get this iron crossbars and things that he's walking on. You have all these things that are embodying that, that are oftentimes done by the prophet. The other example when you're talking about that with Hosea, have you read Ezekiel 16? Oh, my. God is sitting here saying, "Israel, I found you like a baby who had not even had its after afterbirth washed off and was thrown by the side of the road. I picked you up and I cared for you. I raised you. I clothed you grew and became beautiful. When you did that, you went and sold yourself as a harlot to other people. How do you think I feel?" By the way, he doesn't give the short version of that. Ezekiel 16 is a long and painful read.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: It is. In that sense is a classic example of what you were talking about at the outset about perspective taking. Doesn't say you've broken the covenant.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: He says, "I want you to feel what it's like to have someone break a covenant with you after I've put everything I've put into you nation of Israel." It's like, oh.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's perspective.
Rick Langer: Okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: All right. Let's bop to the New Testament.
Rick Langer: Let's do that.
Tim Muehlhoff: Here's my favorite one. Honestly, this is the one that got me thinking about biblical perspective taking the most, Book of Hebrews. Imagine being persecuted New Testament believer. You arrive at a crude jail. You're stripped, you're often whipped. The wounds are left untreated. You're put into a prison carved out of rock. When you and I went to the holy land, we actually got a chance to see what some of these ancient prisons looked like. It was not fun. In light of these deplorable conditions, it makes sense that the writer of Hebrews implores his readers to remember those in prison. Hebrews Chapter 13. This especially takes on significance that the letter was written by Paul, whose 25% of his entire career was spent in prisons, if this was written by Paul.
It's what he says next that is embodied perspective taking. Remember those in prison and then he says this, "As if you were there yourself. Remember those being mistreated as if you felt their pain in your own bodies." My goodness. What an expression of embodied perspective taking. I don't just pray for those in prison. I imagine I am in prison having been whipped, hungry at night, freezing. Now what does that do to my prayer life?
By the way, you and I actually going to one of those prisons and stepping into it is what we call embodied perspective taking. I put myself in certain situations so that I understand what it's like. It's like my students always talk about this in my class. Remember in high school you had that interesting assignment where you had to carry a pound of flour and pretend it's an infant.
Rick Langer: Oh, yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Some even have it strapped to their chest but that's embodied perspective taking. We now give you an object or we can talk about what it's like to be homeless. Rick, remember you and I did that crazy idea where we went and slept outside? We did dumpster diving, we slept outside with our students-
Rick Langer: You wimped out halfway through, right? That's what I remember about that.
Tim Muehlhoff: At four o'clock we called it. You slept on our couch.
Rick Langer: I think it was about midnight and you were getting a little soft but that's okay.
Tim Muehlhoff: It was cold. Now listen, this is perspective taking run amok. Okay. If I say, well, come on, I did dumpster diving to see what kind of food we can find, and I slept outside for a night. I know exactly what it's like to be homeless.
Rick Langer: Yeah. Don't be ridiculous.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's a misapplication of what we're trying to say here. Let me give you the last one to wrap up, because to me, this is just a beautiful expression of our faith. Obviously, when we get to Jesus, we get divine perspective taking.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Now, obviously God is omniscient. He knows everything. That does not take away from the fact that we read in Hebrews where it says that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and that he sympathizes with us. In the Greek, this comes from Kenneth Wuest, it means knowledge by way of common experience. Does Jesus know what it's like to be betrayed? Yes.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Does he know what it's like to be whipped? Yes. Does he even know what it's like to feel abandoned by God? Yes, on the cross, "My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?" There is Jesus doing divine bodily perspective taking to know what the human condition is like.
Rick Langer: Yeah, I was going to say, when you first mentioned your favorite New Testament, and we were talking about Hebrews, I was thinking right, you were going to all of Hebrews 2. You have this whole thing that he who... Let me pick up this phrase. [inaudible 00:22:40] for he for whom, and by whom all things exist in bringing many sons to glory should make the founder [inaudible 00:22:49] salvation perfect through suffering. That idea that he's going to share in our suffering. Then this is picked up, it actually becomes kind of a theme in this last half of the book of Hebrews Chapter 2, "because he himself has suffered when tempted, he's able to help those who are being tempted". This again, then culminates in Chapter 3, but you really have almost two full chapters of them developing this theme of Jesus having to become "like his brethren in every way" in order to become their savior. It's a pretty big theme. It's not just a small thing in the New Testament in that regard.
Tim Muehlhoff: The way it helps me is... I didn't have a super close relationship with my father. He was a factory worker. General Motors in the heart of Detroit. He started when he was 18. I mean, imagine.-
Rick Langer: He stayed there through his whole working career.
Tim Muehlhoff: Whole career, had to have medical disability at the very end. The job literally destroyed his body. Like most sons and their fathers, there's just this distance discord, you don't get me, I don't get you, and you don't spend much time with me. You always seem tired and irritable. Well, I I was first gen. I went to college. My dad graciously paid for the first year. Then he said, "If you want to stay, you got to find a way to stay." I said, "Okay, I do want to stay." He goes, "Okay, I'll get you in the factory in the summer." Rick, I spent two months, not two years, not 20 years, two months working in a factory in the heart of Detroit.
It was one of the most dehumanizing experiences I've ever had in my life. One, pornography was everywhere. You couldn't walk into one room without hardcore porn everywhere. Everybody sweared like crazy. It was backbreaking work. I literally would fall asleep driving in the car, we commuted me and my dad. I'd literally fall asleep in the car, and I'm a college student, and get home and just crash and then have to wake up at. 4:30 in the morning, rinse and repeat. For the first time it produced empathy. For the first time I was like, "My dad didn't do this for two months. He did it his entire life. Why? To provide for the Muehlhoff family."
Rick Langer: He didn't do it because he thought it was fun.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, no.
Rick Langer: He did it because his family needed him to put bread on the table, and that's what he did to do it.
Tim Muehlhoff: Now, could I have read about factory work? Sure. Could I watch the documentary about it? Sure. I'm not minimizing that. To be in it, smell it, taste it. Half of the summer, half of the factory was cordoned off because it was a murder scene. A factory worker had murdered a fellow factory worker. Welcome to my dad's life. Foremen that were just flat out mean. That's embodied perspective to me.
Rick Langer: Yeah, that's real.
Tim Muehlhoff: It made a huge difference.
Rick Langer: If you'd read a newspaper article about this, you wouldn't be telling me this story 40 years later.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, you're right.
Rick Langer: In terms of the kind of understanding it generates. I think it is interesting with Jesus, the writer of Hebrew shares some of this in the context of feeling free to approach the throne of grace because you have the sense of who am I coming to? I'm coming to somebody who kind of does get me. Yeah, he's had experiences. I've had experiences. I haven't gone through everything Jesus did.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rick Langer: At the same time, you realize there's some fundamental things that he and I have shared in common, and therefore I can bring those things to him. I guess one of the tragedies, even as I think about that, is this failing to make good on that promise, so to speak. It's like, look, there may be some things that are hard to talk about, hard to deal with. Sometimes it's even being frank and honest about your own suffering and your own hardship. You look at this passage and it's exactly saying Jesus has done this kind of perspective taking exactly to open the opportunity for you to come behind the veil and approach the throne of grace, that you may find grace and mercy in time of need. That's what he's done for you. Oftentimes I think we take our hurt and sometimes we hide it away.
Sometimes I almost feel like we don't like the fact that God let us hurt and we don't want to bring it to him, partly because we don't want him to make it go away, because we don't want it gone away. We want it properly identified as this particularly tragic, difficult thing in our lives. I mean, I totally get the difficulty, but there's something about that opportunity to come to somebody who really has that deep perspective of it.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. To me, Jesus wept.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Here's the son of God. He's going to raise Lazarus, and he's still weeps at how death has invaded. If any of the listeners want to research this more, the topic of perspective taking, let me recommend this Undercover Boss. Remember this show?
Rick Langer: Oh, yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: Undercover Boss.
Rick Langer: Never watched it, but I remember hearing about it. Yeah.
Tim Muehlhoff: I show it. I show in my perspective taking class.
Rick Langer: This is where the boss goes into the workplace, but with people who wouldn't know that he's their boss.
Tim Muehlhoff: Does not know it. One I show is the CEO of 7-Eleven, and his employees and managers are complaining about things, and he's kind of irritated, like, "Come on, they have everything they need. This is ridiculous." Really cool thing. He goes undercover. He is at a legitimate 7-Eleven that is one of the busiest, I think, in New York. He's failing miserably partly because there just aren't certain things that he would need to do his job. The manager, who's great, her name is Dolores, just says, "Oh honey, you think we're going to get that kind of stuff? We're not going to get that kind of stuff. We just got to make do so let's make do." Later he goes, "Okay. It took me one afternoon in a store to realize my employees were right. I was wrong because I actually tried to do it instead of theorize about it. I actually tried to do what I'm asking them to do and it did not work." That's beautiful example of perspective taking. He stepped in and experienced it, and it changed how he viewed what his employees needed.
Rick Langer: It seems to me like just doing a little bit of a mental exercise of a person, you may be a hard core conservative, another person may be a hardcore progressive, or whatever your political boundaries we fight so much about, and just taking that moment to pause and think, "What life experiences led them to adopt this posture? Are they irrational? Are they idiotic? Are they foolish?" Kind of the way this 7-Eleven boss is thinking, "Oh, these guys are just whiny."
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Rick Langer: Once he's there, he's like, "Oh yeah, that's why they needed this. That's why they want this." It isn't always a thing that makes them suddenly right and you suddenly wrong. At the very least though, it's the thing that makes them more like they're normal humans. You understand having had this experience or having heard this story, I now understand why a person might land their plane at that particular airport. That conviction, that belief, that policy that they advocate for.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah.
Rick Langer: Well, thanks for turning our attention to perspective taking. That was wonderful. We're grateful for you joining us here for the Winsome Conviction Podcast. We encourage you to subscribe. We'd love to have you join us. Go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever it is that you'd like to get your podcast come from and become a regular listener. You can also check us out at thewinsomeconviction.com website. Thanks for joining us.
