It is difficult to give a straight answer because everyone feels differently. Generally speaking, people with high abilities are often stricter with others than they think they are.

A person who is very capable, for example, a person who has acquired quite an advanced level of academic knowledge or a person who is seen by others as doing a very difficult job, tends to be stricter to others than he thinks he actually is.

Therefore, these people need to be careful not to be too strict and should be more forgiving. For them, other people don’t look so smart. They think that they are dumb, incompetent and clueless.

You need to objectively look at your past career and assess whether you’re superior or not. If you are much higher than average, you’re most likely very strict to others so you need to be softer and nicer to them.

On the contrary, if you have an inferiority complex when looking back at your past, you tend to be either strict by “taking out your anger on others” or “too soft on others” -two extreme ways. You need to find “your middle way” all the time.

You Can Make Your Capacity of Tolerance Bigger by Making Efforts

Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Panasonic, Inc. barely graduated from elementary school and used to say, “Everyone around me looks smarter than me.” I think he was half serious, half not when he made this statement. That said, I’m sure he had a keen eye on people. How to balance between “being strict” and “being forgiving” varies from person to person and it is generally difficult.

Even for a person with high ability, if he makes the right effort and gains his knowledge to enlarge his capacity, his capacity of tolerance will be larger correspondingly. One needs to strive to understand different ideas that come from different types of people. To this end, it is important to read novels, watch movies and TV dramas -which I don’t do much, but there are some dramas that are worthwhile watching- to learn about different people’s lives. It will help you increase your knowledge, and your understanding will be spot on as a result.

One Needs to Keep Asking Oneself if One Is Making Judgements Like God and Buddha

Balancing is very hard indeed. That’s why one needs to keep asking oneself if one is seeing things like God does. Compared to people who are not thinking about this at all, a person who is asking himself whether he is making judgement like God does; whether he made the right judgement about people; whether he made accurate judgements day after day, will improve the state of his mind.

I do this everyday. Everyday, I ponder and ask myself if I made the right judgement about matters and people. I often think that I made a mistake and correct my mind. It is truly hard. How to assess and how to guide people changes completely from different perspectives.

Also, contrary to your opinion, there are cases where the judgments can vary greatly because disagreements occur between third parties. This is hard to deal with too. It would be easy to decide if it were up to your own discretion, but person A and person B have different opinions and can’t work together. This may result in person A getting a promotion and person B being rotated between different sections. It requires a lot of energy to manage these situations.

Constantly looking within your mind is the only way. Please take a moment everyday to meditate and explore the right mind, that is to explore whether or not you are making judgment like God or Buddha. It is extremely important especially for a person who wants to become a company CEO to do this. Being busy meeting and talking to people day in and day out is not enough. Being alone and quietly reflecting within your mind whether your judgement was right, your motivation was right, the outcome was right, your judgement was public or private, is very important.

Photo:PIXTA

If You Can See Correctly, You can Speak Correctly

Considering this, one needs to seek to elevate oneself. How to deal with other people varies from person to person so it’s hard to say. Like I mentioned earlier, if you polish your mind like a mirror, it’s supposed to show another person’s true figure. It’s necessary for you to see the true figure of a person regardless if he is a child or just another person. If you can see who the person is correctly, you will naturally know whether you should be strict or gentle with him. In that sense, I think it is vital to train your mind to see things correctly. If you can see correctly, you can speak correctly.