Importance Of Mutual Respect

766 Words4 Pages
In order to instill a widespread culture of tolerance and mutual respect, organic exposure is key. By that I mean that people need to take initiative on their own to respect one another as opposed to it being required of them by whatever entity is in charge of them. First of all, we must keep in mind that the people that we are seeking to change are, frankly, those who are not accepting of other races, religions, sexes, sexual orientations, etc. Tolerance and acceptance is not the sort of thing you can force someone to truly buy in to and implement into their daily lives. Trying to force people into scenarios that artificially cultivate respect in a sort of supervised, regulated setting more or less forces people into creating a façade that…show more content…
The problem with trying to inorganically bring people into a situation where they are instructed to understand each other is that there is no such thing as synthetic respect. Instead, groups of people may often just put on a face of respect without it really meaning anything. I believe that this sort of behavior has a tendency to impede progress. Also, I think that this actually allows the kind of ideas that separate people to become more ingrained in the minds of the people that are not tolerant in the first place. With this in mind, we have to take our own respect for our fellow man to a whole new level: we have to respect those who may not even respect us. When faced with a person or even a group of people that do not share our ideas regarding acceptance, it is more important than ever to hold ourselves to a higher standard. In doing so, we demonstrate our competence, but also to display that everyone is deserving of their respect. If this ideology were applied universally, we would find that people looking for a reason to exclude a certain group of people would have less and less material to contort into what they would call evidence to rationalize their misplaced…show more content…
I believe that this is symptomatic of the shift in the mindset of all sorts of workplaces all over the country over the last couple of generations. It is an undeniable truth that when individuals can all bring a unique perspective and experience to the table paired with a mutual respect for everyone involved, the effectiveness of that group will inevitably be improved on. People have realized that diversity actually does contribute to the overall functionality of nearly any group of people. At this point, this belief is a statistical fact that has been proven objectively in many studies. In the world we live in today, the answer to this question seems obvious: “Would you rather have a team of people that all have the same perspective on life or not?” The oil and gas industry is not an exception to this phenomena. I have worked for two separate oil and gas companies: Trifecta Oilfield Services and Newalta. In both companies, I worked closely with people of various races, ages, sexes, and religions, and I found them both to be extremely healthy work environments. Everyone there seemed to actually respect one another as a coworker and as an individual and both work environments performed extremely well. Honestly, I never heard so much as an insensitive joke during my time there. By getting to know and work with people from cultures different than my own, I was able to benefit from their
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