Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated.
Platinum Rule: treat others the way they want to be treated.
One word makes a big difference. It underpins so much miscommunication and unnecessary suffering in the world.
So, I want to write up a quick practical guide for myself to practice the Platinum Rule.
Step 1: Name the difference.
Awareness. Nuff said. By default well-intentioned people operate using the Golden Rule because it is easy to model to think of what we’d want. It’s non-trivial to know what others want. Awareness helps to shift the default.
Step 2: Just ask. Ask how they would like to be treated, how they would like to be supported.
I don’t want others to mind-read me, I don’t want to mind-read others. I want to give them what they actually want rather than what I think they want.
This can be difficult in some cultural contexts, gift-giving, for instance. In the norm, as a giver you’re expected to mind-read the receiver’s desires and needs. As the receiver you’re supposed to mask your disappointment if you don’t like the gift to protect the giver from “making them feel bad”. In other words, the receiver is expected to self-abandon their own disappointment and do emotional labor for the giver, rather than getting what they actually want. How perverse. No wonder I’m averse to gift-receiving for Christmas and birthdays.
In this context, here’s what I prefer doing: I tell the receiver a gift I have in mind. I ask if we can make a day of it, check out the gift in person, see if they actually like it. If they don’t, we search for something they do like and discover it together. If we find something great, and if we don’t, great, because the process of searching becomes quality time connecting on their aesthetic, desires, needs.
Step 3: Request to be treated with the Platinum rather than Golden Rule.
I would love to be explicitly asked rather than attempts at mind-reading. Don’t get me wrong, mind-reading is great, but I’d much prefer direct communication than well-intentioned but ultimately mis-calibrated attunement.
I see attunement as one of those areas where you have to master direct communication before you can read others well. The people who claim to be “attuned” while not practicing direct communication are in fact (1) conflict avoidant and (2) have not verified whether they’re actually attuned. In the absence of direct communication it’s difficult to confirm whether the results are actually good or not, so it’s easy to over-evaluate one’s capabilities.
Step 4: Anything else? Feels like this covers the basics, but I’ll keep adding to this if anything else comes to mind as I begin practicing the Platinum Rule more explicitly.