Finding Common Ground

Recall a disappointing moment in your life when you failed to convince someone to agree with you or do something with you or for you. Think back on how you approached them, and now think how you might have done it differently to get a different outcome.  See if you can think of an example in which establishing a common ground with them first would have yielded a different outcome. Tell this personal anecdote in your blog as a story ("Once when I was ...."), and then tell the alternate-reality version ("If instead of doing it that way I had taken a different approach...").  Your story will llustrate the principle of starting from a 'common-place' -- You don't have to use the technical language for your public audience, but illustrate the point.  

After moving into college, I had a plan to watch the movie version of the musical Rent (plus the deleted scenes), which I'd been wanting to sing along to with others all summer and which is quite important to me.. I'd been talking to some on my floor/building before we had moved in, as we had made a group chat, and we had discovered a mutual appreciation for musical theater and this show/movie in particular. So a new friend and I announced we would one Friday night, but then other friends who I had hoped to be there wanted to do something else, and it looked like we weren't going to have much of a turnout, so we called it off. I never made much of a case for inviting the others to come, however. I think all I said was something along the lines of "but it will be fun!"

I think I would have been more successful if I had made a case for moving it to another night and made a more compelling argument. I could offer to work around their plans like dinner or playing games by suggesting we watch the movie in between. I could also have made my intentions clearer to the girl who was also a fan by saying it wasn't so much about watching the movie but sharing our love for it and singing. This would have made it sound more appealing than tiresome, I think. To attract others, I could have also brought up how the show was playing at IU the next week, how it tackled issues still relevant to today (like LGBT representation), and how its diverse casting inspired the currently popular Hamilton. These common issues had the potential to attract new friends to a sing-along movie night.