Thin Slices Applied to Others

At this point, you have a good understanding of the Thinly Sliced Life principle. So far, we’ve applied this frame to our own lives, to gain more empathy and acceptance for ourselves and dissolve tension held against ourselves. This same principle can also be applied to other people, which is what we’ll explore in this lesson.

You can apply the Thinly Sliced Life to any person in your life that you have conflicted feelings about or that you hold a grudge against. However, fair warning: you might feel a lot of resistance to doing this, because it will effectively and rapidly dissolve the grudge you hold. And we like our grudges. We like disliking and even hating other people.

Don’t judge yourself for wanting to hold on to those feelings. The idea here is that when you use this tool, you recognize that it’s truly up to you. You can dislike and judge people for as long as you want to continue to do so. And you can stop, you can drop the burden of the grudge, at any time you wish.

Applying the Thinly Sliced Life to another person involves a lot of guesswork. The point is not to know exactly what happened and understand exactly how their life circumstances shaped them. It is simply to realize that there is a context. That this person isn’t just your enemy, out of the blue. Considering a possible life story is all it takes to see that there’s more to it than the simple idea in our heads, when we hold a grudge.

Exercise

• Consider a person you hold a grudge against (ideally one you would like to let go of).
• Guess a time and location of their birth.
• Write a possible life story this person experienced, that may have led them to become the person you met.
• What experiences, what pain, what life events may have led them to become who they are and make the choices they made?

Note: this exercise works better with people we are not very close to. With close people, we believe that we already know everything about them and this illusion of knowledge gets in the way of empathy. So try it out with a relative stranger before trying it with someone like a close family member.