Flat Mindsets and Bloated Egos

Many people have a closed mindset on a few topics, but its the few who have closed mindsets on many topics that irritate. Everyone has an ego and an opinion and hitting on one, often affects the other. That's nobody's case.
But if you hold your ego forth and challenge everyone to dare touch your opinions, you are simply testing their patience for you. At the end of this patience, is the emotional bank balance that you have in the other person's soft corner, for you to erode. The obvious choice would be to use this balance wisely. The less obvious choice, especially for such touchy, egoist people, happens to be the cost of this relationship.


As an example, I could take my cultural and ethnic background way too seriously. This in itself, pretty much makes me believe that only those with a similar background are worth my view and others are simply too ordinary to rise. Arrogant as an adjective, doesn’t quite do justice with them. On top of that, I could be too stubborn to stop and consider that I could be wrong at the first place. Now you could argue with me but I wouldn't budge because an honest argument is at least a logical attempt to appeal the rational faculties of an intelligent being. And I am simply not open enough and thus not logical enough to entertain your arguments. Instead of a sporting debater (I checked it up, it's a word) , what you get to see is my face, swollen and misshaped with my dented irritated ego. For you didn’t realize but that's what you were punching with your logic! My Big Fat E-G-O !!!

Either you relent and start massaging my ego, because you like me too much to deform my face (a little emotional balance in your big heart) or you continue till you reach the end of your patience and then check the emotional balance to decide what to do. So how do you deliver an open idea inside such a closed mind ... ?

One of the options that could work is to approach through the person/subject that the egoist is passionate about and willing to hear out. This could be people like parents, spouse or subjects like sports. For eg: you could talk about different players having different styles and yet similar capabilities (Sachin Tendulkar and Don Bradman - another argument for another day but acceptable for now).
Then they have definitely dissimilar backgrounds and history but similar stature for their time in reckoning. Finally, there could be a subtle hint to drive home the point that similar could be the case with normal people with different backgrounds yet similarly good or bad traits to their personalities. But the catch is, if the other person realizes your intentions before you could enter the goal post, you have a harder ego shield coming to block you and maybe a bigger face to deal with and even bigger bloated ego to defuse !

Will add more later..... Meanwhile, if you do get to this post and get a drift of what I am talking about, do write back.