If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances…try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in a manner of your design for action, let me be

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me.  That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me in to a copy of you

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend or your colleague.  If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions…then you open yourself so that someday these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right…for me.

To put up with me is the first step to understanding me

Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness.  And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you.  And far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

Taken from Please Understand Me…by David Kiersey and Marilyn Bates