Is a partial opinion worth anything?
Opinions indicate what we think about things, they share a part of our emotional and spiritual selves within them, people love opinions because they can agree or disagree, they can debate and they can have their knowledge stretched and tested. By contrast logically presented research often just adds new knowledge, but lacks a positional, emotional, dimension.
Opinions Matter…
Opinions can be partial (i.e. take sides) or impartial. Both have their place, but a partial opinion is likely to polarise the audience and an impartial one to energise it and engage with it.
If your style tends to polarise it’s probably because your opinion is partial or seen as partial, politicians suffer here because they carry a party badge that means ordinary mortals assume partiality and party bias. Sometimes it’s not there and the impartial opinion creates charisma, authority, and presence that stands the individual apart from others. Did Barack Obama win the election so clearly because he was (mostly) impartial, he spoke for Americans, not Republicans and Democrats, yet expressed his opinions about many subjects.
In a societal web world being opinionated is a distinguishing feature of expertise, impartiality and consistency leads to authority, and, increasingly, it’s not enough to be an expert, you have to be an authority in your chosen field to be noticed.
