Tact

Tact: a keen sense of what to say or do to avoid giving offense; skill in dealing with difficult or delicate situations. A keen sense of what is appropriate, tasteful, or aesthetically pleasing; taste; discrimination. (dictionary.com)

I am 43 years old and have yet to develop certain people skills—like tactfulness. I have a friend who always knows how to say things in a genteel, polite, tactful way. She has even taught it to her kids. I remember when her boys were really young, they gave my son one of their happy-meal toys and said: "You can have this toy, because we don't care for it." My son told us about this quote and the three of us would repeat this over and over like it was some sort of foreign phrase. We would have just said: "We don't like this stupid toy, in fact we were going to throw it in the trash. But we figured you would like it, so here!"

I wondered...can this tactfulness be taught to older people like me? I've been hanging around this friend for 10 years now, and it still hasn't rubbed off on me. However, I have observed that she has some intrinsic characteristics that I don’t have. She listens more and talks less than I do. When she speaks, she does it slowly and softly. She measures her words carefully. She reminds me of a chemist performing an acid-base titration--where a known concentration of one chemical is added, drop by drop, into an unknown concentration of another chemical until the precise moment when the indicator changes color.

I wish I could train myself to learn tactfulness like I learned chemistry lab skills.