Manners

I was wondering what to write about today and was just idly looking up a quote book.  The area I came across was manners.
There were a couple of quotes in there I really liked.  One by a George E Bergman I laughed at.  It was about tact.  “Tact is the art of making guests feel at home when really that’s where you wish they were.”
I guess I was interested in that as it is something still there but not highlighted really.  I think the Mirerriam-Webster said it well when it referred to manners as “the outward manifestation of personality or attitude.”  Why I like that is I think manners are inherent in a personality.  A person either has good manners or not.
I like one thing I read by an Emily Post. “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.  If you have that awareness, you have good manners no matter what fork you use.”  I would put one caveat on that.  A person needs to have more than an awareness – though that is the start.  The awareness needs to be acted on.  It is one thing to know what to do, and another to actually do it.
There was one I really like by a Freya Stark, “Manners are like the zero in arithmetic; they may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.”
Manners do add hugely to relationships.  I was talking to someone yesterday and they said they turned around the normal way of processing something.  (He was talking about dietary needs but at the time I thought that has great application to other things.)  What he did was to instead of highlighting a need for something he highlighted what was right - with an emphasis on building on that.
It is funny but that reminds me of table tennis coaches taking on older players who may have done something a certain way for decades.  The emphasis is not to unlearn bad habits but to build on good ones.
I feel the same way concerning manners.  It may be a waste of time to highlight what is not and better to reinforce what is.  And I have found that encouraging the good in me encourages more good it me.