Rusty Debating Skills

I lived in Sendai for the first 3 years of my life in Japan and one thing about living in Sendai is that people don't generally debate and disagreements are often avoided. Moving to Tokyo was rather different as being good at making arguments is important, especially when working in a company.

I, unfortunately, have not developed my Japanese debating skills and for the lack time spend among English speaking peers in Japan, I have found that my debating skills gone rusty and the "thick skin" that one needs to survive a debate has also gone thin. In effect, I believe that I've lost some mental agility and stopped keeping a pool of readily accessible information in my head to make arguments because I've had no need to before. Information retention is terrible at the moment, though some might attribute this to the aging effect, I refuse to accept that as an excuse.

Especially when it comes to dealing with upper management, when making persuasive arguments is especially important for these people to sway executives and push their career upwards. If you want to do well in a career, having good debating/persuasive skills (balanced with it not being aggressive) is absolutely important.

To be honest, I miss my old philosophy class in high school where we used to debate on a variety of topics at 7 am. Sure we would be sleepy as hell, but it was a lot of fun back then.