If you want to interact effectively with me, to influence me — your spouse, your child, your neighbor, your boss, your coworker, your friend — you first need to understand me. And you can’t do that with technique alone. If I sense you’re using some technique, I sense duplicity, manipulation. I wonder why you’re doing it, what your motives are. And I don’t feel safe enough to open myself up to you.
The real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of your character, of the kind of person you truly are — not what others say you are or what you may want me to think you are. It is evident in how I actually experience you.
Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, in the long run, I come to instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts with me.
If your life runs hot and cold, if you’re both caustic and kind, and, above all, if your private performance doesn’t square with your public performance, it’s very hard for me to open up with you.
Then, as much as I may want and even need to receive your love and influence, I don’t feel safe enough to expose my opinions and experiences and my tender feelings. Who knows what will happen?
But unless I open up with you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won’t know how to advise or counsel me. What you say is good and fine, but it doesn’t quite pertain to me.
You may say you care about and appreciate me. I desperately want to believe that. But how can you appreciate me when you don’t even understand me? All I have are your words, and I can’t trust words.
I’m too angry and defensive — perhaps too guilty and afraid — to be influenced, even though inside I know I need what you could tell me.
Unless you’re influenced by my uniqueness, I’m not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone.
Source: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
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Amazing eh? Probably the best articulation I’ve come across of someone who does not felt understood and it is not because he/she has not “pressed into the life” of a person supposed to be the influencer.
I’m consistently sadden with people trying to get into our lives without themselves opening up. Worse, EXPECTING us to open up when their private performance are inconsistent with their public ones. You know, the feeling of insincerity eeking from their being. In precarious position like this, I shut up.
Must applaud Covey for writing it so well. Wish I read this book long ago.
Filed under: Books, Reflections, Uncategorized
Probably one of the best business books I’ve read in a long time.
