Seek first to understand, then to be understood – How to build effective interpersonal communication to build influence

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In his book – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey dedicates a chapter to Habit No.5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood. 

We are all guilty of being too keen to help someone with a problem they have. We jump in and explain what we think they should do or what we think they need to hear. And it will often come from a good place; “You should try doing this…” or “what you need is…”. But really, all we’re doing in these circumstances is passing on our thoughts based on what we think.

Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes…

How can we really tell someone what we think they need, or need to do without fully understanding their needs? Stephen Covey uses an example of using someone else’s glasses to fix their eyesight. Just because the glasses might benefit the person who is wearing them, doesn’t mean they’ll be any good to anyone else who has eyesight issues.

We can’t fully ‘fix’ someone’s issues, if we don’t fully understand what the problem is. And what works for us, won’t always work for someone else.

I see this a lot in the mental health awareness and ambassador/first aider training that I deliver. Our instinct is to tell a person suffering from poor mental health what we think they should do to get ‘better’. We forget to seek to understand and jump straight to wanting them to understand what we think the problem is and what they should do.

More often than not, the majority of us don’t actually want to hear someone giving us their solutions to our problems, we just want them to listen and understand.

And there lies the problem… Listening.

When did we learn to listen?

Covey describes the 4 basic types of communication:

Reading

Writing 

Speaking 

Listening

But what ones do we use the most every day?

For the vast majority of us, speaking is the main form of communication that we use. Writing and reading would come next and listening often comes last. From our earliest years, we are first taught how to speak, then read and write. But can anyone actually remember being taught to listen?

Julian Treasure’s TEDTalk – How to speak so that people want to listen – is one of the most popular TEDTalks of all time. It sits in the top 10 talks comfortably and has well over 50 million views on YouTube. However, in his interview on the Diary of a CEO Podcast, Julian explains that he has done 5 TEDTalks, and the talk he did on listening has just a 5th of the viewers as his talk on speaking.

“We’re much keener to be heard than we are to listen to others” – Julian Treasure 

Why do we want to be heard so much, but struggle to hear others?

Everyone likes to feel heard. We want to be validated and feel valued. We want to give our value to others and help them when they need it. But we often fall into the trap of doing it on our terms instead of the other person’s. We forget to seek the understanding. Asking questions instead of imparting our knowledge. Truly finding out exactly what the issues, problems or needs are.

We look at things through our own perspectives and hold our own judgments. But as Stephen Covey explains in his book – “The key to good judgement is understanding.” 

A mistake often made in sales is trying to sell a product rather than selling the solution. Finding out exactly what the needs are of the buyer or the market is how some of the most innovative inventions and technology has been created.

Communication is a 2 way process. When we speak, we want to be heard. Julian Treasure can explain exactly how to do that in his TEDTalk. If we really want to be heard and really want our message to have an impact on the people we are talking to, then we need to know and understand them first. Then and only then can we have the impact that we want our own words to have.

How do we listen?

Stephen Covey believes that Empathetic Listening is key to creating an understanding. Trust plays a huge role in being able to get someone to open up and confide in the listener. If anyone starts to feel judged or unsafe, they we won’t be as open as they would if they were comfortable with the listener. We can’t build an understanding if the person we communicate with doesn’t feel comfortable enough to speak to us.

Listen with the intent to understand rather than listening with the intent to reply. Sometimes, silence is golden. We might think that we’ve had a similar experience, but this is their space to share not ours. Respect their space.

Empathise, don’t sympathise. Sympathy is a form of judgmental listening. Sympathy can create dependancy, and Covey explains that people can often feed off sympathy.

It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing, it’s about understanding. We all see the world differently and can have varying perspectives. Enjoy finding out how to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Be aware!

Empathetic listening is just one way to improve communication. It’s not a technique, and it’s certainly not something that needs to be used all of the time. If someone feels like a technique is being used on them, then they won’t trust you. It takes practice but more importantly, it takes awareness.

Be aware of when to use it and when you don’t need to use it. And be especially aware of when you find yourself creeping back into bad habits of judgmental listening, telling rather than asking and/or diagnosing before prescribing.

 

Visualise – Catastrophise – Energise | Prof Damien Hughes TEDx Talk on Finding your Courage

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Professor Damien Hughes has written and spoken about high performance in business and sport. He has written books and is co-host with Jame Humphry on one of the top podcasts in the UK – The High Performance Podcast. 

In his recent TEDx Talk in Manchester – How Peak Performers Find the Path to Courage – he talks about the challenges we face when it comes to making change. This can be as individuals but also applied to organisations and teams.

There are loads of examples of people who have gone against the grain and challenged the perception of how something can be done differently. And all of them will have gone through Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘Three Stages of a Known Truth’: 

  1. Ridicule 
  2. Violently opposed 
  3. Accepted as self-evident

In his talk, Hughes uses a real life ‘hare and the tortoise story’ from the first ever ultra marathon in Australia. When the 61 year old Cliff Young turned up to enter the 875km race in his farming overalls and boots no one believed he would genuinely attempt to start the race. When the race started and the athletes all ran past him, it was clear that Cliff had his own unique shuffle style of running.

Needless to say, from his appearance, age and running style; Cliff Young was ridiculed by everyone involved in the event. But when Cliff decided not to take a break and carry on shuffling through the night while the other athletes were resting, he gradually built up a lead on them and went on to win the first ever Australian Ultra Marathon.

This was when Cliff Young’s approach was violently opposed and questioned. ‘He must have cheated’ they all thought. It was standard practice for ultra marathon athletes to stop for a 6 hour rest. But Cliff hadn’t bothered. As it turns out, there was nothing in the rules about rest times for the runners. It had just become a standard practice that everyone conformed to.

So it was no surprise 12 months later at the same race, when the majority of the race entrants had adopted the same Cliff Young shuffle running style. It had finally become accepted as self-evident.

The moral of this story isn’t the same as the ‘Hare and the Tortoise’ tale. It isn’t about chipping away at something slowly and steadily like the tortoise did. It isn’t about being humble which was the lesson for the hare. It’s about courage and having the bravery to stand out from the crowd to challenge the perceptions of others and keep going with it, even when you’re being ridiculed and opposed.

“Dead fish go with the flow”

We all like to think we can stand out from the crowd and walk our own paths. But how easy is it to do that? How strong do you have to be when faced with the challenges of doing something a different way?

For all the people who had the courage to do something differently and challenge the perceptions of the others around them, how many people didn’t? And how many ideas have been lost to the buckling of peer pressure or the fear of what others might think?

“It’s presence doesn’t always guarantee success, but it’s absence almost makes success impossible”  – Courage

Allodoxaphobia – the fear of other people’s opinions – is the second highest phobia in the UK. It’s safe to say we all suffer from this at different points in our lives. Social anxiety and a fear of being judged can seriously damage our confidence and prevent us from standing out from the crowd.

We need that feeling of belonging and we don’t want to be rejected. This is why social conformity is often the easiest option. But do we want to just be ‘dead fish’ going with the flow? Or do we want to stand out and follow the path that we believe in, even if it goes against the grain?

To help with overcoming these fears and anxieties, Damien Hughes discusses processes that are used with professional athletes and high performers to keep them on the right track.

Visualise

Visualisation helps us all literally paint a picture in our minds. There is more and more scientific evidence that suggests visualising specific activities or scenarios can activate the same neural pathways in the brain as actually performing those activities or experiencing those scenarios.

Catastrophise

We often stay away from the ‘what if’ questions. No one likes being brought down to reality when someone starts trying to pick holes in our plans. But we need to be prepared for all eventualities. What if the plan doesn’t work out like we thought? How will we react if something does go wrong?

Creating these pre-mortems and asking ourselves what could or can go wrong, will ultimately help prepare us for hurdles we might have to face. By adding catastrophising with the visualisation, our courage can increase by up to 32%. It builds resilience for if/when something does go wrong.

Damien Hughes talks about writing a ‘Zander Letter’ which is a letter to yourself written as if it is 12 months in the future. In this letter you write about how you have achieved what you set out to achieve and how you overcame the obstacles that were in your way. This encourages you to really think in detail what could get in the way and how you will deal with it for when that happens.

Energise

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter came up with what is now known as ‘Kanter’s Law’ when it comes to change: In the middle, everything looks like a failure.

How do we keep ourselves energised to keep going when we’re stuck in the middle and it’s too far to go back and the finish line looks a million miles away?

Having the courage to keep going is the hardest part. Reminding ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. We are full of energy at the start of a project and we love the feeling when we’ve finished. But when we find ourselves in the messy middle and things start to feel overwhelming, we need to find a way to keep the energy to keep going in the times that she lost her confidence.

Hughes ends his talk with examples of reminders that athletes use to re-centre their minds in moments of doubt. He also quotes the ‘Paradoxical Commandments’ by Kent Keith which Mother Teresa often used to keep her own levels of courage high so she could keep doing what she was doing.

Courage doesn’t always come naturally. It takes work and practice like everything else. Visualising, catastrophising and keeping ourselves energised can help us all have the courage to make the changes we need to make and get to the finish line.

 

 

 

 

James Smith – Confidence Predicts Success

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James Smith is one of the main reason that I started this blog. In January 2023, I took some time to listen back to my favourite Diary of a CEO podcast episodes and write about my top 5.

It was though but fun ranking all the episodes that I’d enjoyed and then trying to pick the 5 I enjoyed the most.

James Smith wasn’t someone on my radar. I knew of him but I had never really explored who he was. My perception was that he was another one of these ‘shock jock’ fitness influencers that likes to go against the grain and say things for the shock factor.

Steven Bartlett does describe him in the show notes as having a ‘no holds barred approach to fitness advice’. But after listening to this episode and paying a bit more attention to James and what he is doing, my original perception has since changed.

He’s a confident guy. And he wants to use his confidence to breed confidence in other people through what he does. And if I hadn’t listened back to this episode, I probably wouldn’t have got my shit together and started this blog.

As a fitness coach at heart, James has spent a large part of his working life around people who are wanting to change; either get fitter, stronger, faster or lose the weight they’re not happy carrying around. But rather than just help people shift the few extra pounds or finally get the 6 pack they’ve always wanted, he cuts through to the REAL reason(s) why they want what they want.

And a lot of it comes down to confidence and how they feel. It could be that they no longer feel ‘sexy’ for their partners or don’t feel comfortable when they take their top off in public. He called these ‘pain points’ for his clients. And when he works with a client, he has to get to the core of the issue and find the real pain points so that they can work together on how to start the change process. This is more often than not a case of building confidence. 

Before he began working as a fitness instructor, he worked as a door to door salesman. This is where he believes a lot of his confidence was built and developed.  He explains that he became aware that confidence is a relationship with failure. Doors being slammed in his face, phones being hung up when he was trying to sell were demoralising. But if he got 1 sale from 100 sales calls, then he had the evidence to back himself.

Building resilience is key. We all get knock backs throughout our careers and lives. Having the resilience and strength to find a way to deal with it and bounce back is so important. So when people like James Smith share their story of how they dealt and managed failure, we can take these examples and apply them to ourselves.

“Anxiety predicts failure and confidence predicts success”

We all have anxiety. And for some of us it can vary on how severe it is and when we feel it. Managing anxiety is hard. Especially if we find ourselves in a situation where it becomes amplified. Standing in front of strangers with a mic in your hand or even just trying to hit ‘record’ on your phone camera to shoot a short video. It’s a natural feeling and completely normal to have these pangs of anxiety. But it’s our relationship with anxiety which predicts how much we let it control us.

Fear of failure naturally crosses our mind when we are anxious. ‘What if i forget what I’m supposed to say…’ or ‘What if they don’t like me and I don’t get the job…’ and ‘What if no one likes me and this flops..’. Unfortunately, shit happens sometimes.

There will be times that you don’t get the job that you wanted, or times when you do say something all jumbled up during a presentation. And for James Smith, he uses the memory of doors being slammed in his face on his door to door sales calls. But what he also uses is the knowledge that after so many doors being shut in his face, if he kept going, he’d get that one sale he needed. So using the confidence that he CAN sell the product because he had the evidence, he was able to keep going.

This rings true when he found himself on the other side of the world in Australia and his original plan wasn’t working. He wasn’t getting the same success as a PT in Australia as he’d had in the UK. His confidence was low and he was anxious about what he was going to do. So he decided to record a few videos on his phone and start putting them out on Facebook and the rest is history.

One of the main takeaways I took from this episode was the power of audacity. We can often associate audacity with negative connotations. We can look at someone like James and think that he’s over confident and has the audacity to say the things he says on his social media. We need confidence and audacity to achieve the things we want to. 

But having the audacity to ask difficult questions and not be worried about how other people think is huge when it comes to building confidence. He references a great experiment he heard on The Tim Ferris Podcast about asking for a 10% discount when buying a coffee. And goes on to quote Mark Manson with a quote I really like – “People wouldn’t care what other people thought of them so much if they realised how seldom they do.” 

We worry about what other people will think about us. And this builds anxiety in our heads. The anxiety relates to the reason we often don’t start the blog or podcast we have always wanted to. Or getting our message across the way we want to get it over.

We live in a polarised world where everything we say and put out on social media is open for others to judge us on. If you are less anxious and a bit more audacious with a positive outlook on your expectations, then with small steps you can achieve a lot more than you can by sitting wondering about it.

For me it was toss up between James Smith or Sir Richard Branson to add to my top 5 episodes. Sorry Dicky, James pipped you to the post on this one.

Check the full episode on YouTube –  HERE 

Listen to the episode HERE 

 

 

How You Say It – Lessons from Sir Alex Ferguson on Leading

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For me, Sir Alex Ferguson is the godfather of ‘man management’. It’s not just the longevity of managing at the highest level in world football, it’s the consistent success he had throughout his career as a leader.

Tactics, ability to sign great players and being able to watch a football match unfold and know what changes need to be made. These are all some of the attributes that make good football managers. However, communication is what separates the good managers from the great managers.

One of the books I dip in and out of very often is Leading which is co-written by Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Michael Moritz. The book is structured around the key skills that Ferguson values highest. It is aimed at giving the reader lessons in leadership that anyone can apply to their own situation.

The one chapter that I’ve dipped into the most, and used in plenty of my training courses is Chapter 8 -Owning The Message. This is the chapter that is dedicated to speaking, writing and answering questions.

Alex Ferguson had to communicate with a lot of people on a day to day basis as the manager of one of the biggest sporting organisations in the world. Players, coaching staff, owners/directors, media, supporters and the global audience. How was he so successful at communicating?

Despite how hard I’ve looked at this and analysed how complex or profound the answer could be,  it’s actually a little bit anticlimactic in some ways.

Keep it simple.

That’s it. Nothing fancy. Just keep the message that you want to deliver simple and clear to understand.

It’s not rocket science, but as easy as that looks and sounds; keeping it simple takes a hell of a lot of work.

Know your audience

“I got into the habit of imagining that I was in the shoes of the listener. I knew from my own experience as a player what it was like to listen to a manager drone on, especially if it was the day before a game, and you were just raring to get onto the training field and blow off some steam.”

He also explains the importance of keeping his team talks ‘short and punchy’ but still getting his point over. To do this, he had to know exactly what message he wanted to convey and how he would deliver it.

As football became more global, he was dealing with international players from all over the world. Language was a barrier. And if his team talks were being translated then it was essential that messages and meaning weren’t being lost in translation.

Next time you’re  needing to explain something to someone, imagine how you would say it to a translator for them to explain your words to another person.

Despite playing at the top level of competition in the world with some of the best players on the planet. Sometimes the simple messages were the most effective and easiest to understand:

“The instructions i gave most frequently were very short. They were nothing more complicated than ‘Keep the ball’ or ‘Do not let them score’”.

Know what you want to say

“You need to know what you want to say; you have to contemplate how you are going to deliver the message; and you have to maintain control of the audience.”

Preparation is so important when planning on delivering a message. Ferguson was always aware of not wanting to deliver a ‘sermon’ that the players had possibly heard him say in the past. He would find new ways to get a message across to emphasise his point.

He explains how he used the Canadian Geese in their flying formation as an example of team work. On one occasion he told a story of his recent trip to his first live performance of a classical music concert. He described to the players how the conductor wanted the same things from the musicians as Ferguson wanted from them: control, harmony, tempo, timing and rhythm.

He planned this conversation and took the time to work out how he would deliver his message using the metaphor.

Alex Ferguson calls this ‘maintaining control of the audience’. For me this is creating engagement. Making sure that he was never repeating himself to agonise over the same old points with players and always thinking of new ways to get his message over.

“Whether the audience is one person or 75,000, you need to assemble your thoughts, know what you want to emphasise and just say it.”

How you say it

“One message that seemed to strike home (at least judging by the number of players who appear to have remembered it) were the words i used at the half-time during the 1999 Champions League final when we were trailing Bayern Munich 1-0. I said’ ‘When that cup is going to be presented, just remember that you can’t even touch it if you’re the losers – you’ll be walking past it with your losers’ medals, knowing someone walking behind you is going to lift the Cup.’”

Alex Ferguson had a reputation for being a feisty character. The phrase ‘the hairdryer treatment’ had been coined by pundits to describe what it felt like to face the angry side of the feisty Scotsman. But this persona was often over-played by the media. No one would have lasted the length of time in leadership at the top level if they had only communicated using anger and raised voices.

He knew exactly at what point to deliver his message to his players and how he should do it. In the book, he mentions the power of giving a player positive reinforcement to make them feel better about themselves rather than using negative feedback. He would never tell a player if they were looking tired, even if he could see it. Instead he built them up to feel stronger.

He knew which players would respond positively and which ones wouldn’t to different ways of saying something. He knew when would be the best time to make his remarks more punchy and when saying less got more.

Using the power of silence can be just as powerful.

“Sometimes, after we had a bad result, I would finish what i had to say to the players and then sit down on the bench and say nothing. The subsequent quietness was probably more effective than anything i said.”

Sir Alex Ferguson knew how to get the best out of people. And although he had great players, coaches and a wealth of experience in the game. One of the main reasons for his success is how communicated. He delivered a message of success to players in a rapidly changing environment consistently. This takes huge skills to keep your message relevant over such a long period of time.

But the beauty of what he did is that he kept it simple. Regardless of whether it was a 1 to 1 conversation with an individual or addressing a stadium full of 75,000 people. He never overcomplicated it and always got his message across.

I would strongly recommend buying this book. If you’re like me and don’t have the attention to sit and read a book cover to cover, this book is ideal to dip in and out of for small reminders.

I asked ChatGPT: What are the top 5 ways to build rapport

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I asked ChatGPT for the top 5 ways to build a rapport. And here is the response:

Sure, here are the top 5 ways to build rapport:

1/ 🎧 Listen actively: The first step to building rapport is to be an active listener.

👀 Pay close attention to the other person when they’re speaking, and show that you understand and care about what they’re saying.

2/ 🤝 Show empathy: Building rapport requires empathy, or the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.

🤗 Put yourself in their shoes and see things from their perspective to create a sense of trust and understanding.

3/ 🤵 Be authentic: Being authentic is also important for building rapport. 💯 Be genuine and honest in your interactions with others, and don’t try to put on a false persona. This helps to create a sense of comfort and trust.

4/ 🤝 Find shared interests: Finding common ground is another key aspect of building rapport.

🎭 Look for shared interests, hobbies, or experiences that you and the other person can bond over. This creates a sense of connection and camaraderie.

5/ 😃 Have a positive attitude: Finally, having a positive attitude is essential for building rapport.

😊 Be friendly, approachable, and upbeat in your interactions with others. This creates a sense of warmth and goodwill, and can make others feel more comfortable around you.