Ways To Effectively Understand People

Key Points:

There are four ways developmental stages to listening and understanding people:

1. Mimic Content=Mimicking content is easy. You just listen to the words that come out of someone's mouth and you repeat them. You're hardly even using your brain.
2. Rephrase the Content=This time, you have put the meaning into your own words.
3. Reflect Feeling=Now you're not paying as much attention to what they're saying as you are to the way they feel about what they are saying.
4. Rephrase the Content and Reflect the Feeling= Include both the second and the third stage.

People want to be understood. And whatever investment of time it takes to do that will bring much greater returns of time as you work from an accurate understanding of the problems and issues and from the high Emotional Bank Account that results when a person feels deeply understood.

Then Seek To Be Understood:

The early Greeks used these three words to contain the essence of seeking to first understand and making effective presentations toward people.

• Ethos is your personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency.
• Pathos is the empathetic side- it's the feeling.
• Logos is the logic- the reasoning part of the presentation.

When you can present your own ideas clearly, specifically, visually, and most important, contextually- in the context of a deep understanding of other people's paradigms and concerns- you significantly increase the credibility of your ideas.

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