Life Coaches Blog

I used to be an asshole. Without really knowing why or how, or even noticing it, I stumbled through most of my teenage and young adult life stepping on people’s toes and hurting their feelings without even knowing it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I cared a lot, and I always liked to help people by giving suggestions and offering solutions, but I didn’t understand that the way I was doing it pissed people off more than it helped them.

It took a whole lotta awareness building, heart-to-hearts with my best of friends, who cared enough to tell me how assholey I was being, and coaching from an ex of mine, who is one of the most empthatic people I know, before I started to change.

And that’s part of the reason why now, I think, I’m passionate about methods of elegant and powerful communication, and why I’m especially sensitive (ouch) when I see other people making the same mistakes I did.

A Difference That Made The Difference

One of the big ‘Aha!’ moments came for me when I learnt and understood a principle that saved me and others an enormous amount of pain. When I got it, my coaching and personal effectiveness shot up dramatically. I not only began to build better rapport, I was also better able to help people discover solutions, and provide suggestions that were more readily accepted.

Stephen Covey described this principle best in his excellent book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Which was the exact opposite of what I used to do:

Seek to be understood first, then to understand.

Another word I like to use in place of understand is empathise; which the dictionary defines as:

Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.

You Don’t Get Me, So Why Should I Get You?

If the other person you’re talking to doesn’t think you really understand his situation or point of view, why should he trust any opinion or solution from someone who clearly doesn’t get it?

In NLP we say that the map is not the territory, which means that everybody has a different model of the world. If I feel that you don’t get my map, you’re obviously not going to be of any accurate help to it. To build rapport, you don’t have to like or even agree to the other person’s model of the world, but you have to at least understand it first before you even have a chance of modifying it.

But understanding this principle didn’t always worked for me, and after a lot of painful trial and errors, I realized why it wasn’t enough. There are 3 main areas that this principle operates in, and each area modifies this principle differently, which I’ll cover in Part 2 of this series.