Most people, it seems, talk more than listen. They want to be heard, want to make their point. But don’t we all respond better to someone who listens to us? Really listens, so that we feel that we are actually understood? The difference is profound.

It is important advice to remember in discussions where there are different points of view, such as with people from different departments in a company. In fact, this is where our client usually found the reminder most helpful. A company’s president, CFO, head of HR, and head of marketing typically have a very different points of view about issues that affect the company.

The advice is important in negotiation. Rather than just pressing for what you want, if you first understand what is most important to the party you are negotiating with, you may well be able to come to an agreement that gives you both more of what you want.

The advice is important in personal relationships. Many arguments stem from a simple misunderstanding. Mismatched expectations or underlying assumptions are often the problem. Rather than reacting to what was said, if we seek first to understand what the other person expects and assumes, the conversation may not turn into an argument at all.

Being a marketing guy, I’ve found that this great advice is rarely considered in marketing or in sales. Most companies’ marketing reflects the company’s point of view rather than the customers’. But we know that isn’t effective. Prospective customers want to know what the product or service will do for them, not just what it will do. They want to know how what the company offers meets their needs, relieves their pain, or fulfills their desires. They want to know why they should deal with that company, not just why the company thinks its offerings are worth buying.

Here is a sales example: Let’s say you are shopping for tires. The salesman tells you all about the latest performance tires that look cool and really hug the curves. But if you are interested in tires that will last the longest, guess what? He has lost you.

If he pushes the latest “in” thing like tires have the lowest profile, and you are interested in tires that give a comfortable ride or have the best safety rating, he has lost you.

But, if he seeks first to understand what is important to you rather than just telling you what he think is sales-worthy, he can connect with you. And probably sell you some tires.

By seeking first to understand, we can then communicate more readily with the people in our lives, and, in business, with clients and customers.

Understand?

Photo by maldiviandude.

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My wife is outgoing and more task-oriented than people-oriented. She likes to move fast. She tends to make decisions on-the-fly and to work in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. She finds it easy to jump from topic to topic or from task to task.

My oldest daughter is much like me with a female perspective. She is a bit more sensitive than I am, but not much. She recently told me that she often does not like people because they do things that do not make sense. We have a running joke between us that one of us hurt the other’s feeling (Yes, feeling is singular and not plural.)

My youngest daughter is a lot like my wife. She moves fast, talks fast, and decides fast. She is different from my wife in that she tends a little more towards the people-oriented side of life. She loves to laugh, have fun, and play. She often leaves clothes on the floor or dishes on the counter because she “forgot” about them in moving on to the next thing.

I struggle with understanding the three female perspectives on life that live in the same house with me. I struggle to shift mental gears when either my wife or my youngest daughter makes a request of me with an “oh, by the way…” start while I’m working on a project that requires focus.

My wife struggles to find ways to communicate with me that respect my need to stay focused on my current task-at-hand without interruption. She struggles to slow down and allow my oldest daughter the time she needs to process requests before answering. She also struggles to restrain her frustration when my youngest daughter fails to follow-through on a task.

My oldest daughter struggles to understand and value her sister’s more light-hearted perspective on life. She has to guard against her own perfectionism when she comments on her sister’s singing. She also struggles with her mother’s intensity and drive when tasks need to be finished in a short period of time. To her, her mother looks angry, and she often responds accordingly by withdrawing from rather than engaging with her mother.

My youngest daughter struggles to allow me to work without interruption. She finds it difficult to stay quiet or to work without music when I am working on business matters. She can run afoul of her mother with her occasionally too quick wit and mouth. She really gets frustrated with her sister’s performance expectations.

In a nutshell, that is my team, my family, my work unit. And somehow we have to find a way to make this work.

We all understand the DISC model of human behavior. We all work to understand each other’s perspective. We work (almost) every day to apply what I have learned professionally to our family dynamic. It’s still hard work.

How different are we from your family or your business team?

I would guess, not very.

We are all similar, and yet we are different. We have different levels of maturity, different levels of knowledge, different levels of skill, and different perspectives on the “right” way to do things.

Still, we have to find a way to make this work.

All the knowledge and skills in the world don’t make a difference in the functioning of a family or a team without a desire and willingness to make it work. As one of my mentors taught me, “commitment and compatibility are two different things.”

As you move forward in your business and personal life, I encourage you to focus more on commitment than on compatibility.

After all, we have to find a way to make this work.

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And contrary to the psychology industry’s biological notion that we choose our mates based on a biological desire to keep our species going, we actually come together on a psychological plane. What actually happens as we mature into adults, and experience relationships that do not lead to marriage, is we develop an unconscious picture of this soul mate. Anyone who has met that one person understands that falling in love is not a biological experience but a mental one, that falling in love happens at a speed unimaginable to those who have not had this most wonderful experience.

But now comes the hard part, trying to figure out how to develop a life together. While the falling in love part happens beyond any imaginable time frame, the falling out of love happens at a turtle’s pace. What is needed to understand is this change in the relationship that takes someone from “for better or worse” to it’s over.

As it turns out, we develop our emotional perspectives from birth, by the examples given to us by our parents. In marriages where the couple struggles between sticking together and splitting up these influences can determine the outcome. What cause those conflicts in so many marriages are these negative insecurities from our past that cause us to fear the same result from our partner today.

What we are doing when we introduce anger and arguments into our marriages is projecting these past insecurities onto our partners, fearing those same results that we have seen before. This is where the wedge in the marriage comes from. What eventually happens after we project those insecurities enough times is we transfer those negative emotions from our past relationships onto our partner causing us to decide to get divorced.

The secret to success is confronting our demons and slaying our dragons, as the sayings go. And this takes courage. For us to be able to look at our partners from a clear, objective perspective we must understand and overcome those influences from our past, we must forgive those who we believe have caused us to be fearful of our current relationship. In psychological terms this is called catharsis. What we must do as individuals is realize that we can look anew at our perspective of our own insecurities. Only then will we be able to develop a marriage where we can stick together throughout whatever life dishes out to us.

To give an example, I forgave my parents when I was 25. I had a conversation with a friend where each was trying to outdo the other on who had the worst childhood, only he still loved his parents. I realized after that conversation that I was wrong in the anger I had built up towards my parents. I admitted for the first time in my adult life that I was wrong. Admitting your mistakes gets a lot easier after that first time.

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Despite their differences, the two boys become friends across the barbed-wire fence that separates their two worlds.

Based on the stories they hear from the adults in their lives, Bruno (the General’s son) says that he and Shmuel (the Jewish boy) are supposed to be enemies. You can see Bruno wrestling with this concept starting at the 6 minute 49 second mark in the video with this post.

This movie is set in a time filled with racism and violence. A time when the differences between us became much more important than the similarities. And, I wonder, have people really changed? Have we gotten better? Or, are we just better at hiding our thoughts that condemn others because they are different from us?

As we work to collaborate, build teams, forge relationships, and work with others; can we get past our differences? Is different necessarily bad? Do we all have to look, act, and think the same? Is there room for differences in our relationships? Can we work for common good despite them?

Just because we might be different, are we really supposed to be enemies?

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Maintaining and growing friendships has become increasingly important to me as I age. In fact, VibrantNation.com, a social networking website dedicated exclusively to women 50+, has recently released a study that reveals that we are of the first generation of women in history whose personal networks at midlife and beyond are actually growing over time. The stereotypes of shrinking connectedness and increasing isolation belong to the women of generations past, clearly not the women of my own Boomer cohort.

In fact, I am often pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous level of intimacy with which women 50+ interact upon chance encounter. For instance, by the time we’ve stood together in line at the women’s room at a concert, we may know each others’ marital status, number and issues with various grown children/grandchildren, health problems and solutions, and so on. Similar exchanges are taking place online everyday at Vibrant Nation as well as on other social networking sites such as Facebook, where women 55+ are the fastest-growing segment.

That said, developing on-going relationships is a new skill for many of us–one I am attempting to learn, the way women newly divorced return to the dating world on shaky legs. This is in part because when I was my daughter’s age, I was too busy liberating workplaces to make maintaining and growing personal friendships a priority. In fact, back then, a good friend was considered to be someone who understood when you had to cancel a social lunch for a business meeting.

Ironically, the inspiring interest in friendships amongst our daughters’ generations can be considered an unintended (but happy) consequence of Women’s Lib. Having earned our older Gen X offspring the nickname “The latchkey generation” is not the part of my generation’s legacy of which I’m proudest. Given how often we were still at work when they came home from school, they turned to one another and the notion of social peer packs was born.

Gen Y, their younger siblings, have taken this even further. They showed us the way to integrate friendship fully into their lives, mostly through the gift of technology, which keeps them connected all the time. Now the friendship equation is reversed: social friends help each other figure out how to make money. For example, my daughter is laying plans to rep her friends’ artistic abilities to ad agencies–a win/win scenario for a generation who, by and large, value their friendships above traditional workplace ambition.

Happily, it is not too late for the women of my generation. committed to making up for lost time, to reach out to others for non-business reasons. We can take a page from our grown daughters to use social networking to keep us connected–and when we do, to remember to put friendships first, professional advancement second.

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These descriptors almost universally come from clearly observable behaviors, thought processes, or attitudes common to a group of people. In and of themselves, most descriptors are neutral – neither good nor bad. It is what we do with them and how we use them that determines their worth and value relationally.

For example, I am a man and my wife is a woman. I have read many books and articles, listened to many audio programs, and attended many workshops in an effort to learn what I need to learn to make our relationship as powerful and dynamic as possible. In nearly twenty years of marriage and after many efforts to understand this other human in my life, I have come to two startling conclusions:

1. In general, men and women do not process information the same way. They do not tend to see the world through the same lens, interact with people in the same way, or have the same emotional needs.
2. No matter how hard I try, my wife will not think the way that I do and I will not think the way that she does.

There, I said it. Men and women are different.

Now, what do I do with this information?

I see two clear options. One, I can label, classify, and put my wife in the “woman” box so that the word “woman” becomes a label on her and her approach to life. Or two, I can use the  “statistical norm” that describes the female perspective to create a reference frame for entering her world to understand her in a deeper and better way.

The first approach leads to stereotyping, criticizing and tolerating the other person. In my experience, I have never met someone who wanted to be stereotyped, criticized, or tolerated.

The second approach leads me to use what I have learned about the “typical” female perspective to discuss things with my wife. (No, I do not believe that there is a “typical” female response. I am using this phrase very lightly, and just to make a point.) Based on this understanding of how women often interpret a situation, I can engage in conversation and dialogue with my wife to better understand her unique perspective. I use the “statistical norm” describing the general female perspective to help me understand how we might see a situation differently. Understanding the general differences gives me a lens to see into her world rather than to reach a judgment of her.

As we work, interact, and communicate with others, understanding our differences can help us to connect at a deeper level. Using this understanding to build bridges to others rather than to label and judge others creates a positive environment where we can move past tolerance to celebration.

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