As it is the summer months, I thought I’d keep the blogs a little shorter but hopefully they will provoke some thinking but I’d like to share some of the ideas, thoughts and random musings that have come to me over the last month.
The first of those is try to avoid getting into “Tell – sell – yell syndrome”. As soon as I write it, I’m sure you know what I mean. You tell someone something once, then you try and sell them on the reason you are right and then you revert to your form of yelling (that may not be loud but the force is the same!)
In this time of political turmoil, it is what we see on the news every day. Most of us have made up her minds on what we think about the political landscape at the moment and it is so tempting to try and get that message across to those of a different view but we seem to have stopped listening to one another. There is more that unites us than divides us but we seem to have moved away from finding that one thing so that we can find consensus.
So if you find yourself yelling – ask yourself if there is anyway you could listen more to perhaps find some ground you can start to agree on.
If you need some guidance on how that can be done well, I was impressed with James O’Brien’s book “How To be Right”. He has a particular point of view but as an interviewer, he talks through how to listen to be able to have a real debate rather than a yelling match with those who are willing to meet you halfway.