A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of understanding one’s own thought patterns in order to improve self-awareness (read: knowledge of self).
Then there’s the other side of the coin: understanding other peoples’ patterns of thought. And this is extremely valuable when it comes to communication.
One of the first things I learned at the very beginning of my entrepreneurial career was the difficulty of communicating a new idea to someone, especially one that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. When attempting to communicate a new idea, you’re essentially trying to communicate something that is very real in your mind that doesn’t exist in the other person’s. Your job as the communicator is to get them on the same wavelength and get the image that’s in your head into theirs. (I still struggle with this. In my previous life, I thought I was a great communicator. But as you learn, you learn there is much more to learn.)
In this process of communicating, the strength and the weakness of two brains attempting to connect is that the human mind is associative: people take the first piece of information they recognize and associate it with something they already know. This has some interesting, and often funny, consequences.
For instance, you complete a sentence, “So what we’re trying to do is build a better form of ground transportation that’s cost effective and environmentally friendly.” And if the person is extroverted, you’ll quickly get a reply to the effect of, “That’s really cool, something like the new electric bicycles? have you seen those?”
“Errr, no. We’re actually working on a solar-powered car…so…”
(This also illustrates a second obstacle: people want to talk about what they know and what they think. )
I’ve had this happen to me enough times pitching numerous ideas in multiple ways to start getting a bit wiser. And while communicating a new idea may be the more extreme example (especially since sometimes the lexicon just isn’t there), communication is a challenge in general. Everyone runs everything through their own personal filter of experiences, thoughts, and attitudes. The trick is to find a way to push their buttons and catch their attention using an example or analogy or some device that they understand and, ideally, are interested in.
This is why I love blogs and some other forms of social media, although I think blogs are the best. Blogs can be relatively frequent, but usually require enough effort that somebody has to care about the topic in order to write a blog post about it. This creates a valuable source of information about a person. If you read through someone’s blog carefully, you have a ton of information about them. You have their thoughts on a page.
And if you understand their patterns of thought, you have a much better chance of influencing those thoughts effectively when you communicate with them.
Kevin
7.23.2009
