It's A Challenge To Understand Others

It's A Challenge To Understand Others

Understanding is the basis for our ability to get along with other people, respectfully and cooperatively. Ignorance is the cause of a tremendous amount of pain between peoples, within families and even within the workplace. Although most of us would probably say that we want to understand others, particularly those close to us, it isn't always that easy.

Feelings such as impatience, fear, confusion, and anxiety or behaviors such as mind-reading. Pre-judging or jumping to conclusions often prevent us from being able to genuinely listen to and understand others.

We can never totally understand everyone all of the time. But, unless we learn to accept that, we will usually get panicky or uneasy feelings when we don't understand our spouses, children, bosses, or people who have different cultural roots or values than us. But we can get over much of this misunderstanding, if we work at it.

We must recognize, deal with and handle our feelings first, otherwise we generally have poor control over our actions. Feelings are triggered by beliefs and thoughts. When we feel impatience, we falsely believe that something has to be done right away. And, usually it doesn't. When we feel afraid, it is often false fear, based on our assumptions or beliefs that something bad will happen, even though, there's no evidence to support that belief. When we feel confused, or aren't sure what is happening around us, we want to take charge of everything.

New circumstances in our marriage or family, new neighbors, changes in our job, or changes in our neighborhood, can all throw us for a loop, but only if we let it happen. Most of the time when we are anxious, it's not about what has happened, but about our fear of what might happen. And, those fears turn out to be false almost all of the time.

A good example is the way many people oppose worthwhile projects in their neighborhoods, such as group homes or special care homes for the handicapped or the elderly. Without any evidence at all to support their anxiety, such people often rush down to City Council, complaining that it will affect their property values. I have no patience with such persons. They tend to be preoccupied with only one person, themselves. And they often forget the legitimate rights and needs of the persons for whom those projects are intended.

Mind-reading, prejudging and jumping to conclusions are all acts of impatience. A person assumes, and doesn't check things out. A person assumes the whole world must think and behave like him or her, and therefore prejudges other people before he or she gets to know them. Equally, in jumping to conclusions, they don't check out their facts or feelings with someone. They make a decision on very limited and usually false information. Those feelings that we don't recognize and understand, and the various faulty behaviors I've outlined, get us into trouble in many areas of our lives.

Marriages suffer when people let their faulty feelings rule their lives, and when they don't show respect and consideration to their spouse, by checking things out and understanding. Relationships with children equally suffer. When parents just communicate negative feelings to their children, and won't, and don't, listen, communication and understanding shuts down completely.
And, in communities, when neighbors or people of different cultures aren't willing to learn about and respect each other's view of life and of the world, understanding shuts down and tension builds up.

How then, can people understand others better? The first rule is to stop talking and preaching. Instead, listen and observe. The next rule is to talk about your concerns, but not in an attacking or a put-down way. Instead, share the areas where you realize you don't know enough about the other person, and then, most importantly, shut up and let them respond to what you have said. Get in touch with any of those stressful feelings I've talked about, as soon as they start to occur. In your head, challenge any thought or belief that is probably triggering those anxious or fearful feelings. If necessary, talk to someone else you trust and respect about your difficulty with those feelings.

And finally, recognize the common tendencies to mind-read, prejudge and jump to conclusions. All of us have done all of these at times in our lives, perhaps more often than we remember or want to admit to. But, if you think back to times you used them, you'll recognize that such actions did not help your feelings, the situation or your relationships with others. So the moment you get a whiff of any of those, old behaviors, open the window of your mind and air it out.