Why People Fail To Understand Others.

If your desire is to be successful and to make a positive impact on your world, you need the ability to understand others. Understanding others gives you the potential to influence every area of life, not just the business arena.

Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others. In most of the time, the biggest mistakes we always make in trying to talk convincingly are to put our highest priority on expressing our ideas and feelings. However, what most people really want is to be listened to, respected, and understood. The moment people see what they are being understood, they become more motivated to understand our point of view. If you can learn to understand people, such as how they think, what they feel, what inspires them, how they’re likely to act and react in a given situation, then you can motivate and influence them in a positive way. 

Lack of understanding concerning others is a recurrent source of tension in our society. Half of all the controversies and conflicts that arise among people are caused not by differences of opinion or an inability to agree, but by the lack of understanding of one another. If we could reduce the number of misunderstandings, the courts wouldn’t be as crowded, there would be fewer violent crimes, the divorce rate would go down, and the amount of everyday stress most people experience would drop dramatically. 

There are many reasons why people fail to understand others. Below is a few main reasons mentioned:

1. Fear.
   In most of the time, when people don’t understand others, they often react by becoming fearful and once they start fearing others, they rarely try to overcome their fear in order to learn more about them. It becomes a vicious cycle.
   Unfortunately, fear is evident in the workplace when it comes to employees’ reactions toward their leaders. Yet in a healthy work environment, if you give others the benefit of the doubt and replace fear with understanding, everyone can work together positively.
   
   
2. Self-Centeredness.
   When fear isn’t a stumbling block, self-centeredness often is. People are not self-centered on purpose, but it’s just in the nature of humans to think of their own interests first. If you want to see an example of that, play with a two-year-old child. He naturally chooses the best toys for himself and insists on his own way.
   
   
   One way to overcome our natural self-centeredness is to try to see things from other people’s perspectives.
   
   
3. Failure To Appreciate Differences.
   The next logical step after leaving behind self-centeredness is learning to recognize and respect everyone else’s unique qualities. Instead of trying to cast others in your image, learn to appreciate their differences. If someone has a talent that you don’t have, hence it’s great, since both of you can strengthen each other’s weakness. If others come from a different culture, broaden your horizons and learn what you can from them. Your new knowledge will help you relate not only to them, but also to others.
   
   Once you learn to appreciate other people’s differences, you come to realize that there are many responses to leadership and motivation.
   
   
   
4. Failure To Acknowledge Similarities.
   We all have emotional reactions to what’s happening around us. To foster understanding, think of what your emotions would be if you were in the same position as the person you’re interacting with. You know what you would want to happen in a given situation. Chances are that the person you’re working with has many of the same feelings.
   
   
   If you treat everyone you meet as if he or she were the most important person in the world, you’ll communicate that he or she is somebody to you. 

Lastly, it is important to know that, people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. 

Sources from John C.Maxwell – Relationships 101 – What Every Leader Needs To Know.