Day 72:) Diagnose before you prescribe
The doctors carefully observe the wounds and listen to us before prescribing the medications. The shopkeeper fully understands first what kind of clothes we are looking for and show us the exact same. Google learns from our search what we like and dislike and makes us view the ads accordingly.
What is common in the above three instances?
Instead of jumping straight to answer, let’s take the baby steps to understand more clearly. The doctor wants to understand the patient correctly so that he prescribes him the correct medicines else it may be dangerous to patient health. If the salesman doesn’t understand the customer, he will end up losing his sales. Similarly, the tech giant won’t be able to make billions of dollars if it misunderstood its user. They seek first to understand
Seeking first to understand is simple but not easy. Understanding comes from listening. There are five variants of listening namely:
• Ignoring: Here we simply ignore the other person.
• Pretending: Here we show off that we are being attentive to the speaker.
• Selective: Only listening the portion in which we are interested.
• Attentive: Fully attentive to the words of the conversationalist.
• Empathetic: Along with words, pay attention to the body language as well as sound.
The order is bottom to top. Just 10% of our communication is represented by the words we use, 30% by our sound and the rest 60%, by our body language. Ironically, we all feel comfortable, when we are having a conversation with an empathetic listener, but we never want to be a empathy listener to others.
As we move more toward digital word, it is more difficult to be an empathetic listener, we can’t easily sense the body language of the person in the virtual place. We need to focus more on the voice modulation and the words to understand better.
“Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful” - Gloria Steinem, American Activist.