If you think for one moment that you are always having the exact same experience as the person standing next to you,
think again…
Ask them next time what just happened and you will get a shock!
In everyday life this is happening more than we realize. Some simple things that you experience, you may have thought that everybody else was seeing and hearing everything the exact same way as you did, but it turns out they are having a completely different experience.
What’s happening here and how can this be useful in your business?
This what I find so great about the world, we are all individuals and have different perspectives and personal awareness. I truly love to learn how different people’s perspectives change their experience. People live their own World View!!
For instance, you interpreted what people say differently to what they are trying to express and visa versa.
All this is what lies outside your personal awareness until something happens to bring your focus back to the current moment.
You may say in a conversation that should be common knowledge to you, common sense even. But the other person is struggling to understand what you are talking about.
The conversation that's going on in your head is
“Come on you understand, don’t you?”
If you have reached this point, then that is one of the indicator’s that you have taken for granted your “experience knowledge”. Commonly called “The Curse of Knowledge”
If this is happening in every day life with friends and people that ypu interact with, imagine what’s happening to the people that work for you or customers?
Whether you realise it or not, everything you are talking about is being interpreted quite differently. Unless you have spent time to understand your customers or the people that do work for you at that next deeper level, you would have been communicating with the assumption “they think like me” and have had all the same experiences as you.
You would have had this experience when you have limited or no knowledge of another industry. Another person is describing their business to you and you needed to ask 3 or 4 times what exactly they were explaining before you really got it. They were probably using some sort of jargon or technical terms that they assumed you knew. That same frustration is happening in reverse when you are communicating.
I would suggest that if you want to be able to communicate clearly and concisely to the people that you interact with. The best way is to keep your language limited to a range of words the person or people you are communicating with knowing and understand quickly.
That may sound simple, much harder said than done.
Not till you stop and really take the time to clarify how other people are going to interpret your words, is it that you start to get what lies just outside your own personal awareness, the wake up call comes that is where most people are staying that you communicate with.
When you realise the power of this simple step in communicating, this is where communication starts to become a useful tool instead of just rambling on with a whole stack of words to people.
All the knowledge that you have gained is stored in your subconscious and in most cases forgotten how much hard work you had to do to gain that knowledge, as soon becomes your common knowledge, also Curse of Knowledge.
The people you talk to have no idea of the experiences you have had and here is the most awesome part for you.
People will appreciate you, taking the effort distilling down your experience, knowledge into simple steps so they can understand it better, they will gain that knowledge that much faster. They will appreciate that you took the time to do this for them.
The next time you start explaining something and the person looks puzzled about what you just said, that’s an indicator you need to use different words or better clarify how they will understand the knowledge you are imparting onto them.
It’s a great opportunity to help them gain your knowledge.