Choose areas in your family life that need additional cooperation, teamwork and better attitudes. Write each one on a note and put them all in a hat. Have the children draw the notes out of the hat one at a time, and explain what they would do to make that situation a win for everyone.
HABIT 5
SEEK FIRST TO
UNDERSTAND . . .
THEN TO BE
UNDERSTOOD
To learn to seek first to understand and then to be understood opens the floodgates to heart-to-heart family living. As the fox said in the classic The Little Prince, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
As we begin this chapter, I’d like to ask you to try an experiment. Please take a few seconds and just look at this picture.
Now look at this picture and carefully describe what you see.
Do you see an Indian? What does he look like? How is he dressed? Which way is he facing?
You would probably say that the Indian has a prominent nose, that he’s wearing a feathered warbonnet, and that he is looking to the left of the page.
But what if I were to tell you that you’re wrong? What if I said that you were not looking at an Indian but at an Eskimo, and that he is wearing a coat with a hood that covers his head, that he has a spear in his hand, and that he is facing away from you and toward the right side of the page?
Who would be right? Look at the picture again. Can you see the Eskimo? If you can’t, keep trying. Can you see his spear and hooded coat?
If we were talking face-to-face, we could discuss the picture. You could describe what you see to me, and I could describe what I see to you. We could continue to communicate until you showed me what you see in the picture and I showed you what I see.
Because we can’t do that, and study this picture. Then look at this picture again. Can you see the Eskimo now? It is important that you see him clearly before you continue reading.
For many years I have used these kinds of perception pictures to bring people to the realization that the way they see the world is not necessarily the way other people see the world. In fact, people do not see the world as it is; they see it as they are—or as they have been conditioned to be.
Almost always this kind of perception experience causes people to be humbled and to be much more respectful, more reverent, more open to understanding.
Often when I teach Habit 5, I will go out into the audience and take a pair of glasses from one person and try to talk another person into wearing them. I usually tell the audience that I’m going to use several methods of human influence to try to get this person to wear these glasses.
When I put these glasses on the person—let’s say a woman—she will usually quickly recoil in some way, particularly if they are strong prescription glasses. And so I appeal to her motivation. I say, “Try harder.” And there’s even more recoiling. Or if she feels intimidated by me, she’ll outwardly tend to go along, but there’s no real buy-in inside. So I say, “Well, I sense you’re kind of rebelling. You’ve got an ‘attitude.’ You’ve got to be positive. Think more positively. You can make this work.” So she’ll kind of smile, but that doesn’t work at all and she knows it. So she’ll usually say, “That doesn’t help at all.”
So then I try to create a little pressure or to intimidate her in some way. I step into the role of a parent and say, “Look, do you have any idea of the sacrifices your mother and I have made for you—the things we’ve done for you, the things we’ve denied ourselves to help you? And you’re going to take this kind of an attitude! Now wear these!” And sometimes that stirs up even more feelings of rebellion. I step into the role of a boss and try to exert some economic pressure: “How current is your résumé anyway?” I appeal to social pressure: “Aren’t you going to be part of this team?” I appeal to her vanity: “Oh, but they look so good on you! Look, everyone. Don’t they complement her features?”
I tap into motivation, attitude, vanity, economic and social pressure. I intimidate. I guilt-trip. I tell her to think positively, to try harder. But none of these methods of influence works. Why? Because they all come from me—not from her and her unique eye situation.
This brings us to the importance of seeking to understand before you seek to influence—of diagnosing before prescribing, as an optometrist does. Without understanding, you might as well be yelling into the wind. No one will hear you. Your effort may satisfy your ego for a moment, but there’s really no influence taking place.
We each look at the world through our own pair of glasses—glasses that come out of our own unique background and conditioning experiences, glasses that create our value system, our expectations, our implicit assumptions about the way the world is and the way it should be. Just think about the Indian/Eskimo experience at the beginning of this chapter. The first picture conditioned your mind to “see” or interpret the second picture similarly. But there was another way to see it that was just as accurate.
One of the main reasons behind communication breakdowns is that the people involved interpret the same event differently. Their different natures and background experiences condition them to do so. If they then interact without taking into account why they see things differently, they begin to judge each other. For instance, take a small thing such as a difference in room temperature. The thermostat on the wall registers 75 degrees. One person complains, “It’s too hot,” and opens the window; the other complains, “It’s too cold,” and closes it. Who is right? Is it too hot or too cold? The fact is they are both right. Logic would say that if two disagree and one is right, the other is wrong. But it isn’t logic; it’s psycho-logic. Both are right—each from his or her own point of view.
As we project our conditioning experiences onto the outside world, we assume we’re seeing the world the way it is. But we’re not. We’re seeing the world as we are—or as we have been conditioned to be. And until we gain the capacity to step out of our own autobiography—to set aside our own glasses and really see the world through the eyes of others—we will never be able to build deep, authentic relationships and have the capacity to influence in positive ways.
And that’s what Habit 5 is all about.
At the Heart of Family Pain Is Misunderstanding
Years ago I had a profound, almost shattering experience that taught me the essence of Habit 5 in a forcible and humbling way.
Our family was on a sabbatical for about fifteen months in Hawaii, and Sandra and I had begun what was to become one of the great traditions of our lives. I would pick her up a little before noon on an old red trail cycle. We would take our two preschool children with us—one between us and the other on my left knee—and ride out in the cane fields by my office. We would ride slowly along for about an hour, just talking. We usually ended up on an isolated beach; we parked the trail cycle and walked about two hundred yards to a secluded spot where we ate a picnic lunch. The children would play in the surf, and we would have great in-depth visits about all kinds of things. We would talk about almost everything.
One day we began to talk about a subject that was very sensitive for us both. I had always been bugged about what I considered Sandra’s inordinate attachment to buying Frigidaire appliances. She seemed to have an obsession about Frigidaire that I was at an absolute loss to understand. She would not even consider buying another brand. Even when we were just starting out and on a very tight budget, she insisted that we drive the fifty miles to the “big city” where Frigidaire appliances were sold, because no dealer in our small university town carried them at that time.
What bothered me the most was not that she liked Frigidaire but that she persisted in making what I considered illogical and indefensible statements that had no basis in fact whatsoever. If she had only agreed that her response was irrational and purely emotional, I think I could have handled it. But her justification was really upsetting. In fact it was such a tender issue that on this particular occasion we kept riding and postponed going to the beach. I think we were afraid to look each other in the eye.