Quotes about Understanding

newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return.

How many times have you made assumptions similar to the store manager's? It's easy to do, because we all see things in different ways. We all have different paradigms or frames of reference—like eyeglasses through which we see the world. We see the world not as it is, but as we are—or sometimes as we are conditioned to see it.

The deposit is to make the expectations clear and explicit in the beginning.

Seek first to understand. Before the problems come up, before you try to evaluate and prescribe, before you try to present your own ideas—seek to understand.

Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know. I

Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand—highly developed qualities of character. It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.

That's why it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table. People will begin to judge each other through those expectations. And if they feel like their basic expectations have been violated, the reserve of trust is diminished. We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people. The

Again, you simply can't think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things. I've tried to be "efficient" with a disagreeing or disagreeable person and it simply doesn't work. I've tried to give ten minutes of "quality time" to a child or an employee to solve a problem, only to discover such "efficiency" creates new problems and seldom resolves the deepest concern.

Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways. We evaluate—we either agree or disagree; we probe—we ask questions from our own frame of reference; we advise—we give counsel based on our own experience; or we interpret—we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.

you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent.

came into focus. Through continued calm, respectful, and specific communication, each of us in the room was finally able to see the other point of view. But when we looked away and then back, most of us would immediately see the image we had been conditioned to see in the ten-second period of time. I frequently use this perception demonstration in working with people and organizations because

While individuals may look at their own lives and interactions in terms of paradigms or maps emerging out of their experience and conditioning, these maps are not the territory. They are a "subjective reality," only an attempt to describe the territory.