Almost everything in life must be done with others. If you learn to relate well to others, you drastically increase your professional leverage and drastically increase the emotional health of your relationships with family & friends.
I. Understanding Others
The first step to relating well to others is understanding them. The first step to understanding others is understanding yourself. Here's How To Build Self-Awareness. Plus, by leading & modeling your own self-awareness, others will follow suit.
To understand others, read and practice the ideas in this piece: What’s going on here, with this human?
When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality.
Raise the bar for how much you want to understand people. It's not just understanding their MBTI. It's being able to predict their sentences, know how their childhood affected their present, know what their dreams are before they die, etc. A 10 is Jony Ive and Steve Jobs, or your own mom and dad. Most people understand each other at a 2. Try for a 7.
II. Reflecting Others
When you're relating with others, the first goal is to reflect their emotional state.
- Seek first to understand, then to be understood
- Be curious first
- Become an excellent reflective listener. Listen for emotions, not events. Don't just play back their statements, try to concisely synthesize their emotional state. Practice.
- Don't forget to put yourself in there. Say "what I'm hearing is..."
The most helpful framework I've learned for reflective listening is nonviolent communication (the book is short and good). It has two parts: empathizing and honesty. Listen empathetically and speak honestly. Listen for emotions. Listen for needs. Your goal is to be present with them. Be a presentist. Be ok with silence. Even when they feel done, ask "is there more?"
To understand emotions, use this emotions 2x2. To understand needs, use the Bentoism needs 2x2. To understand morals, use the six moral foundations.
The best leaders listen. When Satya Nadella joined Microsoft, he made the entire executive team read NVC.
Especially when managing people & leading, try to make your ratio of open-ended questions to directive statements around 10:1. In a peer-to-peer relationship, your goal should be to listen 60%, talk 40%. When you're in a group, speak 1/n. If there are 4 people, talk 25% of the time. If there are 10 people, only talk 10%.
Don't focus on your own anxieties. Assume you are liked, and you will be. Your goal when interacting is to make the other person feel more comfortable.
You'll know you've succeeded at all this when someone feels seen. It feels great to be seen. Some of my most impactful moments have just been friends reflecting my own words back to me. "Wow, that sounds hard." "It sounds like you're comparing yourself to others." Or when they note something about my being that I couldn't tell because it's the water I swim in. I still remember when I was 26 and someone told me I was enthusiastic. I was so surprised!
Give that gift to others. Reflect their emotions and see them for who they are.
III. Helping Others
80% of helping others is being aware of yourself first and reflecting their emotional state. One trap people (and more often men) fall into is "trying to solution" when their thought partner just wants to be listened to.
But you can help others by giving constructive criticism.
Not surprisingly, the best constructive criticism comes from within them, not you. Experts call this motivational interviewing (MI). With MI, your main goal is to support their own self-efficacy and their own desires for change, not yours. MI recognizes that all change comes from within. Think about this for yourself—have you ever changed because someone offered you unsolicited advice to do so? No. Instead, use MI to build success spirals in others, letting them know that you believe in them.
But in the end, the work is theirs to do and you can't control their behavior. You want the best for others but let them #doyou.
The key idea underlying MI and other change techniques is the idea of psychological safety. People need to feel safe around you in order to share their shame, in order to change.
This is shown by the pyramid in the excellent book, 5 Dysfunctions of Team:
- Start by earning trust
- Then you can disagree and commit
- And drive accountability and results
(There's a similar idea of home → edge → groove in the excellent Robert Kegan book An Everyone Culture.)
Once you've built trust, be sure to give the constructive feedback in private while giving positive feedback in public. Then, when you give the feedback, see it as a partnership rather than as combative. As Claire Hughes Johnson notes:
We often envision critical conversations as combative, where the parties stand in oppositional positions. I aim to approach the situation as partners, standing side by side. To do that, you have to be aware of the language you’re using; you want to show empathy and curiosity but also take a bit of a risk.
Don't view feedback as +/- but +/Δ. The delta implies action-oriented change.
Try not to give too much constructive criticism over writing. Instead, record a quick Loom.
When you're considering whether to be honest with someone, almost always do so. Don't walk on eggshells. Often you might hold resentments within yourself, then let them out later all at once. This doesn't feel great for them. Instead of you telling them you were angry when they didn't take out the trash, you held it in, put on a mask, then eventually revealed your true state. This reduces trust because they never know what you actually believe. It's surprising when it eventually comes out.
Lend people ideas that are not yet fully formed. It's ok.
Clear is kind. Say the hard thing.
IV. Conflict
In addition to giving constructive criticism about a person, sometimes you disagree with a person about, well, anything.
Here's how to fight well.
First, start with the advice above:
- Understand yourself & others. The primary trait to look for here is agreeableness. If you're already agreeable, lean into conflict more. If you're not agreeable, look to open up space for others.
- Reflect others. Most conflict happens when you think you heard them say something, but they didn't actually mean it. As the poet Khalil Gibran writes, "Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." Look out for the meant-said-heard delta.
- Help others. If you've already created trusted spaces, now you can leverage that trust for this conflict.
As you have conflict:
- You don't need to join every argument you’re invited to. Ignore most conflicts, especially on the internet.
- Steelman their perspective, don't strawman it. You'll know you have succeeded when you can pass an ideological turing test for their position.
- As Patrick Collison notes here, see arguments as trying to collectively find the "topology of disagreement." Clarity is the goal, not winning. See the disagreement as an epiphenomenon of some underlying beliefs, and look for those.
- Co-create a shared third rail for the things you agree on (facts, etc.) then understand the disagreement from there.
- And, as always, tune in to your body. Breathe the tension out.
