Some­times, mis­un­der­stand­ing arises when we do not under­stand other people’s map of the world, or in other words, when we can­not put our­selves in their shoes.

Each per­son reacts to the other, the sit­u­a­tion esca­lates, emo­tions inten­sify, and the chance of reach­ing a mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial agree­ment dis­ap­pears in a puff of smoke.

Whether you’re prepar­ing for a meet­ing, deal­ing with fam­ily mem­bers, sell­ing, nego­ti­at­ing, coach­ing, or giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion, the abil­ity to put your­selves in other people’s shoes mas­sively increases the like­li­hood of success.

When you are able to adopt a dif­fer­ent point of view eas­ily, you gain in your abil­ity to detach from the imme­di­ate sit­u­a­tion, and to keep your cool in chal­leng­ing circumstances.

In a word.. you don’t go bananas!

Sounds good to me!

But not only that…

Your abil­ity to look at things from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive makes you more flex­i­ble, more adapt­able, more able to see every­thing from a higher point of view, and there­fore more likely to keep on the right track rather than get swal­lowed up in non-essential issues.

In a word, you make bet­ter choices and deci­sions.

Sounds really good to me!

The Back­ground for the exercise

The idea is to adopt 3 dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives
1. Your own per­spec­tive (see­ing through your own eyes, in NLP terms, it is called “Asso­ci­a­tion”)
2. Another person’s per­spec­tive on the same sit­u­a­tion (see­ing through THEIR eyes)
3. The Fly on the Wall per­spec­tive (a totally detached, 3rd party perspective).

Now it’s impor­tant you actu­ally DO IT! Under­stand­ing intel­lec­tu­ally and expe­ri­enc­ing and 2 VERY DIFFERENT THINGS! When you expe­ri­ence, you fix things at the uncon­scious level, and it is easy to get back into state.

The exer­cise

OK, so here’s how you do it. I’ll detail the process step by step below, read through it, and then go ahead!

So the first thing I’d like you to do is to recall an argu­ment that you had with some­one recently. Not nec­es­sar­ily a major argu­ment, but chose some­thing impor­tant enough that you can feel some­thing when you recall the event.

Got that? Good!

OK, ready to go? Sit com­fort­ably and close your eyes now.

1. See what hap­pened through your own eyes, see the other person’s face, his/her facial expres­sions, what he/she looks like, how he/she moves, the gestures.

Hear the other person’s voice, the tone, the pitch, is it loud, is it soft?

And feel what you were feel­ing at that time.

Now, I’d like you to float up out­side your body, and float down into the other person’s body. And when you do that

2. You see every­thing that per­son saw: he/she can see your face in front of him/her, so see your face right now, the facial expres­sions, the ges­tures, the body language.

And hear your voice as you are speak­ing to that per­son, the tone, the pitch, the volume.

Feel what that per­son is feel­ing at that time.

And now, float out­side that person’s body, and go and adopt the 3rd party per­spec­tive, be the fly on the wall.

3. And see these 2 peo­ple there, see their ges­tures, their body lan­guage, their faces, the facial expressions.

Hear the voices, how they speak to each other, the vol­ume of the voices, the dif­fer­ent tones, the pitch.

Notice any feel­ing, or are they not there?

And now come back into your body and open your eyes.

Debrief

How was it, did you notice any­thing dif­fer­ent as you were adopt­ing dif­fer­ent per­cep­tual posi­tions? How about your feelings?

What have you learned? What are your con­clu­sions on that matter?

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