It’s Hard to Get Others to See Things from My Perspective
This sounds a little self-centered, like my perspective is more important than everyone else’s.
That’s not what I mean by “getting others to see things from my perspective”.
I’ve been hearing from marketing people for a long time about the difficulty of getting people to understand what we’re saying. This is often referred to as the “curse of knowledge”, which is when we’re sharing a message with the assumption those who are hearing it have as much knowledge and familiarity with a given topic as we do.
The fact that I’ve been hearing this for a while and am still trying to figure out how to implement it, is exactly what I’m talking about.
This issue resurfaced in a few different places over the past couple of weeks.
First and closet to home is my struggle with getting construction companies to see the value of my Blueprint for Building a Better Proposal system.
The value of this proposal system makes perfect sense to me, but then I developed it more than thirty years ago and have been using it almost daily since then. My “curse of knowledge”.
I’ve shared this proposal system idea with construction companies without much success. It’s frustrating, having been where they are and knowing that it would likely help them.
Why wouldn’t they want to start using it immediately?
The second place that this issue came up was in a discussion with my friend Shep Jordan. He’s in the process of writing a memoir of his experiences with six role models when he was growing up. He hopes to help others see the negative impacts resulting from a lack of good role models in today’s world and the need to do something about it.
It’s critically important for boys to have good role models and for men to be good role models!
The problem is…how to get others to hear what he’s saying? They may hear him and agree, but how does he get them to embrace and implement the ideas that are in his book?
The third place this got discussed was in our mastermind. One of the members is working on a new program and was asking about pricing. As we discussed it, I asked for clarification. With further discussion I realized that this is that same common problem. He was crystal clear about what he was saying…the rest of us not as much.
How can we help people understand what we’re saying?
The other thing we need to realize is that it’s going to take some time to get other people to understand what we’re trying to say.
There’s so much going on in our own minds and the world around us, that it takes a long time and a lot of repetition to break through the noise. It may take years and repeating the message hundreds of times before they even know that we’re saying anything.
Add to that the importance of aligning your message with their need and you have a big hill to climb. The thing to remember is that the hill can be climbed.
As noisy as things are right now it’s amazing that we can get anyone at all to listen to what we have to say.
The thing to remember is…if what we have to share is in alignment with God’s plan then our part is to keep on sharing it over and over knowing that if even one person is helped it was worth the effort.
Putting ourselves back in the position of our target audience and repetition is the way to get them to hear and understand what we’re saying.
And most importantly…don’t give up, keep on sharing.
