How Do You Talk to Someone Who Thinks You’re Wrong?
Everybody wants to be understood.
Things get trickier when we have to understand somebody else first.
On Truth Tastes Funny, Hersh Rephun sits down with persuasion expert Danny Bobrow for a conversation about what happens when two people can look at the same facts and inhabit completely different realities.
Danny has spent more than four decades working in communication, sales and marketing. His Persuasion Blueprint is built around three ideas: caring, connection and collaboration. But this conversation quickly moves beyond business.
What do you do when someone you care about believes something you find impossible to understand?
Can you acknowledge another person's reality without agreeing with them?
And what if the goal of a difficult conversation isn't changing anybody's mind, but preserving enough humanity to keep talking?
Danny and Hersh get into sales, family, social media, politics, Israel and the Middle East, and the strange way human beings can turn disagreement into a threat almost instantaneously.
Danny also introduces what he calls the “care gap”: the distance between how much we believe we care and how much of that caring the other person can actually perceive.
That leads to one of the simplest ideas in the episode: before someone is likely to hear what you have to say, they need some indication that you've heard them.
Sometimes persuasion means changing a mind.
Sometimes success is leaving the relationship intact.
And sometimes the smartest thing you can say is:
Tell me how you got there.
