Become Interested Instead of Being Interesting

I met a very interesting man who attended my seminar in Atlanta, Georgia last week. His name is Arthur and he has been in sales and sales management for the last thirty years.

We talked at great length after the seminar and one of the things he told me is that during his sales career he has seen a lot of good people fail and the main reason is that they tried to be interesting instead of being interested.

I thought this was a very important point coming from such a successful individual. You see every one of us is engaged in selling in one way or another. For example, parents are trying to sell their children on the advantages of doing things the right way, husbands and wives are always trying to sell each other on their own points of view or something they want.

People in the world of business are selling every day. The higher the position the better the person is at selling his or her ideas and plans. The children with the most friends are the ones who are the best at selling themselves. Selling is just another word for human relations and communications.

People are successful in life to the extent that their communications are interesting. This is true in both your business and personal life. Because of this, every person should try to be more interesting in his or her conversation and communications.

How do you go about being interested instead of being interesting? One of the best ways is to see what a person is talking about from his or her point of view. It might sound easy, but it isn't. It is called empathetic understanding, understanding with a person, not about him or her.

The idea is to emotionally crawl into the other person's skin and see what he or she is talking about from his or her point of view. You then communicate with that person or sell him or her from his or her own standpoint.

When you do this, you immediately become the most interesting person he or she has talked to in months or even years. Again, this is not an easy thing to do. Your natural impulse is to see everything in your world from your own standpoint, but the minute you can completely forget yourself and think not only of and through the other person some amazing changes will start taking place.

You'll find people will start doing exactly what you want them to do and becoming exactly the kind of person you want them to be. Perhaps the most amazing part of all is that you will become intensely interesting to others.

By forgetting yourself and putting all your emphasis on other people and helping them get what they want, you will get what you want.

Getting along well with others is a lot of fun and enormously rewarding. This simple key to success is much too difficult for most people. You have to forget yourself.