Robert > Recent Status Updates

I took the style under stress. You can take it here https://www.vitalsmarts.com/resource-...

Looking for conditions where the trout is, you wont be able to see the fish, just the conditions. Like conversation.

We act in self-defeating ways. In our doped-up, dumbed-down state, the strategies we choose for dealing with our crucial conversations are perfectly designed to keep us from what we actually want. We're our own worst enemies (Pg 6)

When conversations become crucial you'll resort to the forms of communication that you've grown up with - debate, silent treatment, manipulation, and so on. (pg. 28)

"What we found was this. The most effective salespeople we studied opened each call in a different way. Sometimes they might use an opening benefit statement, but frequently they would use some other starting point. Less effective people were the ones who tended to open each call in the same way" pg. 142

"Be open to reason, but closed to threats."

"The fundamental selling disease - jumping in too soon with solutions"

This quote from the book reminds me of the Play Theory improv rule 'Look Outward': "What we write always seems clearer to us than it does to our readers, because we can read into it what we want readers to get out of it. And so instead of revising our writing to meet their needs, we send it off as soon as it meets ours." (pg. 5)

This is true in public speaking too: "You will write more clearly once you more clearly understand your subject and readers." (pg.4)

Using questions to uncover problems and make them bigger. Then using questions to get people to state the ways your solutions will help them, thus reducing their objections.

"Human aspect of negotiation can be either helpful or disastrous." (19)

"Change the game" from Getting to Yes = "the Third Alternative" from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

"As more attention is paid to positions, less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties...The result is frequently an agreement less satisfactory to each side than it could have been. (pg. 5)" This is along the same lines of the Win-Win approach Covey taught, habit 4.

Why should we care about this stuff? So we can achieve results. When you are selfish you are blind to the outside. Affecting the outward is how you make matters better.

I'm connecting the teaching in this book and the principles taught in 7 Habits. Specifically habits win/win and seek first to understand. Also from How to Win Friends. For example, 1. avoid arguments; 2. You can't win an argument, even if you win you make the other person feel inferior and thus loose; 3. If you are wrong admit it quickly and emphatically; 4. A drop of honey catches more than a gallon of gall.

"Before he betrayed himself, bud saw nancy, whatever her faults, simply as a person who could use his help. But after he betrayed himself, she seemed very different to him. She didnt seem to deserve help anymore, and bud thought he felt that way because of how she was being. But that wasn't true. The only thing that happened was his own self-betrayal. So buds feelings were lying to him."

when we’re in the box, our view of reality is distorted—we see neither ourselves nor others clearly. We are self-deceived. And that creates all kinds of trouble for the people around us.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true cause of problems, and once blind, all the "solutions" we can think of will actually make matters worse. That's why self-deception is so central to leadership- because leadership is about making matters better.