This One Hack Will Allow You to Get What You Want From Others in Life
Humans view each other two-dimensionally.
The reality is that there is no way for strangers to understand you. Everyone puts on fake personas at work, school, and sometimes even with their friends. People are always misunderstood.
To get what you want, you need to understand other people.
So… What in the World is Tactical Empathy?
Humans love themselves.
They love talking about themselves, bragging about themselves, and showing themselves off.
So… how is this information helpful?
Well, to get what you want from people, you need to empathize with other people’s situations. To put it simply, you need to make them feel heard.
And in order to do that, you need to watch what comes out of your mouth carefully.
Empathy Statements
Once you get the basic principle of empathy under your belt, you need to understand how to use empathy statements.
To put it simply, empathy statements are statements that effectively summarize a situation to make your counterpart feel understood.
The nifty formula for this goes something like this:
- “It sounds like __ is really important to you.”
- “It seems like you’re really concerned about __.”
And if the counterpart rejects your summary statements, you can simply say:
- “I didn’t say that it necessarily was that way. It just seems that way.”
Empathy statements make your counterpart feel heard and make them feel as if you are on their side. Once you master empathy statements, you need to ask calibrated questions.
The highest form of knowledge is empathy — Bill Bullard
Calibrated Questions
Once you sympathize with your counterpart, calibrated questions are questions that direct their focus to your problem.
Calibrated questions are questions that start with:
- “How”
- “What”
A real-world example of a calibrated question in use is with rent. Let’s say your landlord wants to raise the rent for your apartment to $1,600 per month. A good calibrated question could be, “How am I supposed to pay the extra $1,600 per month in rent when I only make $1,400 per month?”
In case they reduce the initial offering to $1,200 per month in rent, you can counter by saying, “That’s very generous of you, but I don’t see how I’m supposed to pay $1,400 a month to stay here when I can rent a similar apartment nearby below $1,000 a month.”
Once you make the other person feel heard, calibrated questions allow the other person to understand your situation.
Quick Recap
- Tactical Empathy: To get what you want out of people, you need to make them feel heard and understood
- Empathy Statements: Statements that summarize a situation to make your counterpart feel heard and understood
- Calibrated Questions: Questions that allow the other person to understand you
I talk about this one rule that will change your life. If you’re looking for a good article recommendation, I recommend you check it out.
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