Other people almost never see you the way you see yourself.
Knowing how you are perceived---in an interview, a sales call, in your everyday interactions---can go a long way toward improving nearly every aspect of your working life.
It's the key to making, and sustaining, a good impression, to being respected and valued, to getting ahead, and to hanging on to what you've got.
In her new book, NO ONE UNDERSTANDS YOU AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT, social psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson examines how perception and communication really work in order to communicate more effectively.
"There are things you can do to encourage your perceiver to see you more accurately and steps you can take to become a more accurate judge of others," says Halvorson. "Understanding how perception works will give you more ability to shape others' perceptions--without their even realizing it."
It is important to know that a person's "typical" behavior will change as a function of where he or she is, whom the person is with, and what he or she is trying to do. This, of course, is one of the reasons it's relatively easy for two people to have very different impressions of you, depending on the situations they see you in.
We can sum this up with a fairly simple rule. The perceivers see what they expect to see, even when they don't consciously know what they are expecting.
Outrageous? Infuriating? Utterly unfair? Yes, absolutely, all of those things. And the worst part is that it is happening all the time. One of the most troubling findings in all of psychology has to be the fact that narcissists and psychopaths often make really good first impressions.
Getting past these first impressions and learning what other people are actually like can happen through questioning our own reasoning, trying to detect bias in the conclusions reached. This second look and questioning is often called the correction phase.
To communicate effectively---to come across the way you intend to in trying to make and maintain good impressions---you will need to really focus on sending the right signals.
And now knowing the kinds of assumptions perceivers tend to make, you can use that knowledge to your advantage and choose your words and actions accordingly.
Source: Heidi Grant Halvorson: No One Understands You and What to Do About It
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