Are we trying to understand someone, or simply finding a better way to make our point?
Most of us enter conversations with some idea of what we want to accomplish.
We want to explain something, offer advice, share an opinion, or perhaps persuade someone to see things differently.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But what happens when nearly every conversation becomes an attempt to influence someone?
We may be sharing our opinions, values, interpretations of events, or ideas about what someone else should do.
When we focus on getting someone to accept our perspective, we can lose something important.
We may be listening, but are we really trying to understand?
Listening With an Outcome in Mind
When we approach a conversation with a specific objective, we tend to interpret what the other person says through that lens.
We listen for opportunities to make our point.
We look for agreement, objections to overcome, or ways to strengthen our argument.
Even thoughtful questions can become tools of persuasion.
Sometimes we get exactly what our approach invites. Not agreement, but resistance.
The problem isn't persuasion itself. It's allowing persuasion to become our default way of communicating.
What Does Alignment Really Mean?
Authentic communication requires us to be aligned with what we genuinely believe.
But it also requires understanding what matters to the person we're talking with.
Those values may be quite different from our own.
If we don't recognize that difference, we may communicate our message perfectly while completely missing what the other person needs us to understand.
This is where listening becomes something more than a communication skill.
Genuine listening means being willing to discover something that might change our own thinking.
We may enter a conversation believing we know what needs to happen.
But understanding the other person may lead us somewhere entirely different.
And perhaps that's where the conversation needed to go.
