How do you identify with another person? When that person is a child, identification can be especially touch. What if you need to connect with a twelve-year-old child? You have a long gap to cross, so you’ll need to build a long bridge. Here are some ways to do that.
First, remember when you were twelve. Use your mental skills to go back in time. This is what an actor does. For each performance, he reaches back for the early hurts and emotions, the trauma and the drama, the sum total of his life. In dealing with a twelve-year-old, you’ve got to go back through all that and let it affect you one more time. Rekindle those emotions one more time.
It may be painfaul–I (Jim Rohn) am not denying that–but you’ve got to go through these pains in order to reach someone who is in pain. So begin by remembering when you were twelve.
Here’s a second way to reach the kids: read all their books. Do your homework. You see, if a child has read this book, and I have read the same book, one of the great places we can meet is in the book. I say to the child, “Remember the story where…” and right away, he is impressed that I’ve done my homework. He says, “Did you read that book?” I say, “Yes, I read all those books.” Then I use the content of the book to relay the message I want to get across.
The child can now see what I’m saying because we went back to the common ground of the book. If you read the book and do your homework, you’ll have a tremendous opportunity to identify with the child.
Identifying with kids is only one of the many relationship challenges. Let’s consider another: identifying with somebody who hasn’t been as successful as you. First of all, you’ve got to talk about your struggle, not your success. If you have an hour to talk, and you spend fifty-nine minutes on your success story, you are building a gulf, not a bridge.
You have to spend most of your time on your struggle. Talk about your fears, your apprehensions, the times you hesitated, the times you were about to give it all up. Once you’ve created that identification and built that bridge, you can then take people by the hand and then show them your success. It will have special meaning because it came from a struggle. It came from determination and heartbreak. You may even have come from the same place as the person you’re talking to. That kind of identification makes you real. It makes your success seem possible to others. It provides inspiration.
Another part of identification is proper word choice. Jesus said to He disciples one day, “Today, I’m going to teach you how to fish.” What an important choice of words, “to fish.” Who was He talking to? Fishermen. He didn’t say, “I’m going to teach you how to recruit.” No, He didn’t say that because these fishermen didn’t know what it meant to recruit.
Then He said, “I now wish to teach you how to become fisher of men.” They understood that language, and they could see how winning people over to your way of thinking is a lot like fishing.
You’ve got to learn how to shift gears and choose the appropriate words depending on your audience. When you have the gift of language, you have the opportunity to choose the right words and the right phrases depending on who you’re talking to. You have sharp perception skills. You know how to choose the words that will make sense.
Here’s the next component of identification: logic and reason. If you’re trying to identify with a child, an audience, or a customer, you need some facts–but stick to the necessary facts. Don’t overload on the facts, because logic and reason will get you only so far.
As you know, it’s possible to talk somebody into buying something. If you keep on talking, though, you can also talk that person out of buying. You can talk a child into deciding, but if you keep on talking, he or she will undecide. We all have a tendency to use too much logic, too much reason. We need just enough logic and reason that what we’re saying starts to make sense to others. They don’t need to understand it all.
Let’s say you walk into a new car showroom and express an interest in an automobile. A salesman comes along and says, “Let me tell you about this car. Follow me.” He takes you out back into the shop, opens up the manual on the car, and says, “Let’s start with the left front wheel. We’ve got a thousand facts here to go through.”
Right away, you would say, “Hold it!” You don’t need to see a thousand facts to decide whether to buy this automobile. How many facts do you need? About a half dozen. If somebody makes the mistake of going beyond the half dozen, he is guaranteed to lose his audience.
Here’s another way to look at it. Imagine sitting down to a steak dinner. You are really hungry, so you eat it all. What if they cleared that plate away and brought you another full mean? Well, if you’re still hungry, you go for the second one. What if they cleared that away and brought you a third? That third one wouldn’t look very good anymore. In fact, if you started eating it, you could lose the whole dinner, right?
Too much is too much. That’s why you need to exercise brevity when it comes to logic and reason. People identify with facts, but they aren’t usually moved by facts. So reach back into your life, do your homework, share your struggles, use the proper words, and be sparing with the facts. That’s how you identify with others and move them to action.
* Source: Leading an Inspired Life by Jim Rohn