Understanding Others Starts With Understanding Yourself

“It takes so little to do so much. If I had known how little it takes to make big changes, I would have sought out this information a lot sooner.”

I wrote that sentence years ago in the foreword to a short book, and I still believe every word of it. The book is called Understanding Others Starts With Understanding Yourself, and it is free on the Resources page of this site. I want to give you a reading guide to it, because it sits underneath a lot of this course. Every lesson here about how a customer filters, frames, moves toward or away from, and decides, is only useful to the degree that you can see the same patterns in yourself first.

What it is

A boss sent me to a sales seminar because my numbers needed help. I went to improve my selling. What I found instead was a way of understanding why people do what they do, starting with why I did what I did, and it changed a great deal more than my sales. The book is my attempt to put the first steps of that into a short, plain form for someone who has no idea where to start.

It is deliberately short. Twenty-two chapters, most of them two or three pages, each opening with a quote and closing with questions. There is nothing in it about quotes or closing or marketing. It is about the person who has to do all of those things, and about the patterns running that person while they do.

Who it is for

It is for you if you have ever wondered why you keep getting the same result with customers, with staff or in your own week, and suspected the problem is not the furniture but the house. It is for the owner who works through the lessons on how customers decide and thinks “I recognize my customers in this” and then, a beat later, “I recognize myself.” It is also for the owner who is worn out and knows the business could be doing better. I wrote it as much for that person as for anyone.

If you are looking for tactics, skip it. If you are looking for the reason the tactics keep not working, start here.

How to read it

Read one chapter at a time. Do not push through in an evening because it is short. Read a chapter, sit with the questions at the end, and answer them honestly on paper, not in your head. Some chapters will feel obvious. Notice which ones; the obvious ones are often the ones you have been hearing for years without listening.

Then, and this is the instruction the book itself gives in its last chapter, put it down and pick it up again about a week later. Read the whole thing a second time. It will be faster. Some chapters will read differently, because the words stayed put and you did not. Have you ever watched a film twice and noticed things you missed the first time? What makes you think this is different? Repetition is how you learned to drive, to talk, to do your trade. It is how this works too.

For the customer lessons in this course, three chapters connect directly. Chapter 8, on moving toward or away from, is the source of the earlier lesson on moving toward or away from. Chapter 13 sits behind much of what stops owners from asking for the sale, and behind the instinct to lead with the expert speech, since it is easier to talk than to ask when fear is running the meeting. Chapter 14, on framing, is the source of the earlier lesson on framing and of the building-and-furniture distinction that runs through this whole course.

The chapters

• Chapter 1: Why Change or Improve?
• Chapter 2: Know Who You Want to Be
• Chapter 3: What Have You Learned?
• Chapter 4: Keep Learning; Let Your Inner Child Loose
• Chapter 5: Evaluate Your Time
• Chapter 6: Be Responsible
• Chapter 7: Outcome-Based Thinking
• Chapter 8: Moving Toward or Away From
• Chapter 9: What You See Is What You Get
• Chapter 10: Your Emotions Set Free
• Chapter 11: Take Control
• Chapter 12: The Voices Around You
• Chapter 13: With Fear in Control
• Chapter 14: How Do You Frame the World?
• Chapter 15: Who Is Your Peer Group?
• Chapter 16: Beliefs
• Chapter 17: Using Your Body to Change Your Life
• Chapter 18: Repetitions
• Chapter 19: Importance of Faith
• Chapter 20: Stay Healthy, Eat Right, and Sleep Right
• Chapter 21: What Can You Do Next
• Chapter 22: Let’s Do That Again!

Download the full eBook free on the Resources page.

Your assignment

Download it and read the foreword and Chapter 1 tonight. Write your answers to the questions at the end of Chapter 1 on paper. Then put a note in your calendar one week from today that says “read it again.” That is the whole assignment.

The first read takes about two hours if you take the questions seriously, and the second takes less. It is free. The real cost is the honesty the questions ask for, and there is no way to outsource that.