How To Learn From Anybody And Anything

With simple mindset changes you can learn from any person or any event. This will help you tremendously in your relationships. You can learn just as much by going to a prison and talking to murderers as you could talking to the most articulate people in the world. It’s not necessarily about what they say it’s about what you hear and perceive. Smart people can learn from anybody, dumb people think they already know all the answers.

There are four easy steps to start learning from anybody and the first one is to show genuine interest. If you start showing genuine interest in what a person is saying to you, they will go deeper and be delighted to share more. This is where you start to pickup nuggets of information. You can learn indirectly, rather than the person telling you exactly what the answer to your questions are. For example showing genuine interest will start to bring out people’s true opinions that they would otherwise hide to avoid confrontation. When they start voicing their true opinions you can learn indirectly how to do something without asking them. Like if they are telling a story of how they trained to run a marathon, you can take that advice to train for coding, you just have to be open to it.

Actually conversing is one of the biggest pillars. Conversing instead of interrogating will make the other person feel much more comfortable and open. When you start to interrogate someone they become defensive and the interrogation becomes an argument pretty quickly. Even if they say things you don’t like or agree with just calmly be open to their opinion and try to see where they are coming from. If you are causing someone to get defensive they will never share with you the hidden things they know and you will never learn from the basic things. You will be to caught up in trying to go after the other person the point is gone.

As I brought up earlier about somebody telling a story of an experience or a paste event. This is where you can get some of the most valuable information. People love to tell stories about themselves and people love to hear stories. It releases oxytocin which motivates cooperation with other people. So genuinely listening and asking questions that will start a story will benefit you. You need to focus on the other person instead of yourself. Don’t interrupt or try to leave the conversation. You will get more out of it if you focus on the other person. It sounds funny but it’s true.

The final step to this process is that you don’t always have to learn a step by step how to. You can learn what not to do in certain situations. Or straight up how not to have a conversation with someone. If the other person is bad or mistreats you in a conversation simply just note it and remember it for the next time you will have a conversation with somebody. Remember what not to do. Don’t go looking for this in people because you will see them differently than their true self. Just be open to learning anything including what not to do.