The Magic of Thinking Big by David J Schwartz

Author:David J Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781473529090
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2016-02-03T18:30:00+00:00

8

MAKE YOUR ATTITUDES YOUR ALLIES

CAN YOU READ MINDS? Reading minds is easier than you think. Perhaps you’ve never thought of it, but you read the minds of other people, and they read your mind, every day.

How do we do it? We do it automatically, through attitude appraisals.

Remember the song “You Don’t Need to Know the Language to Say You’re in Love”? Bing Crosby made it famous many years ago. There’s a whole bookful of applied psychology packed into those simple lyrics. You don’t need to know the language to say you’re in love. Anyone who’s ever been in love knows that.

And you don’t need to know any language to say “I like you” or “I despise you” or “I think you’re important” or “unimportant” or “I envy you.” You don’t need to know words or to use words to say “I like my job” or “I’m bored” or “I’m hungry”. People speak without a sound.

How we think shows through in how we act. Attitudes are mirrors of the mind. They reflect thinking.

You can read the mind of the fellow sitting at a desk. You sense, by observing his expressions and mannerisms, how he feels toward his job. You can read the minds of salesmen, students, husbands, and wives; you not only can—you do.

The expert actors—those in demand in movies and television year after year—in a sense are not actors at all. They don’t play their roles. Instead they lose their own identity and actually think and feel like the character they are playing. They’ve got to. Else they’d look like phonies and their ratings would plunge.

Attitudes do more than show through. They “sound” through too. A secretary does more than identify an office when he says, “Good morning, Mr. Shoemaker’s office.” In just five words one secretary says, “I like you. I’m glad you’re calling. I think you are important. I like my job.”

But another secretary saying exactly the same words tells you, “You bothered me. I wish you hadn’t called. I’m bored with my job, and I don’t like people who bother me.”

We read attitudes through expressions and voice tones and inflections. Here’s why. In the long, long history of humankind, a speaking language even remotely resembling what we use today is a very recent invention. So recent, you might say, in terms of the great clock of time, that we developed a language only this morning. For millions and millions of years, people got by with little more than moans and groans and grunts and growls.

So for millions of years people communicated with other people by body and facial expressions and sounds, not words. And we still communicate our attitudes, our feelings toward people and things, the same way. Aside from direct body contact, body movements, facial expressions, and sound are the only ways we have to communicate with infants. And those young ones show an uncanny ability to spot the phony.

Professor Erwin H. Schell, one of America’s most respected authorities on leadership, says, “Obviously, there is something more than facilities and competence that makes for accomplishment.

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