As I last wrote, I reached an impasse in my ministry about twenty years ago. I felt frustrated and impatient with people because I was convinced if the right information was given to them, I could persuade them. I was wrong.
I happened to have checked out an audiobook by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, from the public library. It gave me a basic human understanding I had been lacking. Here is what that was: Dale taught me that people are fundamentally emotional.
I had believed that people primarily use their minds to think about their beliefs, decide how they will respond, and then live by those decisions. Nope!
While it is true that people can think and then act, there is so much more that goes into their behavior. We overemphasize people’s thought processes. We tend to believe that they have made decisions and abide by them because they have thought them through. But emotion plays a much more significant role than we think.
I will use dogmatic people as an example. We often think that dogmatic people have thoroughly analyzed their positions and refuse to consider changing them because their intellect will not allow it. However, the more dogmatic a person is, the more emotional a person feels within. Often, the dogmatic person has invested so much of herself into her position that it would distress her to change. There is something to be said for accounting for the role of emotion, the unconscious mind, and the subconscious mind in working with people. Understanding those things will help you comprehend how they arrive at their position. It’s not logical. It’s emotional.
Recognizing this reality can help you relate to people better in the workplace, schools, marketplace of ideas, and religion.
I’m Mark Edge; thanks for reading.
______________________________
You can purchase Mark’s new book Holy Chaos How To Walk with God in a Frenzied World here: