Rainn Wilson Quotes

We lack social awareness because we're so focused on what we're going to say next - and how what other people are saying affects us - that we completely lose sight of other people. This is a problem because people are complicated. You can't hope to understand someone until you focus all of your attention in his or her direction.

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

Well, I think part of my gift, or if I have one, is that I love listening.

When I was young I used to listen to other people and to try and understand what they thought and where they were coming from. I listened and didn't speak.

The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.

I can be a good listener. I can ask the right questions a lot of the time.

Keep this question in mind: 'What would I think of this if I exchanged places with the other person?' It paves the way to more successful action.

Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.

One way to overcome our natural self-centeredness is to try to see things from other people's perspectives.

Changing your attitude from self-centerdness to understanding requires desire and commitment to always try to see things from the other persons point of view.

Most of us tend to suffer from 'agenda anxiety', the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us.

... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

Most people that derail as leaders in the corporate world, it's not because they couldn't do the math and calculate return on investment properly. The issues are communication and understanding. All of what typically would've been called the 'soft stuff.' You have to be authentic. You have to be dialed into the soft stuff.

The more socially intelligent you are, the happier and more robust and more enjoyable your relationships will be.

One of the other things I think that I've been able to do in my life, is to listen well.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

Listen more than you talk.

I'm engaged: I'm interested in other people. I think that's just as important as knowing how to do the job.

But some actors I have met possess an intelligence that I can only dream of. It's about character, it's about behavior. They understand things about people that I simply don't see.

I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement.

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state.

'Know thyself' is a good saying, but not in all situations. In many it is better to say 'know others.'

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

For me, becoming a man had a lot to do with learning communication, and I learned about that by acting.