SO YOU’LL SEE that I’m trying to teach you with your own best benefit in mind, let me tell you briefly what I’ve come to realize over the years about teaching. Teaching is the process of moving people from what they know to what they don’t know. And I’ve found the best way to teach a motivated student is to appeal to his consciousness with a very small element of language, a metaphor and a simile, which is understandable to him so he can understand what is being taught.
A dry, boring teacher talks about what he knows, as if the student should have a clue. The student makes no movement. He hears the teacher talking about something the teacher may know well, but unless that teacher compares it to something within the range of that student’s experience, little learning takes place.
At the other end of the spectrum—and also unacceptable—is the teacher who moves students from what they know to other areas they already also know.
I’d always been taught that a teacher masters his material, goes into the classroom, and presents it. The teacher presents, the student receives. If the student doesn’t get it, he fails. But that’s not the way the real world works. In the real world a teacher has to know his audience and start where they are, taking them to where they haven’t been.
When you use Verbal Judo, you have an audience; you have someone on whom you practice Verbal Judo. Your audience may not be a class full of kids but an office full of employees. Maybe you’re dealing with an audience of one: your boss or your spouse. Maybe it’s a difficult child or a tough landlord or a problem neighbor. Regardless, like the cop on the street, you have to read your audience, know your principles—the tools with which to accomplish what you want in the situation—then decide which of the many methods will make your principles effect the outcome you want. Often the best way of reading your target audience is to see the person the way he sees himself. Which is the true essence of empathy.
Then, using the language of your audience, you can make the strange become familiar. Albert Einstein was brilliant at that. He would sit in Princeton Square and use balloons and oranges to explain the most complicated ideas. Carl Sagan does much the same. Great, profound thinkers must communicate simply. They understand the complexities, but they must make them simple so everyone can understand.
For example, you’ll see case histories here where a cop is trying to calm a frightened, potentially violent troublemaker. In the classic macho approach, the cop would challenge the guy: “Put that knife down or I’ll take you out! You haven’t got a chance. I’ll blow your head off,” things like that. That virtually forces the man to attack, to defend his manhood, to save face.
But what if that cop gently empathizes and says, “Hey, friend, let’s do each other a favor. You don’t want to spend the night downtown with us, eating our food, sleeping on our steel cot, and missing your woman. And I don’t want to sit at a typewriter for a couple of hours doing paperwork on this. If we can work this out, you can have dinner at your own table, be with your woman, and wake up in your own bed tomorrow morning. And I can go back about my business.”
You’ll come to see how this works, how the perpetrator becomes an ally with the officer to the benefit of both. What has happened? The officer has motivated a disagreeable person to a point of Voluntary Compliance—the ultimate goal of Verbal Judo. If you can see how learning that skill would improve your relationships and your life, you’re a motivated student who has picked up the right book.