There will be times when you sense what words others will react well to. People have visions of what their day would look like if all things were to go optimally as planned. Your role as an outsider in the experience of someone else, is to either propel their day to look and feel like what they desire, or serve as a barrier to that vision. The art of determining what the ones around you want to hear is a one which is dependent on your intuition until you have solid evidence for your belief. For example, someone who loves their coffee every morning would not want to hear the fact that there is no time to grab that morning cup on that one particular day.

Others are more difficult to read however; someone’s sense of uniqueness may serve to make them not want to hear that they look like another individual. They may want to be told how unique they look, and how impressed you are with their physique. Knowing what others want to hear is a study propelled by trial and error. This article touches on the interactions you have after you’ve already determined what other people want to hear. Utilizing the information about what others around you prefer to hear can enable your ability to get a further read on them as individuals.

Inching Toward the Goal: The Art of the Tease

If you’ve determined that your significant other wants you to join them at the gym today, the words, “let’s go to the gym in thirty minutes,” are the words they’d like to hear from you. Knowing the words your significant other wants to hear will serve to make those words valuable as currency. This example does not advocate for the teasing and manipulation of a significant other, but only aims to provide an example of the concept at play.

By inching closer to what they want to hear but not quite yet saying it, you will increase their hope and willingness to do things for you in order to hear you speak the words they want to hear. You can mention that you want to get a haircut and go for groceries before you go to the gym, and will need a ride to both places. In this instance, your partner’s willingness to drive you around to the barber and grocery store is increased due to the promise of hearing your acceptance of the invitation to go to the gym. Again, this article is not an advocacy to manipulate your significant other.

This concept can be used in more creative ways. Another common example is a bartering of responsibility and reward that people experience with their kids. Parents typically have a good idea of what their children want to hear, and use it against them to dictate the child’s behavior. Common examples are children’s liking to sugar, their tendency to want to play outside at the park, and to watch cartoons in front of a TV screen. A parent’s permission to do those things is what kids typically want to hear. In the process, parents tease and inch closer to allowing their kids to indulge by infusing other demands into the equation.

Inching Away: Testing Open Mindedness

Knowing what people want to hear but not saying it will also open you up to experience the open-mindedness of those individuals. If speaking to a religious person, for example, you may anticipate that they don’t want to hear scientific rebuttals to their religious beliefs. You can however, begin to subtly mention things that may veer off course from what they want to hear in order to test how open-minded they really are. You can mention how good pepperoni is on a pizza to a devout Muslim and see how they react. To your English teacher, you can announce your physics homework to be more important than your literary homework and watch to see if they agree.

Knowing what people want to hear and inching toward the opposite end, places them in uncomfortable mental situations. How they react to hearing the opposite of what they want to hear will help you see how they handle the unknown. It is a form of pressure which you can inspect them deal with and navigate through. It is a test which utilizes instances which require people to be open-minded without putting them in harm’s way. Testing how people react to what they don’t want to hear can be an important tool for picking business partners and developing intimate relationships. Open-mindedness is valued differently depending on who you talk to. If you respect people who prove to be open-minded, then knowledge of what they want to hear can be used to provide you with a clearer analysis of that trait.

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