Building up Affinity,
Reality and Communication with people
An article by L. Ron Hubbard, from the Special Course in Human Evaluation Lectures
Now, affinity can be built up in a number of ways. You can talk to people and build up an affinity with them. But remember we're talking about communication, not just talk. There are many, many ways to communicate. Two people can sit and look at each other and be in communication. One of the nicest ways to go into communication is tactile. You can pet a cat. And the cat all of a sudden starts to purr, purr, purr. You're in communication with the cat. You reach out and shake a guy's handpresent timeyou reach out and shake a guy's hand. You're in communication with him because tactile has taken place. Oh, the boysthe old boys with the tooth-and-claw idea that "everybody hates everybody really, and everybody's on the defensive and that's why we have to force everybody into being social animals"you know, the old school. They said, "The reason men shake hands is to show there is no weapon in the hand." Nah. Communication. In France, and so forth, they throw their arms around each other. They do it in Spain, they do it in Italy, and so on. There's lots of contactcontact. That contact is communication.
If a person is badly out of communication and you touch himhe considers all things painfulif you reach out and pat him on the shoulder and he dodges slightly even though he doesn't go on, you'll find he's also out of communication vocally. You try to say something to him. You say, "You know, I think that's a pretty good project, Project 342A, and I think we ought to go along with it." He'll sit there and he'll look at you and he'll nod, then he'll go down and he'll complete Project 36. And you say, "Project 36 has been just thrown out. We weren't gonna go through with that at all." He hardly knows you're talking to him. He dodges everything you say. Or he may talk to you so hard and so long you won't get a chance to tell him you want to do Project 336A. That's dodging you, too. In other words, he's out of communication with you. Therefore, his affinity is low and he won't agree with you either. But if you can get him into agreement, this'll pick up and this will pick up.
This is about the most important dope I've ever run across on the field of interpersonal relations, control and management. Supervisory techniques which do not have this as a precise working axiom are apt to failas often as they do fail right now.
A group of menhere's this group of men in a room. You go in and you talk to them. Agreementtrying to reach agreement with them. If those men are pretty spooky and pretty low on the Tone Scale, I tell you, you can advance the most beautiful, the most wonderful reasons under the sun and they will still remain antagonistic towards you. Are you communicating with them? That's it. The low-toned individual doesn't take a high-toned communication. And I'll show you a little bit more about that in a moment. If you're not communicating with them, they're not agreeing with you and you haven't any affinity with them. And they're not going to agree or do what you say. They're going to kick back at you one way or the other. There are ways to get into communication with that group.
You can go aroundyou can take any group of workmen, any group of men working on a similar projectyou can take one look at the foreman and the men, you can tell whether or not these people are in communication with one another. If they aren't, they are not working as a coordinated team. They're not in communication, perhaps, because they're not agreed on what they're doing.
All you've got to do is take the group, put them together and say, "What are you guys doing?"
You don't ask the foreman, you ask the whole group and the foreman, "What are you guys doing?" "Well," one fellow says, "I'm earning forty dollars a week. That's what I'm doing." Another one says, "Well, IuhI'm glad to get out of the house every day. The old woman's pretty pestiferous." Another one says, "Well, Ias a matter of fact, I occasionally get to drive the truck over there and I like to drive the truck and I'll put up with the rest of this stuff if I can drive the truck, and I got to work anyhow." Another guy will say, if he were being honest, maybe, "I'm staying on this job because I hate this dog that you've got here as a foreman. If I devote my life to making him miserable, boy, that makes me happy. I really lead him a dog's life, too."
And all the time you thought those men thought that they were grading a road. Not one of them thought they were grading a road. You thought that they were building a road between Augusta and Wichita, and they weren't. Not one of them was building a road. Not one of them was even grading.
And you get them together and this crew may be unhappy and inefficient, and so forth, and you say, "Well, you know, some day gonna be a lot of cars will go over this road. Maybe they'll wreck themselves occasionally, and so forth, but a lot of cars will go over this road. You boys are building a road. You're building a road from Augusta to Wichita, from Wichita to Augusta. Pretty hard job. But, somebody's got to do it. A lot of people thank you boys for having built this road. I know you don't care anything about that, but that's really what we're doing around here. Now, I'd like a few suggestions from you people how we could build this road a little bit better." All of a sudden the whole crew is building a road. R to A, they go upso forth.
L. Ron Hubbard
Excerpted from the lecture THE ARC TRIANGLE
This lecture is available in the Special Course in Human Evaluation Lectures.
|