It’s easy to look at everything through your own perspective alone. It’s often the default response to any situation, but it can sometimes be a cause of problems as you work with customers, coworkers, and higher-ups.
If you’re unable or unwilling to look at things from another person’s perspective, you’ll find that your communication isn’t nearly as good as it could be. The reason it’s so important to put yourself in other people’s shoes is that you want to get multiple potential perspectives on something that you’re doing.
Whether it’s a group project that you’re working on or something that you’re working on personally, it’s good to have an outside perspective to see what you might have to adjust in order for it to be understood by more people.
Whenever you’re planning something out, make it a point to consider other people’s insights. This can be difficult at first, because you’ll sometimes assume they know the same information you do.
For example, if you were designing a website, you would know how to access a certain page since you built it all from scratch. However, if someone with no prior knowledge of the website were to visit it, you’d want to make sure they would be able to find that page easily.
It helps looking from other people’s perspectives if you make notes of what certain people do and do not know. You can have a section dedicated to each type of person that might encounter your work, ranging from an inexperienced customer, to a regular consumer, and even up to someone who works in that business.
List off some common knowledge that they might have, and ensure that they’re able to understand your work easily. However, it’s not always just about efficiency. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes also helps with communication.
If you’re working with multiple people on the same project, you should be able to understand what their life looks like at that moment. If you think or know they’re going through some other problems in life, you might lighten up their work load a bit to make things easier on them.
If you know someone is looking for more work to do, you can give them a bit extra. In another sense, you can give people more information if you know they’re less skilled or knowledgeable in a certain subject. Taking these kinds of considerations into mind will make your work go so much smoother.
