Life Without Limits (22 page)

Sometimes as a boy I resented such moments, but eventually I came to be more patient and understanding of others. Like that woman, I’ve learned that sometimes there is more to people than you first suspect, and sometimes there is less.

The art of reading people, relating to them, engaging with them,
and stepping into their shoes, knowing whom to trust and how to be trustworthy is critical to your success and happiness. Few people succeed without the ability to build relationships based on mutual understanding and trust. We all need not just someone to love but also friends, mentors, role models, and supporters who buy into our dreams and help us achieve them.

To build your Dream Team of supporters who have your best interests at heart, you must first prove yourself trustworthy by standing up for them. Your mates will treat you the way you treat them. If you invest in their success, support them, encourage them, and give them your honest feedback, you can expect them to do the same for you. If they don’t, you should move on and find someone who wants to be on your team.

We are social by nature, but if your relationships aren’t what you’d like them to be, you may not be giving enough thought to how you interact with others and what you put in and take out of your relationships. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try and win friends only by telling them about yourself: your fears, frustrations, and pleasures. The truth is that you win friends by learning about them and finding shared interests to build bonds that provide mutual benefits.

Building a relationship is like building a savings account; you can’t expect to take anything out of it if you haven’t put something into it. We all need to tune up our relationship skills from time to time by evaluating our approach to them and looking at what is working and what is not.

A strong sense of purpose, high hopes, abiding faith, self-love, a positive attitude, fearlessness, resilience, and mastery of change will take you a long way, but no one makes it alone. To be sure, I
value my ability to take care of myself. I worked hard to become as independent as possible. But I am still dependent on the people around me, just as we all are to a great degree.

Often I am asked, “Isn’t it hard to rely so much on others?” And my response is, “You tell me.” Whether you acknowledge it or not, you depend on those around you nearly as much as I do. Some tasks I need help managing, but no one on this earth succeeds without benefiting from the wisdom, the kindness, or the helping hands of someone else.

We all need supportive relationships. We all must engage with kindred spirits. To do that effectively, we must build trust and prove ourselves trustworthy. We must understand that most people instinctively act out of self-interest, but if you show them that you are interested in them and invested in their success, most will do the same for you.

When I was a boy, my mum often took me shopping or to other public places, and while she went about her business, I’d spend hours observing faces in the crowd from my wheelchair. I’d study them as they passed by and try to guess what they did for a living and what their personalities were like. Of course, I never knew whether my instant profiles were correct, but I did become a serious student of body language, facial expressions, and reading people in general.

This was mostly a subconscious process, but when I look back and reflect, I realize I was instinctively developing some very important skills. Since I lack the arms to defend myself, or the legs to run, it was important for me to quickly assess whether I could trust someone or not. It’s not that I consciously worried about being attacked, but I was more vulnerable than most, and so I became more “people aware” than most.

I’m sensitive to the moods, emotions, and sounds of those around me. This may sound a little strange, but my antennae are so finely tuned that when someone puts a hand on my wheelchair armrest, it’s almost like we are holding hands. I get this weird feeling that a physical connection has been made, just as if we were shaking or holding hands. Whenever my friends or family members put their hands on my chair, I feel this warmth and acceptance.

My lack of limbs has affected the way I relate to people as a professional speaker. I don’t have to worry about one of the primary concerns of most speakers—what to do with my hands. I’ve worked on communicating with my facial expressions, and especially my eyes, rather than my hands. I can’t make gestures to emphasize points or convey emotion. I worked at varying the width of my eyes and changing my facial expressions to convey emotions, and to hold the attention of my audiences.

My sister recently teased me: “Nick, you really do love eye contact. When you speak to someone, you look into their eyes with this intensity. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

Michelle knows me well. I look into the eyes of other people because they are windows to the soul. I love eye contact. I admire the beauty of people, and I find it, often, in their eyes. We can all find something bad or imperfect in others, but I choose to look at the gold within them.

“It’s also your way of keeping the conversation real and sincere,” my little sister said. “I can see it when you talk to my friends. You get straight to the core of the person, and you capture their attention so that they soak up every word you tell them.”

I’ve learned to engage quickly by looking into the eyes of the people I meet and asking questions or making comments to find a common ground. Before back pains limited my huggability, one of my favorite ice breakers was to say, “Come and give me a hug.”

By inviting people to come close and make contact, I hoped
to make them feel comfortable with me. Reaching out to others, bonding with them, finding a common ground are relationship skills that everyone should master. They determine how well we interact with those around us.

“People skills” is a widely used term but is rarely well defined. We all like to think we have great people skills, just like most of us are under the illusion that we are great drivers. My brother teases that I’m the world’s worst backseat driver even though I’ve never had a legal driver’s license. According to him, my people skills are a work in progress. Yours should be a work in progress too.

No one should take for granted skills that are critical to success and happiness. You can live a life without limits, but you can’t live a life without trusting relationships. That is why you should always self-monitor, assess, and work to develop and refine the ways in which you engage with those around you. Psychologists say that our ability to build bonds of trust and mutually supportive relationships depends on a few primary people skills. These include the ability to:

• Read emotions and moods
  
• Listen attentively to what others say and how they say it
  
• Assess, comprehend, and react to nonverbal signals from others
  
• Navigate any social setting or gathering
  
• Bond quickly with others
  
• Turn on the charm in any situation
  
• Practice tact and self-control
  
• Demonstrate care for others with actions
  

Now let’s look at each of those basic people skills in more detail.

Reading body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and the look in someone’s eyes is a skill we all have to some degree. We really can’t help but pick up these signals. Most people can even tell when someone is pretending to be angry but isn’t, or is faking pain just for attention. Psychologists say this skill improves as we age, and women are generally better at it than men. I wasn’t surprised to learn that women with children are especially good at it. My mum could read me like a book. She often seemed to know before I did when I felt sick, hurt, frustrated, or sad.

This is what your parents were talking about when they said “God gave you just one mouth but He gave you two ears, so you should listen twice as much as you speak.” Too often we don’t listen to understand. Instead, we listen just enough so we can respond. To really connect, you have to take into account the feeling behind the words, not just the words themselves. I’m no relationship expert, but I’ve seen my fellow men struggle with this. Women are known to be more intuitive and can become frustrated with men, who tend to be more literal. They tune in to the words rather than the emotions.

It’s one thing to listen and observe carefully, but it’s even more important to take what you hear and observe, accurately assess it, and then act upon it. The people who do this well tend to have the best relationships and to be high achievers in their work. It can also be an important survival skill.
The New York Times
reported a story about two American soldiers on patrol in Iraq who saw a parked car with two young boys inside. The windows were rolled up even though it was 120 degrees outside. One of the soldiers asked the other, his patrol sergeant, if he could offer the boys some water and took steps toward the car.

The sergeant looked at the entire scene around them and sensed danger. He ordered the patrol to fall back. Just as his soldier turned around, a bomb exploded inside the car. The two boys were killed. The soldier who wanted to help them was hit by shrapnel but survived.

Later the sergeant would recall that when he saw his soldier move toward the car, “My body got cooler; you know that
danger
feeling.” Other subtle clues had tweaked his antennae earlier. No shots had been fired at them that morning, which was unusual, and overall the streets had been quieter than they were on a typical day.

Studies of veteran soldiers have shown how they rely on their ability to quickly read and interpret their surroundings based on sensations, body language, or anomalies that “just don’t fit.” This is critical not just for relationships but for survival, for them and for us.

Knowing how to act appropriately and fit in—whether at a church social, a private country club, an employee picnic, or a simple dinner—is another important people skill. You have to respect
where you are. When visiting foreign lands, I often ask my host or interpreter to help me understand local customs and traditions so that I don’t make a mistake that alienates my audience.

There are certain actions you do while dining at home that you should never do during meals in certain countries. In most places belching is considered the height of rudeness, but in some places a good raucous burp is considered a compliment to the chef. On a more serious note, there are topics you should avoid in certain settings. Mentioning old conflicts, politics, and in some cases, even religion can only lead to trouble.

But you can always find common ground for engaging with others. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned that listening is the most valuable skill for engaging others, especially when you are “working the room” in a large crowd.

We bond with others not just through words but through our expressions and body language, which includes how we position ourselves in relation to others. We often aren’t aware of our positioning until someone who is spatially impaired invades our personal space. Close talkers, for example, may be trying to bond, but they tend to send people fleeing. It’s a difficult line to judge, because we welcome some people into our personal space more than others. A friend once shot me a look of utter panic at a party because he’d been backed into a corner by four people vying for his attention. They towered over him, and he looked a bit like a fox cornered by the hounds.

I don’t have a problem capturing anyone’s attention, but holding on to it is another challenge altogether. When I meet people, they are intrigued by my body but not always comfortable looking at it. I have just a few seconds to overcome that by turning on the charm. With kids and teens especially, I’ll make jokes about “lending a hand” or something costing me “an arm and a leg,” so they can see that I’ve heard all the comments and that I can laugh along with them. I think the real secret to charisma is making each person you meet feel that they have your complete attention when they speak to you.

We all tend to think we are tactful and thoughtful of other people, but I know I sometimes fall short. My brother loves to remind me that I bossed him around when we were younger. Aaron had to put up with a lot. Even when my parents were both home, he served as my caregiver because we were always together. He’ll tell you that I could get a little crazy with my demands. One morning, for example, his friend Phil visited us. He walked into the kitchen at breakfast time, so I asked Aaron and Phil if they wanted some bacon and eggs.

“Sure, thanks, Nick!” Phil said.

I set about fixing him bacon and eggs. I did this by yelling, “Okay, Aaron, can you get me some eggs, and I also need you to fetch the pan. Oh, and put the pan on the stove. Crack the eggs in the pan, and I’ll take over once they’re cooked.”

As Aaron got older and bigger, he found a way to deal with my bossy ways. Whenever he decided that I was being too demanding, he’d threaten to put me in a cabinet drawer, shut it, and leave me
there. So I had to develop tactful people skills, or I would have been filed away forever!

We’ve all heard of those who “talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.” You can be a great listener, a highly empathetic, engaging, charming, and tactful person, but if you don’t step up and reach out to other people when the situation requires it, then all your other skills are meaningless. Just saying “I feel for you” doesn’t cover it. Your actions speak louder than your words.

In your work relationships, this means not only doing your job and striving to be successful but helping others do their jobs and supporting them in their efforts to succeed.

To master these people skills, you must place your own self-interests, concerns, and agendas on hold and dial in to those around you. It’s not about being the center of attention or the funniest person in the room; it’s about engaging with other people on their terms and making them comfortable enough to invite you into their lives.