How to Communicate Successfully: The Halvorson Collection (2 Books)

Chapter 9

Correcting Bad Impressions and Overcoming Misunderstandings

Your boss doesn’t think you’re particularly competent. Or your coworker thinks you’re a pretentious ass. You’ve made a bad Phase 1 impression—probably because you were not yet familiar with the biases and lenses of perception—and now you want to repair the damage you’ve done. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. You need to somehow get your perceiver to enter Phase 2, the correction phase, so that his or her impression of you will be revised to reflect you more accurately.

Once in Phase 2, the perceiver will be more likely to take into account the circumstances surrounding your actions (e.g., Maybe she isn’t incompetent . . . perhaps she’s just new to this kind ...