Why should you understand others? The crux of it is you will be able to manage well and achieve what you want to achieve if you can understand the personality of others with whom you interact. You can change your behaviour suitable to get positive results out of the interactions with that person. You get a tool to handle life itself once you are able to understand others. Understanding other peoples personalities will boost your personal and professional relationships. It will enable you to deal more effectively with difficult people. When you understand people it is easy to negotiate, persuade, or help them solve their problems, or whatever the situation requires.

How to learn to understand others? Through observation you can learn a lot about others. "My dear Watson, you see a lot but you observe very little.” Told Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson. Sherlock Holmes had a knack of putting the solutions in perspective. For, as Holmes obviously knew, observation helps a lot in understanding a person's strengths and areas of improvement, both at a personal and professional level. Another way to understand others is thru gathering information about them. You can learn about them from others who work closely with the individual. The information source can also include clients who deal with him or his past bosses and peers. Interactions with the individual can also give you a lot of clues about him, how he thinks and his views on various subjects. Some General Obervations about people that can help in understanding others 90% of the people are more worried about themselves. About what others are thinking about them, about their appearance and behaviour, whether their friends like them or not. The thoughts of these people are mostly self directed. It is only the remaining 10% who are interested in others. This means - Embarassments do not make a lot of sense, people who appear to be mean or hurtful do not do it intentionally, you have to initiate relationships and not wait for others to come forward. Most of the time it happens that you feel something but nobody else knows about it. In such situations when people are not responding to you, don't get angry with them. It is not correct to say everyone is selfish. Most of the behaviour of people is on the principles of selfless concern for the welfare of others. It is basically a win/win situation. People have very poor memories. People are forgetful by nature, so don’t assume malice or disinterest if something is forgotten. People have trouble remembering things, especially those that do not apply to themselves. People tend to be emotional. They have stronger feelings about things that they relate themselves to. By being sensitive to those underlying currents gives you an advantage over them. People feel lonely. It is the nature of human beings to socialize and the desire to be with other people is strong.