Getting inside their heads… (1)
Face it. The thought processes of another person – even someone very close to you – are unknown territory.
So if you want to ‘get inside their head’ – well, you can’t.
But you can try. You can make the mental effort to imagine the way they think and feel. And the key word there is ‘imagine’. (Don’t try this if you don’t have an imagination… 
OK, confession time. I have a big, unfair advantage. As the only child of an English father and a Danish mother, both with a love of travel, I grew up poised between two very different cultures.
Every summer I would leave the uptight, authoritarian England of the 1950s and visit my Danish family in a country that was already liberal, open, relaxed, socially caring and effectively classless.
For six weeks I would be totally immersed in a different language, a different way of thinking, and a different set of expectations.
People dressed differently, spoke a language with a smaller, harder-working vocabulary, thought differently and acted differently. They were, mostly, far more tolerant than their English contemporaries – though I did have my first encounter with racial prejudice there, too.
It was – literally – an education.
Because it taught me, quite painlessly, that there’s always more than one way of looking at just about anything.
And that it’s possible to get on very well with a range of people who all hold very different opinions.
It also taught me to be very wary of anyone claiming to have ‘all the answers’. Including, of course, blog writers like me.
The snag is that for most people, suspicion of people who are ‘different’ is a normal part of their culture. Call it prejudice, call it self-defence, call it tribalism, call it what you like, it’s not an attitude good copywriters can afford to have (unless they’re prepared to question it, that is).
Example? OK. Over the last 25 years or so I’ve written scripts for a large number of business videos. It’s been fascinating work, taking me inside places and organisations not always open to public view. In the course of those 25 years I’ve had reason to interview senior staff at Sellafield, and to visit a laboratory conducting animal experiments. As a freelancer I could, in theory, have turned down both those jobs.
I didn’t. Because I thought it would be a lot more interesting to put my preconditioned thinking to one side and listen to what the people there had to tell me.
I’m still not convinced we have a real solution to the problem of nuclear waste. And I still have doubts about the long-term value of animal experiments. But – at the very least – I can see other points of view.
Conclusion?
Getting inside other peoples’ heads isn’t easy – but it is worthwhile. And making the effort is an essential part of creating an effective newsletter.
As the old joke has it, don’t criticise someone till you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticise them, you’re a mile away and you’ve also got their shoes…
