It’s fascinating stuff. We wouldn’t want to spoil it too hard for you, but the three habits can be broken down the following way:

• Thinking Win/Win: this means that you’re not seeking only a situation where you benefit. You seek to put both you and your partner in a winning situation. It’s not that controversial an idea: if you sell something to someone, that’s a perfect example of a win/win solution. The customer wins because they get something they want at what they feel is a reasonable price. You win because you make money, which you can invest into making more.
• Seek to Understand Before Being Understood: this means that you empathize with others. You try to see things from their perspective, to understand it in your terms. Doing so is essential if you want both you and the other to win.
• Synergize: synergy is a word that gets thrown around in the business world a lot. It’s seen as something of a quasi-mystical state of unity between minds. Well, the truth is, it’s a real thing. It’s what happens when people achieve a deep understanding of each other. They can complete each other’s sentences, and come up with a sequence of ideas that, if mapped, looks less like a line and more like a tree of possibilities.

Now, obviously, that’s painting the ideas with a pretty broad brush. Obviously there are some subtleties to how they work and making sure they work properly, but you get the gist of it.

You’re probably asking yourself at this point: why are we bringing this up?

Well, it’s like we said. Those are habits that you can use to be very effective with people. But there’s a very fine line between their effective use and their ineffective use. Indeed, it’s entirely possible to do these things wrong. You can damage your relationships with other people in a very bad way.

Here’s the amazing thing about these principles, though: not everyone lives by them. This is especially true in the business world. People tend to enter in with a Win/Lose mentality, and they can want you to lose. If they feel that they came out of a situation where you won and they lost, you can see how they’d want to do anything in their power to get back at you.

That would include attacking your reputation, something that’s incredibly easy to do these days. All they need is a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and a fake name. The rest is a cinch from there.

It wouldn’t even be your fault. This is the real world. You can try to do as right with people as you can and it still go horrible.

We just want you to know that if this has happened to you, we’re here to help you get back on track.