This short video by Jeff For Local Marketing explains why people often resist new ideas or unsolicited help. Jeff argues that initial resistance is a natural response to unknown changes and that the "curse of knowledge" leads helpers to speak from their own advanced perspective instead of where the other person is, causing miscommunication (illustrated with a gardening example).
We see a business owner who may be, I don't want to say, struggling what appears to be, they need help. And we immediately jump in and say, hey, here's a solution. And we wonder why. They say, yeah, I'm not interested. They resist that. Well.
When something new comes along for me, and I think statistically from a psychological standpoint, it's true for everyone. When we don't know what it is, our initial response is what resistance. And the reason for that is because, hey, we may be going along pretty well, right? And when somebody comes and says, hey, I can help you with X, Y and Z, you're like, well, I didn't ask for any help. The other part is I don't even know what, I don't know about this. Now there's a thing that's called curse of knowledge. And what that basically is, and it's true for all of us, you, me, your brother in law, a friend, whatever, we all have this level of understanding about specific things. And so what we do is we think everyone, everyone, because we live in that world, everyone has that already understanding. And so we jump in where we are instead of jumping in where they are. And that's a big difference because what happens is we start talking from a much higher plane. And again, it doesn't matter. You can be a gardener and I'm thinking about planting some stuff in my yard and you're immediately talking about soil temperature and mixtures. I'm like, I haven't figured out where I'm going to put it in my yard yet. In other words, you're way down the road instead of asking, oh yeah, tell me more about that.
