A Year of Learning and Unlearning

Another year older and none the wiser a little wiser.

Wisdom truly comes from experience. Experience comes from living, in making mistakes and learning from them.

And what did I learn during my last go-around the sun?

Being likable serves you better than being knowledgeable. To paraphrase Dale Carnegie (or Theodore Roosevelt, depending on which internet site you source):

"Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care about them."

Throughout this past year, that was the common take away from almost every professional interaction I've had. Forget that I have the credentials and experience (and sometimes data) to back up my advice, ideas, or suggestions - it seems that to a certain group of people, I have zero credibility because they do not like me. And a lot of them are people whom I had no prior interaction with. 

Which makes me wonder, how much of their opinion of me is based on their actual feelings about me, and how much it was based on someone else's (most likely) second-hand experience of me? Not that really cared that much, which only perpetuates my reputation of being "uncaring" (indifferent) towards others.

It's not that I don't "care" about others. I'm a compassionate person. I think that I just come across as "uninterested" in other people's lives because I don't want to be seen as intrusive or a gossip monger. I think I need to unlearn how to associate "showing interest in others" with being "intrusive".

How does one actually do that?