03 Mar2017
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To read the full article go to The Huffington Post
There is so much going on behind our words. As we speak, our brains are taking in microexpressions, voice intonations, gestures and pheromones. People who have high SI have a greater awareness of their protoconversations. Goleman identifies two aspects:
Social Awareness: How you respond to others
Primal Empathy: Sensing other people’s feelings
Attunement: Listening with full receptivity
Empathic Accuracy: Understanding others’ thoughts and intentions
Social Cognition: Understanding the social world and the working of a web of relationships
Social Facility: Knowing how to have smooth, effective interactions
Synchrony: Interacting smoothly
Self-presentation: Knowing how you come across
Influence: Shaping the outcome of social interactions
Concern: Caring about others’ needs
Let’s start with your social awareness. People and places trigger different emotions and this affects our ability to connect. Think about a time you felt excited and energized by an interaction. Now think of a time when you felt drained and defeated after an interaction. Goleman presents a theory on how our brain processes social interactions:
The Low Road is our instinctual, emotion-based way we process interactions. It’s how we read body-language, facial expressions and then formulate gut feelings about people.
The High Road is our logical, critical thinking part of an interaction. We use the high road to communicate, tell stories and make connections.
Why are these important? The Low Road guides our gut feelings and instincts. For example, if people didn’t come to your birthday parties as a kid, you might feel a pang of anxiety when thinking about your own birthday as an adult-even if you have plenty of friends who would attend. Your High Road tells you that you are a grown up and things have changed, but your Low Road still gives you social anxiety. I call these social triggers. You should be aware of your unconscious social triggers to help you make relationship decisions. Knowing your Low Road social triggers helps your High Road function. Here’s how you can identify yours:
What kinds of social interactions do you dread?
Who do you feel anxious hanging out with?
When do you feel you can’t be yourself?
Whether you are a cheerful extrovert or a quiet introvert, everyone needs space and a place to recharge. Goleman suggests a “secure base.” This is a place, ritual or activity that helps us process emotions and occurrences. A secure base is helpful for two main reasons. First, it gives us a place to recharge before interactions so we don’t get burnt out. Second, it helps us process and learn from each social encounter.
You can improve your Social Intelligence, you just need to prioritize it.
In my courses, I sometimes refer to this as a post-mortem. After a business pitch, coffee meeting, party or date do you set aside time to reflect and review what went right and wrong?
Here are some questions I ask during my post-mortem:
What went well?
What went wrong?
What would I have done differently?
What did I learn from this interaction?
Possible secure base ideas on where you can do your post-mortem:
In the car driving home
Journal before bed
Business workbook for ideas
Brainstorming with a partner
Re-hash with a friend
#4: Broken Bonds
One of the biggest pitfalls in social intelligence is a lack of empathy. Goleman calls these Broken Bonds. Philosopher Martin Buber coined the idea of the “I-It” connection which happens when one person treats another like an object as opposed to a human being.
Imagine you have just lost a family member. You get a phone call from a friend offering condolences. Immediately you sense the obligation of the caller. They are distracted, you can hear the typing of keys in the background. Their wishes are cold, memorized and insincere. The call makes you feel worse not better.
This interaction makes you feel like an ‘it’ -a to do list item, a ‘should,’ an obligation. Another word for this would be coldhearted. I had a friend who emailed me every 60 days to grab lunch. Her emails were so similar that I realized I was a calendar alert that she had set-up! I was merely an item on her to do list-she felt she ‘should’ do lunch to keep in touch and our lunches were perfunctory, predictable and boring. I stopped saying yes.
Don’t interact because you feel that you ‘should.’
Say no to obligations if you can.
Interact with empathy or don’t interact at all.
When someone smiles at us, it’s hard not to smile back. The same goes for other facial expressions. When our friend is sad and begins to tear up, our own eyes will often get moist. Why? These are our mirror neurons in action-part of our Low Road response to people. This is why Debbie Downers bring us down with them-the scowl and our brain unconsciously copies it making us feel depressed along with Debbie.
Hang out with people whose moods you want to catch.
If moods are catching, gravitate towards people who will infect you with the good ones!