The Power of Social Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your social genius. Tony Buzan
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How can you resolve disagreements and conflicts amicably? This chapter will show you everything you need to know!
Chapter 8: Social Graces – Or What to Do When …
Little gestures that show that you care are immensely Socially Intelligent. This chapter will give you a guide to understanding how such gestures work, and how you can use them for your own benefit and happiness.
Chapter 9: Signposts for Social Success
Developing your Social Intelligence will inevitably give you greater social status and influence. You can apply everything you have learned to guarantee your growing future success. This chapter introduces a great Social Intelligence Star, who is the epitome of the power and qualities of Social Intelligence.
Chapter 10: The ‘Power of Ten’
In the final chapter I explain how Social Intelligence is but one among many intelligences we all have, and how each one of your Multiple Intelligence interacts and strengthens all the others.
To help you in your journey, The Power of Social Intelligence features a host of apposite quotes, self-check exercises, fascinating stories and case histories. The book also has some special features:
Mind Maps®. Mind Maps® are amazing thinking tools designed to help you see, outside your head, the ‘maps of thought’ that are inside your head! Mind Maps® use all the ‘equipment’ your whole brain uses every day to recognize, understand and remember things, including words, lines, colours and images. Mind Maps® simply make things easier for you wherever and whenever you use them. They are ‘Friends of your Brain’.
Social Workouts. All the following chapters contain a Social Intelligence Workout – games and fun exercises that will help you develop and strengthen this Master Intelligence. You can look on them as your Mental Gymnasium – a place where you go to increase the strength, flexibility and stamina of your Social Intelligence muscles!
Social Brain Boosters. These Brain Boosters take the form of Intentions or Affirmations. By repeating them to yourself on a regular basis, you will build up the maps of thought about these intentions in your head, and will increase the probability that what they say will become part of your new social behaviour and growing Social Intelligence. They have been specially designed to protect you from some of the pitfalls of incomplete and inaccurate Positive Thinking modes of thought.
Reading People –
Body Language and How To Master It
Chapter Two
‘Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.’
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Your body is impeccably designed for the purpose of communicating with your fellow human beings. Your voice and your words obviously play a vital part in the art and science of social interaction. Be fully aware, however, that an even greater percentage of your communication with others is conveyed by – your body. In fact, studies have shown that fully 55 per cent of all meaning conveyed in any act of communication is given by your physical demeanour!
Your body will communicate, without words, whether you are happy or sad, well or unwell, fit or unfit, removed or engaged, confident or nervous, enthusiastic or bored, interested or indifferent, open or defensive, socially ill at ease or socially confident and in command.
And, of course, other people’s bodies will communicate the same things to you. If you are aware of this, you will be able to ‘read’ other people more accurately and empathetically, and so boost your Social Intelligence.
To give you an immediate experience of this, try the following game:
You are to imagine that you are an actor on stage, miming ultimate depression, despondency and despair.
Imagine that you have woken up in the morning to be told by the person you love the most that they find you unutterably grey, boring and dull and wish to have nothing more to do with you. Immediately after this you receive a message that your best friend is gravely ill. This is followed by a phone call from your bank manager informing you that you have just gone bankrupt and will have to sell immediately the house you have lived in and loved for many years.
As you sink into this imaginary total depression, observe what happens to your body. Check the following things:
Your diminishing height
Your posture
Your energy levels
Your senses and their lessening alertness
Your breathing and its reduced depth and strength
Your motivational levels
Your desire for social contact
Now imagine exactly the opposite scenario, one of extreme joy and happiness. Imagine that you have woken up, and the person whom you have secretly loved and desired for many years tells you that they find you the most amazing, attractive, entertaining and wonderful person they have ever met; your gravely ill friend has just had a miraculous recovery; and you have a call informing you that you have just won the Lottery Jackpot.
Now check your posture, energy and motivational levels, the alertness of your senses and your sociability, and feel the difference!
The game you have just played demonstrates how every cell of your body acts as a major communicator to other people. Being aware of this allows you to begin the journey to becoming a master reader of body language. The findings of the game are confirmed in formal studies, like the ones that follow:
Case Study – See and Tell
Psychologists Geoffrey Beattie and Heather Shovelton of the University of Manchester have found that gesture helps convey huge amounts of information. They discovered that when people see storytellers’ gestures as well as hearing their voices, they pick up about 10 per cent more accurate information about the story than when they are listening to the voice alone. Beattie and Shovelton say: ‘gestures are every bit as rich communicatively as speech; meaning is divided between the hand and the mouth’.
Case Study – Mirror Neurons
An American study has shown that gesture and speech are simply two outlets for identical thought-processes, and both are designed to help you convey those thought-processes to other individuals.
Joanna Iverson, from the University of Missouri, and her colleague Esther Thelen, from the University of Bloomington, Indiana, point to the direct link between movement and meaning that is found in a group of brain cells known as ‘mirror neurons’, confirmed by a study of monkeys.
The mirror neurons fire both when a monkey makes a particular movement, and also when it watches another monkey making the same movement. Intriguingly, these mirror neurons are found in the region of the monkey’s brain that exactly corresponds to the speech-production region of the human brain.
Who Am I?
‘If you want to know yourself, see how others behave; if