Tag: silence

Top 8 psychological hacks to boost you work and social interactions

1) Go into any interaction with acceptance and comfort mindset

2) Pay attention to people’s feet when you approach them

If they turn only their torsos and not their feet, it means they are in the middle of an important conversation and they don’t want you to interrupt them. If they turn both torso and feet, it means you are welcome.

3) When arguing, stand next to the person, not in front and move your eyes around

As subconsciously, this might be perceived as confrontational, and thus exacerbate the argument.

4) Show attention and understanding during conversation

  • rephrasing what he/she just mentioned
  • labelling his/her feelings using words (which has deflating and positive effect)
  • mirroring, i.e. repeating his/her words for more clarification/elaboration – animals mirror each other for comfort and to instil trust
  • nodding and using “uhm” and other silent confirming sounds
  • summarise in order to get “That’s right”: this will show that you heard, understood and identify with his/her issue/points and hence the answer “that’s right”
  • ask open-ended questions using “how” and “what”: both give a chance to the other person to elaborate and clarify, which instills further understanding for you and the longer the other person talks, the better he/she feels about you

5) Use silence in conversations

We tend to think silence is awkward. Don’t shy it, let it flow and let the other person or yourself ponder in the silence periods and then continue answering. Silence periods may seem awkward but they induce understanding and bonding.

6) Enrich your conversations

  • storytell: package information into stories and anecdotes (using details of colours, music, tastes, smells, movements, etc) – we are evolutionarily wired to buy into stories and trust those who tell them
  • tone and inflection: no one finds monotone exciting. Switch up your tone of voice from deep for declarative statements, to high inflection when you want to leave them guessing.
  • ask them to guess what happens next: where relevant/possible, this will create engagement and anticipation
  • avoid using “I think” and “I believe” where possible: instead use “I will” and “I know” to show a stronger and more confident footing

7) Use Benjamin Franklin effect

A person who has done someone a favor is more likely to do that person another favor than they would be if they had received a favor from that person. Similarly, one who harms another is more willing to harm them again than the victim is to retaliate.

In social situations, you can hack this by making someone do something small for you, then asking for your true favor. It’s such a small favor that they will say yes, and due to cognitive dissonance their brain will rationalize that they must like you enough to do you a favor in the first place. This is also called the foot-in-the-door effect.

8) Frame your request as a choice

No one likes to feel pressured into doing something they don’t want to do. By subtlety rephrasing a request, you can make the person feel like they came to the decision on their own terms.

Also this insightful blog post on overall work ethic touches on some of these and other psychological factors..

21st century: lose of silence and humanness

Years 1982, 1989, 1994, 1999 are not notable but for fact that some of redefining moments of recent technological breakthrough, especially in the realm of mobile and Internet technologies, happened during those years.

Now an average American teen sends or receives around 2,200 text messages per month, but one 13-year-old  managed to handle 24,000.

We are more and more in a hurry. Time blurs because Internet and technologies bring us means that make us connected ever faster and ever more seamlessly. We want to have more done and achieved in less and less time. Competition is fierce. What we don’t realize that in these times of accelerated realities our perceived effectiveness or success based on doing more rapidly or in less time is illusionary. Once we come to that realization, it is usually too late. We become disconnected from our friends, families and even teh very realities with which we were trying to keep abreast of.

In trying to stay ahead of our lives in the accelerated 21st century, we all start feeling the strain of our pace, personal and professional, in our everyday lives. We start feeling the need to unplug. In one generation we have moved from exulting in and worshiping time-saving devices and gadgets that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time.

In 21st century, we have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say. We don’t have time to think. We need to say as much as we can in as little a time, assuming otherwise to stay behind. Facebook, Twitter and plethora of means of communication, while admittedly helping us to receive, create and share more information, also take out of us our innate ability to reflect, ponder and consider, all of which require focus and time, of which we have less and less.

However, the urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser men have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Famous American writer Thomas Merton noted that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Well-known New Style designer Philippe Starck claims that he stays consistently ahead of the curve by never following news or watching TV. Highlysuccessful Malaysian businessman Vijay Eswaran attributes his success, taking his company QI Group from launch to the billion dollar mark in 10 years, to his practice of reflecting in silence for one hour everyday. Even in negotiations and sales, silence is the ultimate key to success.

A series of tests in recent years has shown, according to Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows“, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio “deep thought and empathy that are essential in our love lives are inherently slow and not in concert with our speedy lives.“

There is an irony to our story of becoming the most advanced in terms of tehcnology. As we created trains, machines, robots and programs, designed to address every type of needs we have, we were only able to do so, by creating and guiding those technologies and machines. Machines and technologies that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier cannot teach us how to make the best use of themselves. There is no meta level to technological revolution.

How do some of us try unplug from the information overflow?

Recent trend is mushrooming of Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China, which save kids addicted to the screen.

Another fashionable trend, especially among business professionals of all types, is yoga or meditation. Yet others go for long weekend walks in forests or hike their way up hills or mountains.

With an ever-increasing amounts of information, connectedness and speed, our innate faculty of regenerating ourselves, re-creating our inner serenity and reconnecting with nature, friends and family intuitively leads us back to many an old and well-trodden paths of our forefathers. And this is to be expected.

I just wish that with all the noise, technology and gadgets, popping up around us and affecting every aspect of our lives in more ways we would like to admit or imagine we don’t forget what we are. We are humans and all the technology in the world cannot make us any more human than we already are. If anything, it has been turning us into the very machines we have striven to create.