Conversational Intelligence by Judith E. Glaser

Author:Judith E. Glaser [GLASER, JUDITH E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bibliomotion
Published: 2013-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Are you defensive and reactive, setting the context for territorialism to emerge?

How can you shift your mind-set from exclusion to inclusion and set a new context for open, trusting conversations that enable you and others to partner for mutual success?

Warm or Cold? The Choice Is Yours

In preparation for important meetings, relationships, encounters, team sessions, or any time you want to create a positive context for your interactions with others, there are things you can to do to prime your brain for the best outcomes. Think of priming as a way of preparing the soil so you can establish a healthy garden.

As we discussed earlier, John Bargh discovered in his study on the effects of hot and cold coffee that simply holding one or the other before having a conversation actually triggers different parts of the brain to light up. Warm coffee signals warm encounters and cold coffee signals cold encounters. Bargh also did experiments with hard and soft chairs, with similar results—soft chairs made conversations easier and hard chairs made them stiffer. You may think this is a bunch of hogwash, but the effects of environment are real. In the business world, there are applications of this wisdom that may surprise you.

For more than a decade I’ve been working with a large global professional services firm as one of fourteen executive coaches. In one of the exercises we do with each group of fifty partners, we give them a list of seven adjectives that describe a fictitious person. We then ask the executives to make judgment calls about what these people would be like. Half the partners get seven words with the word “cold” in the middle of the list, and the other half get the word “warm.” Then we watch hands going up as we call out the question—is this person more likely to be trusted or distrusted?

What astounds the room is that “cold” and “warm” are the only words on the two lists that are different, yet in almost every case, those with the word “cold” on their list assess the person as not to be trusted, while those with the word “warm” on their list of adjectives assess the person as trustworthy. Given this research and the insights we’ve discovered, there are things you can do, not to manipulate, but to prime your conversations for the best outcomes.

Because intention matters, priming must be done with the goal of sincerity and honesty. It must be done with mindfulness for true partnering and not as an act of deception or as a power play. Our minds and hearts pick up deception and manipulation before anything else—remember, we’re hardwired to protect ourselves.

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