I teach effective communication for building connections, so you can create new business opportunities.
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A general rule of life should be to always aim for quality over quantity. The only exception I have thought of is money. I’d rather have more money, I don’t really care about the condition of the bills. With more money I can support the causes I care most about and eliminate the stress that stops me from creating the content I most want to share with you.
My quality over quantity rule is especially nice as it applies to relationships. I’m very much a people person. Over my many years of indulgence and excitement over the rise of social networks, I mistook these brief interactions with people as quality encounters. They used to be, but today algorithms decide whom you will see in your timeline instead of you.
“Let your guiding rule be not how much, but how good. A thing you do not want is expensive at any price. Avoid surplus. Choose quality over quantity.”
During my digital detox from social media last summer, I made it a point to reconnect with old friends via video conferencing, telephone, or a few in-person* beverages. I didn’t realize how much I missed this type of interaction.
I have been reviewing old photographs from the many conferences I attended over the years. I have then scheduled and conducted catch up video chats with some of those folks. The meetings have been personally rewarding to me. These quality chats are much more fulfilling than a like, comment, text, or private message.
“The most precious gift you can give someone is the gift of your time and attention.”
Spending 30-60+ minutes chatting with people I enjoyed meeting way back when has been one of the best uses of my time. Why not communicate again with the people you have most enjoyed interacting with in the past?
They say time and attention are our most valuable resources. Investing this time and attention in reconnecting with people I admire has made me far richer.
Quality relationships make you richer.
* Making a point to be six-feet apart, wearing a mask before and after, and with clean hands.
In order to effectively lead an organization or department, one must be fluent in social intelligence skills.
The key elements of social intelligence are verbal fluency and conversational skills; knowledge of social roles, rules, and scripts; effective listening skills; understanding what makes other people tick; social self-efficacy; and impression management skills. Social intelligence (SI) is one of the core areas my corporate training focuses on in the Nice Method. How versed are you in each of these areas?
Verbal Fluency and Conversational Skills. Ronald E Riggio Ph.D. explains this well in his article in Psychology Today. “You can easily spot someone with lots of SI at a party or social gathering because he or she knows how to “work the room.” The highly socially intelligent person can carry on conversations with a wide variety of people, and is tactful and appropriate in what is said. Combined, these represent what are called “social expressiveness skills.”
Effective Listening Skills. I obsess about actively listening with intent. I love the reaction I get from audiences when I share the fact that an anagram for the word ‘silent’ is ‘listen’ (also ‘tinsel’, but I digress). We don’t learn from speaking, we learn from listening. Here’s a quick video from The Master Communicator’s Secret Weapon presentation for more on how to improve your listening skills.
Understanding What Makes Other People Tick. As a speaker and improv performer, I have studied how to read an audience. Noting the facial expressions and body language of the crowd is important in adjusting my performance to leave them satisfied. The same goes for professional settings like sales calls, video meetings, candidate interviews, employee performance meetings, and investor calls. Not only is reading the people important but understanding why they are behaving the way they do is crucial.
Knowledge of Social Roles, Rules, and Scripts. To come off as socially sophisticated and wise, one must understand the difference in the people they interact with. In an office setting or virtual meeting, you come across many different types of people who demand different styles of interaction. Recognizing these differences and adapting your communication style is key to effective communication.
Impression Management Skills. You need to be aware of the impression you are leaving on the people you communicate with. This means mixing a healthy dose of authenticity with self-censorship. Being honest and sincere is paramount in everything we do, but being completely transparent can have serious ramifications in professional relationships.
Role-Playing and Social Self-Efficacy. Knowing how to play different social roles will make you feel comfortable no matter who you are communicating with. When you practice these skills you feel socially self-confident and more effective. This is why role-playing is an important part of the Nice Method, which leads to improved social self-efficacy.
A while back, I sent a survey to my email newsletter subscribers. The Nice Makers were kind enough to provide me with feedback to help me shape future editions. One comment I received asked me to share my thoughts on “nice”.
As you know, the newsletter is The Nice Maker. I am the chief connector at Networking For Nice People, this blog is called The ROI of Nice. I’m obsessed with using nice as a way to improve how we communicate with one another.
Look up the definition of nice and you will find words like pleasant; agreeable; friendly.
I write and think a lot about empathy and kindness. I believe this is at the core of effective communication. I consider myself a humanist. Humans are far from perfect, but we learn and pivot from the lessons in life that help us grow wiser together.
I believe in standing up for our rights. I believe in truth and justice (and justice reform). I believe that rather than striving to be angelic followers we should aim to be nice. Nice isn’t perfect. We aren’t always kind and we aren’t always empathetic, but I believe we become nicer when we strive to practice kindness and empathy.
We can be pleasant by simply smiling more. Smiling really is contagious. Sensorimotor stimulation in our brains causes us to mimic what we see without realizing it. When we mimic someone else’s facial expression, we trigger that same emotional state in ourselves, which then allows us to formulate an appropriate social response like returning a smile we receive.
Believe it or not, people can read your smiles even when they are hidden beneath masks. As a photographer, Laura Fuchs who shoots New Yorkers smiling behind their masks says, “I can see your smiles. It’s all in your eyes and cheekbones”.
Being agreeable is the essence of being nice. This is the practice of saying, “Nice, and…” when someone suggests something to you. This practice is always better than rejecting someone with a “Nice, but…”.
Try it next time someone suggests something to you. Spend a full day responding with “Nice, and…” in your reply. More details on this here.
Approach the people in your life with an empathetic mind and a “nice, and” attitude. We express friendliness by doing so. My goal is to always make people feel comfortable whether they are in a workshop I’m leading, a meeting, or a casual encounter. The key to coming across this way is to actively listen to the people you meet.
Using courage and facing fears are also traits of being nice - nice to yourself. Standing up for those who need it is nice. Being the person you needed when you were younger is nice. Nice isn’t complacent. Nice isn’t cowardness. Nice is respecting yourself and the good people in your life.
I’m pushing for a nicer world and this begins with me and you. Are you in?
It’s such a strange phenomenon to be self-quarantined with my family. I have my two teenaged kiddos home with us all day. They are often in their rooms working on school work, reading, gaming, or FaceTiming with friends. They spend the majority of the day hidden in their rooms. My better half is the same, she is happiest with a book but also helps the kids with their homework and has her own school work to do. Me, I’m working but I crave interaction.
I was irritable for a couple of days in a row recently. I equated it to some future work concerns and our teenagers’ habits. I had a revelation yesterday while listening to Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast interview with the physician and former Surgeon General of the US, Dr. Vivek Murthy.
What was the revelation, Dave? You ask.
I’m lonely.
Researchers and scientists say loneliness is a gap between the connections you need and the social connections you have. Loneliness is subjective, it’s different than objective terms like “isolation”. You can have many people around you and still feel lonely.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, loneliness isn’t necessarily the same as being alone. It usually refers to the distress people feel when their social involvement and relationships are not what they want them to be, such as feeling left out or alone when they’d prefer to be involved or interacting with others.
According to Dr. Murthy, there is a deep stigma and shame that comes with loneliness. We feel that if we are lonely we are not likable or broken in some way. This stops us from admitting how we feel to ourselves. If it’s beyond our vision, we don’t discuss it.
People describe loneliness as carrying an entire load by themselves, they feel like if they disappeared tomorrow nobody would care, or they feel like they are invisible. It doesn’t look like someone sitting by themself at a party. It can show up in different ways like fatigue, anger, social withdrawal, or irritability.
Dr. Murthy defines three dimensions of loneliness and explains that we need all three dimensions to feel socially connected.
Intimate and emotional. We want a partner.
Relational and social. We crave friendships.
Collective loneliness. We want to belong to a community or network of people who share our interests.
Any lack of relationships in these dimensions can lead to loneliness. So you can have a wonderfully intimate relationship with your spouse yet still feel lonely if you are lacking a community or friendships.
This is where approaching people for genuine connection instead of validation is key.
Loneliness can also come from not being your true self. You need to connect to yourself by understanding your worth and value. This gives you the power to be yourself.
If we spend time trying to be someone we are not it doesn’t feel good. Human instincts guide us to deeper connections to people. You feel emotionally drained when you are craving someone’s acceptance. Think of a date or meeting when you are nervous. You’re exhausted by the end because you are focusing on trying to please them.
Focus on the connection you have to yourself first. Recognizing this is powerful because you can observe how you interact with others.
Loneliness has profound consequences for our health. It’s much more than just a bad feeling. Dr. Juliana Holdlongstand has done extensive research into this and discovered that people with strong social relationships are 50% less likely to die prematurely than those with weak social relationships. She found the impact of lacking social connection on reducing lifespan is equal to the risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and is greater than the risk of obesity, excessive alcohol, and lack of exercise.
Dr. Holdlongstand studied multiple studies and found confirmation that this causes a higher risk of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Loneliness can leave you with a lower quality of sleep, more immune system dysfunction, and more impulsive behavior and impaired judgment.
We, humans, are relational entities. We decide who we want to hang out with instinctively. If you spend five minutes openly talking to a neighbor, that gives you a shared experience and gives you insights into their values. What’s important is it’s an in-person (albeit 6-feet away) conversation.
These days everyone is connecting via web video chat services like Zoom, Skype, Hangouts, and via telephone and social media. Online dialogue is so challenging because there is no relational context.
Visual cues like body language and facial expressions or tone of voice can also be missing from encounters on social media. This can easily lead to toxic exchanges online.
The only way to address big issues is to talk with people. Today’s technology makes us think we know ‘the enemy’. We believe what we see and hear online and in the news. We end up feeling closer and more threatened to the people we are against. It’s crucial that we don’t feed the trolls.
You don’t really know the people you see online or in the news who you feel against. Step back and consider they are humans - be empathetic. There are parts of everybody that are lovable to others. Consider what the people you feel against are scared about. Everyone has something that makes them lovable and something that they are scared about. This is called mutual vulnerability.
There is a cognitive bias called motive attribution asymmetry. This tells us our beliefs are grounded in love and our opponents’ beliefs are grounded in hatred. The contempt that results in this bias is visceral and righteous. It feeds intolerance and the same emotional stew that makes loneliness so toxic.
People don’t trust each other’s motives. This leads to motive attribution asymmetry. The only way to get past this is to build true, authentic relationships with each other. The only way to do this is to open up and be vulnerable.
We get signals telling us who we need to be. The definition of success and worth is often led by our ability to acquire wealth, reputation, and power. The reality is the true definition of worth is about the ability to give and receive love. It requires courage to be vulnerable, the ability to recognize our values. Society tells us to chase the false gods of wealth, reputation, and power.
Dr. Murthy explained that he is worried we are not setting our children up to believe in themselves and recognize their true source of power and self-worth. Instead, we are telling them their value is conditional on the acquisition of extrinsic things and circumstances.
Hunter-gatherers being separated from their tribes once led to loneliness. This meant our likelihood of survival went down because we were more likely to be killed by a predator or have a lack of food supply. Our threat level would shift up and we would focus inward because of our lack of safety. We need one another it is human nature.
When you try to interact with someone who has an elevated threat level, it makes it harder to connect with them. Loneliness chips away at our self-esteem. It makes us think we are not lovable or likable.
We need to make a conscious decision in our culture to shift what self-worth is defined by. Understand shame and empathy. Shame corrodes our capacity for empathy of others because it is so self-focused. When we do this we will continue to lead people to a place where they don’t feel they are enough, which is a recipe for loneliness.
Loneliness reveals the power of human connection in our life. The power of that connection can heal deep trauma. Authentic, open relationships lead to love. There is nothing more powerful than love. We need to strive to move us as a society to value connection and put people at the center of our lives and society.
It’s normal to feel lonely. I felt much better when I shared this discovery with my family. It turns out we all feel lonely and it’s perfectly normal during this ‘new normal’ pandemic life we are living.
I encourage you to give the full podcast interview a listen. I also recommend picking up Dr. Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.
Random Acts of Kindness Week comes each February. For much of the world, February weather sucks. Just looking out of the window as I write this is a reminder. It’s been gray and raining endlessly in Nashville over the past few days. Perhaps this is why Random Acts of Kindness was created during this dreary month. Let’s brighten it up, shall we?
The following is a list of twenty-five ideas you can use at work to be nice to your colleagues and to yourself. I encourage you to print this list and pin it above your desk or stick it on the wall in your kitchen to share the ideas. Even though you are encouraged to deliver random acts of kindness during the official week, there is nothing stopping you from doing so during the fifty-one other weeks of the year.
As Maile Proctor writes, “kindness releases feel-good hormones. Have you ever noticed that when you do something nice for someone else, it makes you feel better too? This isn’t just something that happens randomly—it has to do with the pleasure centers in your brain.”
She continues, “Doing nice things for others boosts your serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of satisfaction and well-being. Like exercise, altruism also releases endorphins, a phenomenon known as a “helper’s high.”
Buy a coffee, grab creamers and sugar, and deliver them to the first person you see at work. This could be a custodian, receptionist, security person, colleague, stranger.
Hold the door open for someone.
Give someone a compliment for the good work they do. Or the cool shoes they are wearing.
Smile.
Take a private bathroom break to practice a short meditation. I’m a fan of Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.
Send a positive text, Slack, or instant message to a colleague.
As companies grow it is common not to recognize everybody. Talk to a colleague you don’t know. Invite them with you for lunch.
Hold the elevator door open for someone. Say hello to your fellow passenger.
Tape two dollars to the vending machine.
Tidy the kitchen. Clean out the microwave. Empty the fridge.
Be a hero. Make a pot of coffee.
Surprise your team by bringing donuts or baking something special.
Write a LinkedIn recommendation. Connect your LinkedIn connections.
Choose to forgive and accept people for who they are.
Write a list of what you are thankful for.
Leave a huge tip for a barista or a server.
Pay the toll or bus fare for the person behind you.
Put your phone away when you are around other people.
Write a complimentary LinkedIn post about a colleague and tag them.
Work without headphones. Raise your head from your computer and smile at each person who walks by. Consider your resting face.
Compliment a colleague to your manager. Write them an email about how awesome the person is.
Interject a kind comment when people are gossiping.
Give a colleague a copy of a book that impacted you.
Write a list of all the things you enjoy about your work.
Listen intently as someone is speaking to you. Use the L.I.S.T.E.N. acronym (VIDEO).
Download this as a PDF to print and share with your colleagues to brighten up the day.
Photo by Sandrachile on Unsplash.
I advocate for being nice to everyone you encounter each day. Yes, it sometimes takes a bit of empathy to return a smile and keep your patience intact.
Leaders of organizations can measure the result of being nice. The best way to do this is to recognize each team member frequently enough to make them feel proud of the work they do. A compliment goes a long way.
I recommend leaders add this item to their daily to-do lists.
A quick pat on the back and compliment will make a person’s day. Happier staff feel more positive and are less likely to find a job elsewhere. As I mentioned, do this to be nice first and foremost. Then consider the cost of replacing an unhappy employee.
How much does it cost to replace an unhappy team member?
Entry-level employees - 30-50% of their annual salary.
Mid-level employees - upwards of 150% of their annual salary.
High-level or highly specialized employees - 400% of their annual salary.
If you are a 150-person company with 11% annual turnover, and you spend $25,000 per-person on hiring, $10,000 each on turnover and development, and lose $50,000 of productivity opportunity cost on average when refilling a role, then your annual cost of turnover would be about $1.57 million. Reducing this by just 20%, for example, would immediately yield over $300,000 in value. And that says nothing of the emotional headache and cultural drain felt from losing great people*. - Source: https://blog.employerscouncil.org/2017/06/28/costs-of-turnover/
Do you want to improve how nice you are to yourself, your team, and your community? Recognize a team member each day of the week. I cover this and much more in The ROI of Nice presentation.
Photo by Lukas from Pexels.