Social Skills – Social Signalling – Control
by pre.
Last week we looked into ways to become more aware of the signals you’re constantly sending to the people you interact with, the subconscious and subliminal messages that you send through your posture, gait, voice, tone and expressions (both verbal and facial). As you become more aware of these signals, you’ll likely find more and more that they are not what you intended. This week we will examine how to not only become more conscious of those signals, but to take conscious control of them. To actually improve.
How Improved Control Will Help
Improved control over your social signalling will primarily help by reducing miscommunication, by ensuring that you less often appear to be saying one thing with words and another through action. It will help you to stay ‘in sync’, so that your meaning is conveyed less ambiguously and more precisely. People will understand your intent more often, and more clearly.
Building relationships will become more straight forward when your aren’t signalling your every doubt and worry to the people you are communicating with. When your communication is more coherent, you’ll appear more trust worthy, more likeable.
Finally, while the Transcendence Institute isn’t really in favour of deception in general, there will inevitably be times in life when deception is necessary — if only when organizing surprise parties and the like. Having better control over your social signalling will help in these few occasions when it’s necessary to lie. The victim of your deceit will more likely fall for it if you can avoid tells, and fake sincerity.
How To Improve Control
In truth you have likely already improved your control of your social signalling no end simply by observing others. Last lap around the spiral you concentrated on improving your perception of social signalling, and you’ll have therefore been paying attention to the way others do it. You have been learning by example the best ways to convey the desired messages without any extra prompting or encouragement from the Transcendence Institute.
Your own awareness of your social signalling, discussed last week, will also inevitably lead to better control of it. Anything in your environment which you pay more attention to, which you focus your awareness on, your brain learns to understand more completely. This understanding will, in turn, produce better control. So just by paying more attention to your social signalling you’ll certainly become more competent at it.
As usual though, the best way to improve any skill you wish to master is through practice. We encourage you, during your social encounters, to deliberately experiment. To see what people think when you stand up straighter, or slouch more. When you shape your face and body differently. Eventually to consciously try to convey an emotion or intent without using words, and to test: To see if your conversational partner picked up on that intent. Try simply walking up to a friend, with intent on your mind, and ask if they can read it: “Do you know what I want to talk about?” When they do, you’ll know you’ve improved immeasurably.
This month’s meditation
You’ll use pre-visualisation to prime your mind to better control the signals you’re sending during a social encounter. You’ll imagine an encounter you’re expecting, or just a random happenstance meeting and practice and concentrate your mind on social signalling issues.
The meditation will also, of course, include lots of suggestion to ensure that you think about these things more, so that your attention is on them during your social encounters, ensuring that you learn more quickly and more deeply while the social interaction is actually taking place.