Social Skills – Integration – Social Signalling
by pre.
Our second lap around the spiral on Social Skills was about social signalling. While the first lap aimed to improve your ability to receive social signals, to read people and relationships, the second lap was about improving your abilities to send social socials, to project your personality, your ideas, into other people’s impression of you.
Of course, the two skills are intimately related and all the things we said last week about social perception could pretty much be said again about Social Signalling.
On social signalling in particular though, we noted that people gain a great deal of information about others through their body posture, their gait, the way they talk and are dressed. All things which you can change through increased body awareness and body control. Gaining more body control will lead directly to an increase in your ability to tune and alter the moods and image which you project.
This information is digested and internalized by others who then treat you accordingly, reflecting their opinions of you in the way they behave. We have previously noted that a person treated like a thief is more likely to become a thief, and in a similar fashion the ideas and emotions projected out to others come back to influence you in the way that they treat you. Your self awareness being moulded indirectly towards whatever you are using your increasing social signalling skills to project.
We also noted during the second lap that there are similar feedback systems within your own body, that posture does not just reflect mood, it interacts with it. Faking confident or happy social signals will force you to form a happy or confident posture, and that in turn will affect your mood. Your very consciousness is affected, boosted, by Social Signalling and tends of course to exaggerate it right back.
Of course changing the signals you are unconsciously sending the world while you think about it is one thing, but changing them automatically, habitually, requires being able to work on changing your very way of thinking. Of bio-programming your own mind to actually take up the actions you decide to take up.
With great control of the social signals which you are sending, ethical questions of course arise. If this increased control allows you to manipulate people, you will need a full understanding of the reasons for not attempting these kinds of undertakings. Understanding that the social world you live in, and your own social status, depends upon doing the right thing in these kinds of situations. Using your powers for good.
The ultimate social signal is language of course, and we’ll review that topic next week.