Socially, You Are What You Say

I communicate, therefore I am.

We are social beings and our brains, that intricate network of neural connections, are encoded so that we can interpret the behavior of others and make decisions to relate to each other in one way or another.

Wherever we have come from and wherever we go after leaving this world, Social Neuroscience shows us that we differ from other living beings with similar brains in that we have a more developed neocortex, which allows us to process large amounts of complex information about our environment. In particular, about the human beings that are part of it.

The Social Brain theory proposed by Dunbar is the neuroscientific basis of why and how we relate to others in order to survive and access resources. And although in the modern organizational world we do not form alliances between groups to easily hunt a deer or protect ourselves from hungry lions, we generate them to lead teams, secure better positions, or survive the 360° review at the end of the year.

There are three elements that make possible this choreography of passions and strategies to have our place in any social group: empathy, language and narratives.

The brain is a great coherence-hunting machine and an excellent energy saver. 

To optimize its own resources (glucose) the brain always looks for the shortest way to activate a behavior. It always goes back to what is known and what has worked in the past. This saves not only energy but also time by getting an action done as fast as possible to access X resource... as fast as possible. 

It is not an option to have to analyze from scratch the immense amount of information involved in any situation, in any context, let alone play trial and error as danger approaches. So what does the brain do? It encodes and stores in our emotional memory the verbal and non-verbal language patterns of people to predict their behavior.

This is how we can surmise what another person is feeling or meant when they said what they said or what their real intentions are. In short, understanding the other person's emotional experience. This is empathy.

Thanks to empathy almost anyone is able to interpret emotional states in others through their body language, the clothes they wear and of course, their voice.

But it is one thing to understand and another to act.

What can you do with the information you get from your empathy level? What's next...? Communicate.

To communicate is to act. Communicating is using our language based on a series of common codes to achieve an objective (of any kind) and this objective is only achieved if we impact the emotion of the listeners according to their personality tendency.

That is why I insist that socially we are what we say. We are what we evoke and activate in the emotional memory of others. We are the emotional filter through which they listen to our voice. For this reason, language goes beyond a particular language or our idiosyncrasy. Mastering language to communicate effectively with others requires that we understand their personality tendency and objectively analyze what the elements of their nonverbal communication mean.

The third element of the Social Brain that makes our social relationships possible is Narrative.

Every social dynamic, in any group of any kind (baseball fans, religious group, urban tribes, etc.), revolves around one or several narratives that we tell ourselves or are told, to mobilize us as a herd towards the achievement of a goal. At the organizational level these narratives are known as Purpose, Values, Mission, Vision or any other concept that reminds the group what we believe in, why we do what we do and how we should do it.

So, we are social beings capable of cooperating and relating thanks to the level of empathy that makes it possible to understand others based on their personality tendency, their voice, etc., and to the level of strategic command of language to evoke and maintain coherence between our behavior and whatever the narrative that defines the group is. 

And these three elements, in control, are what make effective and persuasive communication possible. A true High-Impact Neurocommunication.

The "art" of communicating, or rather, the "science" of communicating, is more than just talking nice, smiling, being liked and being understood. The science of communicating requires a fairly deep understanding of who you are, who the other person is and what kind of voice (literally, the sound of it) can best connect our emotional states to achieve a common goal.

My grandmother used to say, "as they see you, they treat you." I add to that, "how they hear you, they feel you."