What 20 Years as a Trainer Taught Me About Social Intelligence
What you start to notice when you begin to see.
Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
When Ernie and I drive to West Point, we have five hours of open road and conversation. We rarely turn on a podcast. We like to sit in the moment and talk about what we notice about human behavior. As personal trainers, we have plenty of time to observe this. Personal trainers are the only profession where we get hours a week 1:1 with people. This could be anywhere from 1-3 hours a week with the same people, some for over 20 years. You get to know people, albeit from our perspective, which, of course, is biased.
Ernie dropped a term, Social Intelligence (SI). Neither one of us had heard of it. Yes, we both have heard about Emotional Intelligence, which Social Intelligence requires, but we had never heard of Social Intelligence. We guessed it probably included things like reading the room, showing curiosity, having empathy, understanding etiquette, and maybe the most important one, self-awareness. I quickly thought, now that is a book I can get behind. Apparently, a few others have thought the same thing.
When I googled Social Intelligence (SI) (besides all of those books people had written), AI shared five categories.
Social Perception: The ability to quickly perceive socially relevant information and understand social situations.
Social Awareness: Being mindful of how one’s actions affect others and understanding social norms.
Empathy: The capacity to understand and share the feelings of another person, often by imagining yourself in their “shoes”.
Social Skills: The ability to navigate social situations, which includes active listening, conversation, and adapting to different roles (e.g., friend, colleague, leader).
Self-awareness: Understanding your own thoughts and feelings in a social context and managing your reactions.
Admittedly, for the last 35 years, I was very low on the SI scale. I had been completely socially blind. There are a few things I did well socially, like having empathy or being able to read the room, but the list pretty much stops there. The truth is, I was just too tri-focused. My children. My husband. My work. Repeat. I didn’t effort, the relationships with my friends, or try to make new ones. I wore the introvert badge like it was a medal of honor. I protected my resources, claiming a draining effect when too many demands were being asked of me. No parties. No social gatherings. Nothing collective except family. After decades of child rearing, I felt I earned the right to retreat as I had devoted plenty of time to everyone else.
And then in the last year, everything changed.
When I enrolled in a class devoted to personality (let’s call this ego patterns) and the liberation from it, I started to truly see myself. I realized that my retreat was a shadow I relied on, and had been my whole life. Everyone has these shadows (not necessarily the retreating), but not everyone is aware of them. It is with this awareness that you learn how you are showing up in the world and how any real growth isn’t going to happen if you keep doing the same thing. Being socially blind has been a shadow for me. Over the course of a year, I went from socially blind to socially near-sighted. But it takes effort. It will always take effort.
It is curious to me that people don’t really want to talk about this, or do the work. You might not be socially blind but if you aren’t you are blind in some other aspect maybe taking care of yourself or being creative. We want the world to change but we don’t want to change. Or we think we are being our best selves, but we actually don’t even know what we need to work on. I didn’t. It took over a year of concentrated self-awareness to shift my social blindspot to less blind. That is effort. I’m not patting myself on the back here, I’m simply saying that reading a book about being a better person, or just being nice doesn’t cut it in this world. We need a dramatic shift. It starts with you. You have to show up, open your eyes to what is really going on in your world, and decide to show up differently. And yes, I’m talking to you extroverts, too. You don’t have it all figured out. 99% of us don’t. But we have to start somewhere.
Yes, people can change, but only if:
1️⃣ They actually want to, and
2️⃣ They know what to change.
And you can’t figure that out alone.
I’ve leaned into AI recently. Many of my guidance packages include some form of it. I talk to it daily, but I also talk to humans one-on-one and in groups (see, she can be taught!). AI is just that, a tool. But used well, it becomes a powerful mirror for self-reflection. In December, I am offering a workshop to teach some simple prompts you can use to work with AI. It’s only an hour long, and if you’ve never worked with AI for personal growth, you will, in just one hour, see how powerful a tool it is.
This world needs to change. We can’t do this alone. We need each other, but it starts with solitary work.
Solitary work that cannot be done alone.
Social intelligence begins when we finally open our eyes to ourselves and to one another. I hope to see you in December.