Hacking Your Brain for Better Relationships. Your brain is social. Whether you consider yourself to be a social butterfly thriving on interaction with other people or a misanthrope with a deep rooted distrust and dislike of human beings and their society, you have a social brain.
That’s right, your brain evolved, and grew to be as big as it is now, to help you understand others, make complex social decisions and to deal with the intricate social structures you live in. The following special networks of brain regions are involved in these tasks:
– amygdala network – plays a prominent role in processing and handling social information such as emotion-related social signals, social values, motivation, and identity;
– mentalising network – central to our ability to understand the mental states of the self and others (Theory of Mind);
– empathy network – gives us the ability to access and respond to the inner world of another person and to have vicarious experiences – the phenomenon of observing others and feeling what they feel;
– mirror/simulation/action-perception network – provides a mechanism for action-understanding, imitation-learning and the simulation of other people’s behaviour.
In fact, connecting with others, forming relationships with them, inclusion and belonging were so important for human survival that our brains evolved to have a neurocognitive overlap between physical and social pain. In other words, it really hurts to be left out – whether it is in the workplace or in one’s private life.
Leadership is about relationships
In his book The Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Source of Leadership, Wilfred Drath argued that, nowadays, relationships, rather than authority, superiority, or dominance are key to a new model of leadership – the relational leadership.
Building trusting and authentic relationships with their employees helps leaders to increase their own overall effectiveness and that of their teams and to use human connections and human capital as an invisible glue that bonds teams and whole organisations together.
You can read about relational leadership, its components and benefits here and here.
Brain hacks to build better relationships as a leader
Building and maintaining healthy and long-lasting relationships does not come naturally to everyone despite all the ‘social wiring’ we have in our heads. Here are a few hacks which you can use to build better relationships as a leader – both in the workplace and beyond.
1. Use an affinity / similarity bias to build trust – we tend to like and trust others if we think they are similar to us. Be curious about a person you want to build relationships with and aim to find out as much as possible about him or her (preferably, directly from them). By doing so, you will be able to identify and emphasise your similarities in terms of background, experiences, interests and more. This will help you to identify and connect with each other.
Another hack to build connection and meaningful relationship with others by emphasising similarities is mirroring and matching the unconscious elements of people’s behaviour during your communication with them. This means copying other people’s body language (only the positive elements), speed of speech, tonality of their voice and some of the words they use. Be mindful to do it discretely though, because blatant mimicking will erode people’s trust and receptivity.
2. Show people that you like them to benefit from the reciprocity of liking – our tendency to like others who express liking for us. Showing that you like somebody can include praising or complimenting them, recognising their efforts and achievements and saying or doing other things that can make them feel good.
3. Schedule a time to meet and talk with people with whom you want to maintain or improve your relationships. People tend to like things (and people) they know – it is called the “mere exposure effect”. Being as busy as we are, unless we schedule time in our diaries for meetings with others, it will not happen. Having regular “catch- ups” with people, whether in your personal or professional life, will also help to maintain your social wellbeing – an important component of mental health and resilience.
4. Learn how to show your vulnerability (appropriately) to build your personal and professional relationships. In this context, vulnerability can be described as our willingness to show another person our emotions and weaknesses. This will create better understanding and empathy necessary for healthy and strong relationships in the workplace and beyond.
5. Learn “to tame” your amygdala – the inbuilt “alarm system” in your brain which reacts to any danger, whether it is real or perceived. It will be activated by a conversation with a colleague or a loved one who you think is about to disagree with you or criticise (read “attack”) you in a similar way to how it will be activated by a lion appearing in front of you. Your fight, flight or freeze response will probably work well in the situation with a lion, but it is less useful when you want to build and maintain good relationships with others. The simplest way to calm your amygdala is to focus on your breathing. You can find effective breathing techniques in this article.
6. Rewire your brain for better relationships by practising mindfulness meditation. American psychologist and neuropsychologist Dr Marsha Lucas highlighted the following benefits of meditation for our relationships:
– It helps us to manage our body’s reactions better so that we are no longer triggered by mundane things and words.
– It builds our emotional resilience by helping us to deal with negative moods and reactions more quickly and more efficiently.
– It helps us to become more effective communicators who are “in tune” with self and others.
– It extends our repertoire of responses, giving us an opportunity to become more flexible and to avoid “knee-jerk” reactions.
– It improves our empathy and enables us to “get” and understand another person’s state of mind without losing the awareness of our own state of mind.
You can read more about these and other benefits of mindfulness meditation practice for our relationships in this article.
And last but not least, there is a great book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew Lieberman, a distinguished social psychologist and neuroscientist, which is “a must read” for everyone who is serious about building and maintaining relationships with the brain in mind.
Want to know more about brain hacking? My next article will follow soon!
