Risk & Business Magazine JGS Insurance Magazine Spring 2019 | Page 14

CONVERSATIONAL BLIND SPOTS
Identifying Your
Conversational Blind Spots
BY: JUDITH E. GLASER, ORGINIZATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
S
uccessful entrepreneurs tend
to be great talkers. They have
to be. That's because they
continually pitch their visions,
strategies, products and services
to investors, banks, employees, customers,
clients, and partners. Unfortunately, too
many entrepreneurs blow critical meetings
and discover too late they can't speak
to influence and fail to connect. These
entrepreneurs have communication blind
spots or, more technically speaking, Low
Conversational Intelligence (CI).
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CONVERSATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE IS
A RATING OF THE
LEVEL OF TRUST YOU
CREATE WITH OTHERS
AND THE QUALITY
OF INTERACTION AS
MEASURED BY SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS.
Someone with high Conversational
Intelligence would activate the prefrontal
cortex of an audience member's brain,
a section that enables trust and good
judgment. A person with low CI, on the
other hand, engages the lower cortex,
where fear and distrust reside. Boosts in
CI often correlate directly with business
turnarounds and a high CI is often a high
predictor of success.
Breakdowns happen when people talk
past each other, not to each other. Once
entrepreneurs become aware of their
conversational blind spots, they can boost
their C-IQ. Recent discoveries in how the
brain operates pinpoint that people can
learn to identify what is going wrong in
conversations and how to "flip the switch"