The Connection Magazine AIM MUTUAL Spring 2019 | Page 22

CONVERSATIONAL BLIND SPOTS
Identifying Your
Conversational Blind Spots
BY: JUDITH E. GLASER, ORGANIZATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
SUCCESSFUL 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).
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" in their brains and others' brains to get
communications back on a productive neural path. Here are three
common blind spots and how to prevent them.
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