How is Communication Integral to Emotionally Intelligent Behaviour? | Tips Tuesday for Leaders feat. Kathryn Graff

This week, Kathryn Graff is joining us for Tips Tuesday for Leaders to talk about how communication becomes critical to achieving emotionally intelligent behaviour.

If you would like to listen to Kathryn speak, the audio file is directly below. Or, if you’d prefer to read about this information, keep on scrolling to see the transcript.

Emotional Intelligence & Communication Strategy Transcript

So, I’d like to give you an example of how communication becomes a really important part of emotionally intelligent behaviour. In order to do that, I want to give you an example of a communication strategy that I have used (and that I know many other people have used) that really displays emotional intelligence at its core. It’s actually really simple! The strategy can be encapsulated in four words:

Be interested, not interesting.

This really came to roost for me one time a number of years ago when my oldest son had a dentist’s appointment. He was at the dentist and he came home and he’d had the dentist’s appointment and that was all fine. The next day, I happened to have an appointment with the same dentist. So off I went, and I got there, and the dentist said to me: “My! That son of yours…he’s really personable. He seems to be a really nice young man.”

So of course as a mom, that was really nice for me to hear. Even though he was an adult, when I saw him again, I said to him, “You know, son – the dentist said a really nice thing to me. She said that she thought you were a really polite and nice young man.”

He looked at me and said, “Well, you know what they say, Mom!”

I said, “No, what do they say?”

He said, “They say: be interested, not interesting.”

Really when he said this, I thought, wow! Here he is – he’s a young adult – but he’s really got it. Because what we often do is we’re so busy thinking about what it is that we’re going to say or giving our own example of something that’s happening when we’re hearing someone else out that we don’t take time to just really sit, listen and try to hear exactly what they’re saying; querying them – asking more questions about it to try to figure out what exactly it is that they’re wanting to share.

Even in leadership situations this can be really critical in terms of the leader showing their staff and showing their team that they value them. That they care about them. That they think they would have good ideas. That they want to get to know them personally.

It’s really, really important to be interested and not just interesting!