A cocktail of bad social skills: 3 dumb mistakes to avoid

Hi there guys, I would like to share with you an experience involving a cocktail of terrible social skills that I encountered at a business meeting recently - I hope that in talking about it, I can help you avoid this mistake in the future. During a meeting, it isn't uncommon for us to make small talk with the clients we meet but as we don't really know them on a personal level, we tend to discuss what is happening in the news to keep get the conversation flowing. A few days ago, I was at a meeting with two guys, let's call them Mr Aye and Mr Bee and the conversation turned to the Titan submersible which imploded near the wreck of the Titanic, killing all on board. This meeting happened just as the announcement was made that the vessel had a catastrophic implosion and there were no survivors. I am not an expert on submarines, like most people, I had followed the story in the news and I didn't know that much about it. Mr Bee took a real interest in the story as he had been in a submarine before as well as done some scuba diving, whilst Mr Aye hasn't really paid attention to the story. I guess he had better things to do than to care what happened to those five very rich people, but Mr Aye said something really quite stupid. He said, "if they were in a submarine, then why couldn't they just swim to the surface even if the submarine gave way?" Oh dear. Mr Bee rolled his eyes and explained that at the depth of 3,500 meters, the water pressure was so high that their lungs would instantly collapse causing instant death. In any case, given that the world record for 1,500 freestyle (held by Sun Yang of China) is 14:31, then even Sun Yang would take over 33 minutes to swim that distance of 3.5 km at that pace and Sun Yang was swimming in a pool, he was allowed to take a breath between strokes. Given a human can at best hold their breath for about two minutes without panicking, not only was what Mr Aye had suggested just totally implausible but it had made him sound quite stupid to have even suggested it in the first place. 

Mr Aye works in finance, he doesn't know anything about deep sea diving or submarines, that's fine as it is not the kind of knowledge he requires to do his job. But in voicing what is a really dumb opinion in front of Mr Bee, Mr Aye had made an error of judgment. I am willing to give Mr Aye the benefit of the doubt that he simply hasn't followed the story at all and wasn't aware of how deep the submersible was when it imploded, but why would he voice an opinion on a topic he knew very little about? I was there at the same meeting and I quickly realized that Mr Bee knew a lot more about about the topic than I did. so instead I simply asked him questions like, "why do you think the submersible imploded like that? What kind of insurance would they have had for this kind of risky mission? Will this stop other companies from running similar trips to view the wreck of the Titanic? Would you have liked to have gone on a similar type of deep sea expedition and what would convince you that it would be safe enough to do so after this accident?" Note that I didn't once try to express any kind of opinion, all I did was take the information that I had learned in the news along with what Mr Bee had said to formulate some questions. In doing so, I had contributed to the conversation whilst carefully avoiding exposing my ignorance on the topic. Thus the best case scenario is that Mr Bee simply ignores Mr Aye's ignorant comment and chalks it down to the typical awkwardness of small talk at business meetings with people you hardly know, but the worst case scenario is that Mr Bee could start to question Mr Aye's judgment in tying to voice a totally erroneous and downright stupid opinion on a topic that he knew nothing about (in front of an expert, no less). I don't want to guess what Mr Bee made about the situation and I didn't want to ask him about it (well, he can make up his own mind on Mr Aye) but I realized that Mr Aye's faux pas did leave me with a rather poor impression of him - please allow me to be clear, I wasn't judging him on his lack of knowledge of the effects of deep sea diving on the human body. I was just shocked that he felt that that it was okay to just say the first thing that came into his mind without considering how others might have reacted.

There is this other thing that I have noticed about Mr Aye that I'll never tell him (nah, I don't know him well enough to open that Pandora's box - that's not my problem to solve) but it is another mistake that he makes. As I am writing this, I just approved a comment by Amanda when she references a Youtube video and my reaction was, hey I have seen the exact same video! Turns out that both Amanda and I like to watch educational videos on Youtube and I'm embedding the video that she referenced below as a good example of a video from that genre. Note that the narrator of the video is extremely articulate in the way he narrates the video - the video is tightly scripted of course but the execution of the narration is always perfect. But of course, if he does make a mistake, like if he has an awkward pause in the middle of a sentence then he would just go back and record that sentence again. I call this the BBC documentary voice - whereby you sound very authoritative because your delivery reminds people of BBC documentaries they have watched and generally, if we watch a BBC documentary on any topic from forensic science to nutrition to green energy, we tend to trust the content as we trust the BBC to be a reliable source of information. Here's the thing about Mr Aye - he does have a lot of technical knowledge when it comes to what he does but he lets himself down when he does any kind of sales pitch or presentation because he simply hasn't mastered this kind of 'BBC documentary voice' when it comes to the way he speaks. This is not about the accent that we have when we speak (as that's a whole other topic altogether), rather I'm referring to the ability to speak without any kind of hesitation or meaningless fillers such as "I mean, erm, well uh, you know, like" which does make one sound rather inarticulate and less trustworthy. This really isn't such a difficult skill at the end of the day as many Youtubers and social media influencers have learnt how to speak this way as they realize how much of an impact that could have on their audience becoming more receptive to the messages that they are delivering. 

This is something easily observed when you watch the news - during a live interview, most people often struggle a bit as they formulate the answers to a question they have just been asked. Even politicians don't perform well as they are trying to do two things at the same time: they are starting to offer an answer (to avoid an awkward silence) whilst thinking of the rest of the answer in their heads. This is the ultimate test of multi-tasking and some people do that better than others. This is easily handled in a casual conversation. Say I am talking to Mr Bee about deep sea diving and I don't quite know what to say as it is not a topic I am familiar with, what should I do in this situation? Allow me to use an analogy from basketball. Even if I am in possession of the ball, I have to evaluate whether or not I have a decent chance of getting close enough to the hoop to try to score a goal. If I do, then I would need to plan what the best strategy to employ to get as close as possible to maximize my chances of scoring effectively. If not, the sensible option would be to simply pass the ball to a team mate who is in a better position to be able to score that goal. If in doubt, you're probably better off passing the ball. Thus in this situation, I would "pass the ball" over to Mr Bee before I run out of things to say and just stare blankly into space mid-sentence. So in this case, I would use a simple question like, "you seem to feel very strongly about this - can I ask you why please? Might this be because of a personal experience? Have you witnessed this before?" In passing the ball over to him, not only am I relieving myself of the need to come up with what to say next, I am also buying myself more time to think about where the conversation is headed and work out how I feel about the topic should he then pass the ball back to me by asking me a question. Furthermore, I am flattering Mr Bee at the same time by making him think that I respect his authority on the subject and thus I want to hear what he has to say on the topic. Those who lack this vital skill can feel too nervous to take part in group conversations as they think they will embarrass themselves when they don't know what to say, when really, all they have to do is just pass the ball if that ever happened. 

Finally, the last social faux pas was committed by Mr Bee this time. I was explaining to him that there are two kinds of people out there. The first kind are those who will look up to someone like him and say, "wow Mr Bee is an expert in what he does, I'd love to be able to work with him so I can learn a lot from him." Then there are those who might be intimidated by someone who is clearly very intelligent, "oh no, what if Mr Bee realizes that I'm not as intelligent as him, what if he looks down on me, I don't dare to work with someone like that. I'm better off working with people who are either less intelligent than me or at least of the same intelligence so they won't look down on me." Mr Bee's reaction to that however left me shaking his head, he said, "oh I would never look down on you Alex, we just have very different skills. You can do loads of things I can't do." I rolled my eyes and thought, firstly, this wasn't about you - I was talking generically about how people would react when they meet someone who is clearly a lot more intelligent but furthermore, this wasn't about myself either. It was a case of listening comprehension failure - if he had been listening carefully enough to what I had been saying, then the obvious question would have been, "so which category do you belong to Alex? After you attracted to people who are smarter than you or intimidated by them?" But when Mr Bee made that mistake, I did then question all our previous conversations - how much information did he actually absorb in those previous conversations then? Was this just a one-off or is he such a bad listener with a short attention span that his mind would simply wander off mid-conversation and stop listening? How many times has he done this before to me then? Fortunately, I don't have to work with Mr Bee as I can imagine just how incredibly frustrating it would be having to work with someone who struggles with basic listening comprehension like that - this isn't rocket science at the end of the day, you just have to shut up and listen.

So those were the three social skills faux pas that I encountered that day: Mr Aye insisting on talking about a topic that he knew nothing about, Mr Aye refusing to 'pass the ball' even when he is clearly struggling to form his next sentence and Mr Bee's epic listening comprehension fail. I am not even going to try to fix the problem with Mr Aye and Mr Bee's lack of social skills - they didn't ask me for help and I certainly wasn't going to go out of my way to say, "you have a problem and I'm going to fix your poor social skills." No, instead I just silently judged them (then bitched about them on my blog) but they will go on having those poor social skills. What do you think? Have you ever met people like Mr Aye And Mr Bee? Do you think that people like Mr Aye and Mr Bee are even aware that they have made those mistakes or are they blissfully unaware, because I didn't say anything to them? Do you think that people actually make a real effort to improve their social skills or do most of them convince themselves that they are doing quite well in that department? Would you say anything to your friends if they had awful social skills? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.