#1710 Interpersonal Intelligence - Harps

wasn't a very studious student. I didn't apply myself brilliantly, but I but I was definitely around other people who were, from an academic point of view, perhaps more adapted to that, more suited to that, more natural students than MOI. But there were sometimes when I realized I had a kind of a kind of intelligence where I could navigate situations, solve problems, do things, understand things, deal with things that

some of my academically brilliant friends couldn't. So I think I understood from an early age, or I became curious from an early age about what intelligence might be beyond academia, what intelligence could be, or maybe what it is beyond IQ and some number, some arbitrary number that we might score answering some arbitrary, very familiar, very similar questions, you know,

across that kind of IQ testings spectrum. And so for me, intelligence over the last ten to twenty years, I've really come to understand that intelligence is not a thing, but rather a range of things. It's many things. And we know some people who are socially smart but academically not so smart, or creatively brilliant but not you know, can't add three numbers. And some people who have got brilliant incredible timing and humor and storytelling capacity, but they can't

cook a piece of toast. And in some situations or some rooms, they're brilliant. In other situations or rooms they're not so brilliant. And I think that's all of us, all of the time. So there was a dude called Howard Gardner. I should have looked up when, but I think it was the early eighties. He developed a theory called the theory of multiple intelligences. Now he's probably should have done more research, but I know he is or

was a professor at Harvard. He's a psychologist, and he kind of proposed that intelligence was not a single, fixed ability to be measured by traditional IQ tests, but rather intelligence was a range of things. It comprised a variety of distinct types of intelligence that reflected different capacities to interact with the world. And so he wrote a book one hundred years ago, now I think it was about forty years ago, early eighties, called Frames of Mind, The

Theories of Multiple Intelligences. And while this, I mean there was four decades ago, so it's been expanded and extrapolated, and different people have thrown there to bob'sworth, as Mary Harper says, and I've even got one addition to his

kind of proposal or his his kind of model. But I think this is a good way to open the door because I want to talk, as you would have seen by the title of today's episode, I want to talk about interpersonal intelligence because I think that on a practical, functional, operational level, out in the real world, as a human being interacting with other human beings, which is most of us most of the time, not all of us all of the time, but most of us do a lot

of you know, interacting, connecting, connecting, conversing, problem solving, working alongside being team members with and so on other humans, and our ability to be able to do that and interact and connect and solve problems and all of those things in real time with other humans. That capacity falls under the banner of interpersonal intelligence. How well we can do that, how well we can int act with, intersect with, understand meet the needs of communicate effectively with be understood

by others. So he recognized eight core intelligences. One of them I'm a bit oh, yeah, they are. I think there's a lot more, but I think this is a

nice start. So his first one was linguistic intelligence, which is essentially sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn new languages, and our capacity to be able to use language well to express ourselves, he says quite clunkily, which is ironic for that sentence, But to be able to articulate ourselves in a way, express ourselves in a way that others understand. But part of that also is understanding.

Listen to this sentence, understanding how they understand. As I've said before, thinking about thinking, So that whole kind of understanding others, which we'll get to. So linguistic intelligence, how well we can frame things, express things, tell stories, solve problems in conversation, sit in a meeting, connect with others in conversation, understand be understood, and all of that that comes broadly in the space of linguistic intelligence, logical mathematical intelligence.

To this is more in the I guess, the traditional IQ space, which is our ability to think logically, to analyze problems, to recognize problems, to analyze problems, to come up with potential solutions and strategies, and all of those

things that I talk about a lot timelines. Accountability to understand abstract concepts, you know, like mathematics and scientific reasoning, and you know people generally, people with high levels of this often fall into you know, the sciences, mathematics, physics, engineers, you know, people like that. He his third kind of intelligence in his list of eight is musical intelligence, whereas

I I think I would replace this one. I would replace this one with creative intelligence, which is just more broad like I think for me, whether it's through music, whether it's through art, whether it's through singing, whether it's through coming up with an idea to build something and then transferring that theoretical something in our head to a real world something. It could be to design a beautiful

garden at the front of your house. It could be it could be to build a bridge literal brick doesn't matter, but anything where that creative intelligence is where we can invent something in our mind in inverted commas, conceptualize it, visualize it, dream it up, and then extract that from our mind being something that doesn't exist in the world, and pushing it out into the world and transferring that theoretical potential something into a real world, actual something for

other people to experience and interact with and enjoy it. And of course, you know, musicians, composes, artists of all kinds, architects, you know, there are a myriad of people who fall into this space. His next one is called bodily or kinesthetic intelligence. And so we see this with often with people who are physical like they are very you know, so dancers and athletes and even people like our friend doctor Alex who's been on the show a bunch who's

a neurosurgeon. So surgeons, neurosurgeons people like that who can control their body really well, like they have an ability to be able to move their body in a way to execute certain physical requirements, be they athletic, or be that something less gross mode of control and more kind of very specifically fine mode of control, like a surgeon.

But it's that body awareness, that body control, that ability to be able to even to kick a football, or to throw a netball or a basketball, or throw a javelin or make an incision with a scalpel in a brain and do what's required. That's what we would call bodily or kinesthetic intelligence. Spatial intelligence. So somebody that I know who's got a high level of spatial intelligence, and it's almost like where we are, where we are, and

where things are in three dimensional space. So I trained to an elite athlete for a very long time, five time Olympian, five time world champion, Jackie Cooper aerial ski jumper.

So somebody like her who would have to hurdle down a ramp at eighty kilometers an hour, jump off the ramp and then twist and contort and spin and rotate upside down, inside out, back the front, and then know where she was so that she could then keep moving forward and then land beat together ish in an upright position and then complete the movement and win a gold medal. That ability, that spatial awareness, that's spatial intelligence. It can

be trained to an extent. Of course, we can improve spatial awareness through training and our ability to do all of those things. But people like you know, pilots also.

the kind of self awareness. Space is understanding you, is understanding your thoughts and feelings. You're like, what.

then to understand me for others better. And that has helped me do what I'm doing right now, which is sit in a room with no audience, with no feedback, with no real stimulus, and to be able to keep a conversation going and recognize in real time, you know, my own nerves, my own ego, my own propensity to overtalk my you know, all the bullshit that is me,

the good stuff and the bad stuff. But to be able to understand myself and when I can, when I can understand myself better, you know, self awareness, self reflection,

then I can regulate myself better. And the last kind of last kind of intelligence that old Howard Gardner talks about is naturalistic intelligence, which is kind of sensitivity to nature and to be able to understand the relationship between us and the planet US and you know, nature, ecology, flora, fauna, and so people who are in the kind of kind of the biologist, space, conservationists, farmers, people who work on and with the earth and land and nature and plants

and agriculture and all of that. Those kinds of people who were great at that and suited to that. You would say they had potentially high naturalistic intelligence. But the one that I want to dive into, let me just finish also just quickly. So in this was quite groundbreaking

when he wrote his book. You know, there of multiple intelligences in the early eighties because while you know, even the Stoics we're talking two thousand and three thousand years ago about you know, what intelligence was and understanding their self and all of those, But for a very long time in research and academia, intelligence was really looked upon one dimensionally and researched one dimensionally. You want to know how intelligent someone is, they do this particular test and

then we go boom, you're that intelligent. But we now know through you know, a range of things, and we've evolved and we've adapted, and we've got more awareness and more understanding. We know that that you know there are some people who are academically challenged. But like, for example, I read recently and I posted recently, I think I'm

going to fuck this up a little bit. But it's a very high percentage of millionaires and therefore billionaires, but a very disproportionately high percentage of people who who are super successful in business are dyslexic. And you think, wow, people who really struggled. So obviously, most dyslexic people who can't read well and really struggle to understand the words on the page in front.

He's also really good at solving problems. And our kind of theory together was that because he lived in a world where he often couldn't understand what everyone around him understood, I mean everyone, would you know, open to chapter four and read fucking page one, two three of the Web of Life, the biology book we had in year eight nine and ten or whatever it was, everyone's reading it going all right, so it sells a single this and that, and he was looking at it as just a page

full of fucking horror glyphics and mumbo jumbo bieroglyphics whatever. You can't understand it, you get my point. And so when you live in a world where there's a lot going on that you can't naturally understand, and you need to figure out how to navigate that world with your own kind of I guess language, and with your own strategies, and that requires a specific kind of intelligence and a real ability to be able to be able to problem solve in real time. And so I'm sure there's research

on this. Why the bit between you know, people who are people who have dyslexia and why they are disproportionately successful in business, But I would not be surprised if there was a correlation between that and their ability to solve problems, to think outside the box, to be creative. Because they had to be creative. They couldn't do things typically, they couldn't do things traditionally, they couldn't do things the

way that their classmates did things. And also because it's not something that people really wanted known or to make public, or you know, people would keep it a secret and they would not tell people quite often, or they would tell limited people because they didn't want to be judged or criticized or marginalized or bullied or all of those things.

And so they developed this capacity to be able to navigate the world looking like the rest of the group, while on some level not really being like the rest of the group in the sense that they didn't have a certain skill or capacity that their friends or colleagues or classmates did anyway, So but just quickly when when Old Howard was developing this, he also made clear that or he suggested that there was no real hierarchy of intelligence,

that they were all equal in a sense. And I understand what he's saying with that, but also I think we would have to acknowledge that different kinds of intelligence would be more or less important, more or less valued in different contexts and different cultures, depending on where we're at and what we're doing. If you're living on an island, then interpersonal living on an island by yourself, then interpersonal intelligence is probably not high on the list of things

that you need. But being able to solve problems might be really fucking important. So his thinking was that they are. They're all different, kind of connected, but all different, and none is more valuable than the other. And I think that is generally true, but specifically in certain instances, cases, environments, context, cultures, of course, organizations than different kinds of intelligence are going to be held in higher esteem, of course, and you know,

more valuable in certain contexts. So let's I just want to share with you just some really practical examples of its personal intelligence. So, in general terms, it's the ability to understand, to interact and communicate effectively with other people. I'll say it again, to understand, to interact and communicate effectively, build rapport, build understanding, build awareness, build respect, work with others.

It involves recognizing and interpreting other people's emotions, motivations, desires, and intentions and responding in ways that build connection, collaboration, and mutual understanding. So people with this kind of intelligence, you know, this high level interpersonal intelligence, tend to excel

in social settings. So in other words, and by social I don't mean at parties, I mean, although they're probably crush parties, I just mean any environment, any situation setting where there are other people, so you know which is going to make them good at leadership and teamwork, and like I've said many times, resolving conflict and building connection

and building strong, respectful personal and professional relationships. So the six kind of characteristics that i'll mate identifies as important or foundational too. And none of these are going to blow you away, but I'll just quickly run through them.

So empathy, understanding how others feel, and caring would be good effective communication, conveying thoughts, ideas and emotions clearly and listening actively, being able to resolve conflict of course, teamwork of course, social awareness of course, and our ability to influence others in an ethical way, not in an a moral kind of subversive way. So I wanted to share just some really fundamental thoughts and examples of interpersonal intelligence for what I do and for the people that I

work with, which is a lot of corporates. I work with, some athletes, I work with a range of people across a range of settings, but virtually everybody that I know, I think everybody that I know, but maybe somebody doesn't come under this ban. But in terms of who springs to mind, everybody that I know needs to be able to build rapport and trust and respect and understanding and communication with other people at some stage. And so this

falls in the context of interpersonal intelligence. So for example, knowing when to talk and when not to talk. So this is something that I was probably an over talker when sound ironic coming from a man who's just talking NonStop now, but in one on one situations or in group situation maybe when I was younger, I think I was an overtalker, not a chronic over talker, but probably

at times spoke more than I needed to. And if you are in especially if you're in a one on one conversation and you're over talking, then you're under listening. And if you are over talking, you are probably creating more disconnection than you are connection. And if you're over talking,

then you might be creating more problems and solutions. So being not only knowing when to talk to somebody, but also how to talk how to talk to them, like how do I approach this conversation or this interaction in a way with this particular person who isn't like me and also isn't like that other person over there or the other person over the other side of the room, but with this person about this issue that I wanted

to discuss or explore or resolve or whatever. When is a good time to talk to them, How do I talk to them? And also perhaps in what, sometimes even where should I talk to them. Many times, when I had a challenge, let's say, a challenge or an issue or a problem with one of my staff members. Remember I owned gyms, and so most of the work was done most of the most all of the training was done on the gym floor, of course, and most of the work was done out of an office and on

a gym floor. So if I would see somebody doing one of my team doing something that I didn't want or that I didn't approve of, or I thought was

potentially problematic. Now, depending on what it was, of course i thought someone was going to injure someone in the next ten seconds, I would just going intervene, and if they got their feelings hurt, bad luck, because I'm more interested in a client not getting hurt than someone's feelings emotions being fucking hurt for seven seconds, right, But in general terms, when I would need to have a talk to one of my team about something that I thought,

it depends of course, maybe I was going to tell them they were doing great. But if I was going to tell them that there's something I needed them to think about or change, I would be really careful about how I did that. I would be really mindful about the energy that I brought into that conversation. I would be really mindful of the language and the tone that I used. I would be really mindful of what is it like being.

or we've moved closer to solving a problem. So if somebody would do something on the gym floor or there was something happening that I didn't love, I would virtually never I would never have this conversation in front of somebody else, like because that would be, even if what I had to say was relevant and right and pertinent and potentially going to help them as an exercise specialist or an exercise professional, even if what I had to

say was one hundred percent accurate, relevant and right, giving that information in the wrong setting, in the wrong way, at the wrong time is a fucking catastrophe. And that is what interpersonal intelligence is about. That it is about knowing when, what, and how to connect with people, to talk to people. It's about it's about understanding, like, for example, with that conversation or any conversation, understanding their reality in

the moment. Remember that old chestnut that I keep wheeling out. As you know, theory of mind is your ability to understand somebody else's thoughts and feelings and subjective experience as much as you can in the moment, realizing that only you think like you and what's in your head. What is your intention? What is your goal? Might not necessarily be anything close to their fucking version of that interaction. Your intention may well not be their experience. Your intention,

I'm assuming, would be good, it would be positive. It would be to fix something, to improve something, to help someone, to enlighten someone, to help them become better. But you and I know this is no revelation. I'm not pulling back some mysterious curtain now when I tell you that, how many times have your good intentions not had a good outcome? Or how many times have you shared with somebody something that is unequivocally true, but nonetheless it is

not well received at all? And the outcome of that interaction, despite your good intention, despite the validity of the information being shared, actually makes things worse. So we need timing, we need awareness. We need to know when and how to speak to people. I spoke recently about the fact that we all speak our own language. Now, of course that we all speak English, right, but if we for example, if we reframe English from a language to a tool, it's a tool that we use, and we all have

the same essentially a version of the same vocabulary. And even though we all have a similar or same vocabulary, we don't all speak the same. We don't all speak the same. We have a different language. And the way that we speak in inverted commons is the way that we think. So the way that I speak is interpreted by some people as funny and amusing, by some people as rude, and abrasive by some people, as offensive by some people, as enlightening and illuminating by some people, as educational.

Now all of these disparate, different varied experiences of the same person me speaking the same way. I know that that is going to happen. And so when I begin to talk to a group that two or three or two or three thousand, I'm absolutely positive that nobody in front of me is having an identical experience of me

as somebody else in the group. There might be similar, there might be some overlap, but that is that kind of awareness, that kind of intelligence, that kind of knowing, that kind of real time kind of navigation of what is in front of me. That is high level into personal intelligence. I'm not saying I have high level, but

that is an example of it. Being able to read the room, you know, being able to I told you a story recently about a gig I did with hundreds and hundred seven or eight hundred people, a mental health workshop for the general public, and a young lady in the front row who was amazing. By the way, her name was mel I think her name was mal I remember, and she had an intellectual handicap, but she was fucking

fantastic and nalarious and gorgeous. And she kept shouting out while I was doing different things, while I was doing my presentation. It's not really a presentation. It's just a talk, isn't it. But here's the thing, right, So in that moment, I've got hundreds of people there to listen to me sitting down, and I've got to talk for an hour and a quarter about an hour and a quarter maybe

it went a bit longer. And there's and I've got seven or eight hundred different people with different personalities and backgrounds and needs and expectations and wants in front of me. I've got this information that I want to share. I've got this kind of conversational journey that I want to take people on. And I did not expect to have Mel in the front road joining in the process, but I did. I did have her, And so then the challenge is, well, how do I do this? How do

I do this in real time? And how do I And so we just need to be able to problem solve like with other people with different persons interpersonal intelligence. And I don't know how well I did, but I think I did okay. And so I thought well, for better or worse, Mel's involved, and so essentially it was a three way kind of exchange between Mel and me and everyone else in the room. And the feedback that

I got was really positive, which was really nice. But being able to being able to be in an unpredictable, uncertain, unknown dynamic where you know when you step on stage as a speaker, and most of you won't do this, but it could be even just stepping in into a meeting room where you're talking, but when you step on stage as a speaker, you don't know the people in

the room. Generally, most of the audiences I talk to in the real world, face to face, three dimensional live gigs, most of the people in most of the rooms I've never met and may well never see again. And so I'm talking to a group of strangers, and so I need to be able to read the room. I need to be able to read the energy I need. Of course, I need to go in and have a plan and awareness, and you know, these are the kind of key things

I want to get across. But I need to understand how to navigate that moment in time with those people, with that group of people at that moment in time, in that room on that day, because my goal, apart from information and education, my goal is to be able to create a moment in time that is for them, hopefully informing and inspiring and all of that, but also something that they enjoy. People to leave that experience and go that was good. That was good. Yeah, he's good.

It was good. I got something from it. I liked it. Because apart from the fact that I'm an educator and a motivator, I've also got to create an experience or contribute towards creating an experience for people that they want to be in the middle of. I say to bosses all the time, leaders, managers in corporate spaces. I say to them when I'm standing at their workplace, I say, do your staff? Does your team like coming here? And

they're like Often they're like, what do you mean? I go, do the people that work for you like coming to this place? And if the answer is no, well, how can you fuck batman? You've got some things to figure out Like that. There are some significant problems that need to be a dressed and resolved because if you have a work environment or a culture or a place that you're the people that work for you don't want to be in they don't look forward to coming to that place,

they don't enjoy it. Then you have a lot bigger problems than the bottom line that you need to address. And this is as a leader, as a manager, as

whoever you are, as a teacher, as a coach. Being able to create experience is being able to interact with people, being able to read a room, being able to have some insight into their thoughts and their feelings and their reality in real time, and taking all of that into account as you open your gob, as you open your gob and say something that might create a problem or a solution. This is a kind of intelligence that is becoming, I believe, more and more valuable. I think this kind

of intelligence is an interpersonal superpower. And I've said this before. It's like, if you can really build connection or poor and trust and understanding with people, if you can really by the way, as I've said a thousand times, you don't have to agree with them. Remember you don't have to be like them. There are people who do horrible shit in the world. I wish they didn't. I wish there was no horrible shit in the world. But that is not the world that you and I live in.

You and I live in a world with sociopaths and psychopaths. You and I live in a world with amazing, generous, kind, beautiful humans who have a purpose bigger themselves, bigger than themselves. You and I live in a huge cross section of different people, different personalities, different needs, different motivations. That's the

world that you and I live in. Now. If you and I want to be able to function somewhere close to optimally around a myriad of different, different people, at the very least, we should try to understand them because like them or dislike them, good or bad people. Hopefully most people are good. I think most people are good. But it's in our interest to understand people. I employed lots of people, about five hundred people over the years. Did I like every person?

the way, I will get things wrong. And by the way, I completely understand right, this is the form of interpersonal and social intelligence. Can completely understand that I'm not for everyone. I completely understand it. And also, my goal is not to make people like me. If my goal is to make people like me, then that's about my insecurity, my shitty self esteem and my ego. My goal is to

serve people. And yes I want to serve myself in that, I guess, but understanding that, of course, there will always be people that intersect with you that for no apparent reason, won't click with you, may not like you at all, and it might be something that you can't explain. But the challenge, the challenge for us is to know that we are not going to connect with everyone. We are going to piss some people off. You and me are

going to get things wrong. Also, news flash, sit down, get out your fucking pen and paper, write this down, underline it. News flash, you and I, me and you. I know you're fucking great and I'm great, just look at us. But you and I are going to be the problem at times. The problem will be you. Now, if you're traversing life, thinking that you are almost never the problem. Well, then you're probably the problem more than you think you could be the problem a lot. Now,

that's not self loathing. That's not throwing ourselves under the bus. That's going you know what, I'm human, I've got flaws, I've got bias. I see things the way that I see them. If I always think I'm right right, if I always think I'm right, then I always think everyone who disagrees with me in the world about anything is wrong. That's a very precarious moral high horse to climb up onto, to perch myself up there like the all knowing, fucking

deity that is me. When I've up until this point in my life been wrong, probably tens of thousands of times, of course, So how do I navigate that? Well, I know what I think, but I also you might say to me, what he doesn't matter. Let's not pick a topic because people get fucking hysterical and emotional. I think a certain way about topic A. However, I'm open to being wrong because I've been wrong many times, and so therefore, unless I have absolute evidence and data and by the way,

somebody telling you something is not evidence or data. Unless I've fucking seen it or touched it or measured it. And you know, unless I have unequivocal evidence or proof of something, then I assume with almost everything that I could be wrong. And I think, by the way, I don't assume I'm wrong, but I know that I could

be wrong. And I think this having certain beliefs and ideas and values that kind of provide a compass for your choices and your behavior, an internal sat Nav for how you live and who you become and where you go literally or metaphorically. I think having those beliefs and those values as kind of internal drivers and compasses, as

I said, are great. But also being open to the idea that I might be wrong, getting out of the echo chamber, like it's a specific kind of intelligence and awareness to know that well, despite the fact that this is comfortable for me to think, despite the fact that I've thought this for a long time, despite the fact that this belief, this idea, this philosophy, this ideology is intertwined with my sense of self, as much as it fucking terrifies me, because if it's not true, then who

am I? As much as it terrifies me, the idea that this might not be true. I have to acknowledge that it might not be true, and if that's the case, I will just deal with it. Because also if I unequivocally know something, then that makes the need for belief and faith redundant because you don't need faith now because you have evidence, you have data. And faith is literally or belief is literally believing in something that you can't prove, because if you could prove it unequivocally, then you would

just have science or data or knowledge or information. I feel like I've banged on a lot, but I just love this. I love this intelligence conversation. You know, it's my training partner who I've spoken about probably fifty times over the years on the podcast. Mark his name is I call him the Crab. His actual name is Mark. And Mark is you know, just somebody who I think he I don't know what you left school year ten or eleven, and certainly even academically, he's not stupid at all.

He's quite smart. But he has a kind of intelligence. He has an ability to solve problems and make things and fix things, and and just he has a kind of intelligence that I do not have. And he's very laid back, he's very informal he's like me a little bit. But when I look at him and him and I are a good friends, and I have I guess a certain capacity for certain things and he has for other things. And between us, what's interesting is there's a lot of divergence,

not convergence. We're quite different in terms of our skills and our abilities and our kinds of intelligence, like the kind of social and emotional intelligence that I have, the interpersonal intelligence that I have. Not that he is socially stupid, it's not at all. But he will often ask me something in that space, how do I go about this? How do I And then on the other side, he's got a kind of a practical intelligence that I do not have. You know, there's just things that I don't

know how to solve certain problems. I'll run it by him. He will come up with four potential solutions in thirty seconds that I couldn't come up with one in thirty hours. So it is indeed a multitude of things. It is a spectrum intelligence. It's not one thing, it's many things. So I wonder what your kind of intelligence is. I wonder, I want. I'm sure it's more than one thing, but I'm interested in how smart you are and in what way see you next time.