THINKING IN REVERSE!

…AND THE GYGES EFFECT

Emotional intelligence! What does it mean? In 1990, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer published an article on the topic in a psychology journal called Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. The title of their article was simply, “Emotional Intelligence”. In the article they defined emotional intelligence as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” About 5 years later the author, Dan Goleman, published a book called, ‘Emotional Intelligence, What It Can Matter More Than IQ’, and the topic has been a focus of study ever since. The basic premise, which actually started to be formed in the 1930’s around the idea of ‘social intelligence’, is the idea that intelligence isn’t just the study of how smart or test capable an individual is. In fact, psychologists started to figure out there were a multitude of nuance to this idea of intelligence and that there were actually at least 7 identifiable forms of intelligence. 

There are those who have what is called visual-spatial intelligence; these are people who are really good at visualizing things. They’e good with directions, maps, blueprints, charts, videos, and good at recognizing patterns. My mother is one of these people. In addition to being an overall intelligent person, she’s an amazing artist and interior designer. She can look at a house and visualize what could or should be done to make it more appealing and functional. My good friend Bill has this ability as well. They can walk into a house they want to flip and see exactly which walls need to be taken out, what the new kitchen and bath will look like, how to move stuff around to make it more functional and pleasing. I’ve always said that I lack that ability because all that stuff just looks like a lot of work to me. 

There is something called, linguistic-verbal intelligence. These are people who have a strong command of language and communication. I like to believe this is one of the intelligences I’m a little stronger in. People stronger at this intelligence are people who are typically good at story telling, writing, memorizing information, and debate. There’s a YouTube channel I enjoy checking out every now and then called Xiomanyc, and it’s an American guy who can speak perfect Chinese, in addition to a bunch of other languages. He goes into all these Chinese areas in New York City, and all over the world, and he orders food or buys things in a street market, and he does so in perfect Chinese dialect surprising the pants off the native Chinese speakers he’s talking to. Quite often the native speakers will tell him that he speaks better than many of their native speaking friends. People like Xioma are a subcategory of the linguistic-verbal category called polyglots, petiole who can speak and master multiple languages. It’s a special form of intelligence. He might not be able to pass a particular class in school, or take a test very well, but he has a special knack for language and verbal skills. 

There are, of course, those who have that traditional form of intelligence known as logical-mathematical intelligence, and all of us know lots of these people. In fact, you’re probably one of them. Our audience is made up of a lot of appraisers, so this logical-mathematical form of intelligence is likely overrepresented in our field. We tend to have the ability to analyze problems and see relationships and answers in the numbers. This feels weird for me to say because math was my absolute worst subject all through school. I always excelled at English, Grammar, writing, and those classes, but failed Algebra 3 times and had to be placed in the remedial math class called ‘Consumer Math’. I’m not embarrassed, by the way, I’m kind of proud of my journey at this point in my life, especially considering how much of any success I may have had involved math, numbers, and problem solving. Some people are really good at that stuff, some are better at other things. And that’s what we’re talking about in this episode.

There are several other intelligences noted by psychologists that we wont go deep into because the point is simply to recognize that everybody is not the same and might not have the same strengths and intelligences that you have. We’re also here to talk about one of those categories a little more heavily because it’s a category that seems to have a strong correlation with success, failure, struggle, health, happiness, and relationships. I opened the show talking about it because, in my opinion, it holds the key to solving many of our own struggles, as well as many of the problems we might encounter on our journey through space and time. Psychologists sometimes break the category of emotional intelligence into 2 subcategories called, interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand, empathize, relate well, and assess the motivations and desire of others. They’re good communicators and can see other people’s perspectives. Those with strong intrapersonal intelligence are good at assessing their own emotions, their own feelings and motivations. They’re very self aware, introspective, self reflective, and they know their own strengths and weaknesses. Somebody with strong emotional intelligence is typically somebody with strong interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. They can see their own faults and flaws and do their best not to let those muddy their ability to communicate well with others and understand another person’s viewpoints and paradigm of the world. 

Why is this important, you might be asking at this point? I believe its important because emotional intelligence, unlike several of the other forms of intelligence, can be learned and developed. If somebody isnt good at math, it’s doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to learn it, it simply means that they’re brains are wired differently than the math wiz and they’re stronger in another area, and they’ll likely never be strong in math no matter how many tutors they have or how hard they try. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, can be developed and employed in one’s life with some recognition and practice. By the way, we see emotional intelligence on display on social media every single day. We see it in the form of narcissism where selfies get likes and deliver needed hits of dopamine for the poster, and we see it in spades in the comments on posts. We can see emotional intelligence at play in emails, texts, and voicemails. We get to see what we’re made of, as well as what others are made of on a daily basis in how we interact with the world around us. In fact, its one of the things I want to give you with this episode because we have an opportunity to learn and develop our emotional intelligence with every interaction we have. We get to see how others interact with us, and then we get a chance to practice how we will display our emotional intelligence with our reaction and response. 

So, before we talk about how to practice emotional intelligence with simple things, lets quickly recap what it is so we’re clear on why it’s important. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions, our own and others. Imagine a world where you couldn’t understand when a friend or loved one was sad, or when a colleague or coworker was pissed off. There’s an actual personality trait called Alexithymia where the individual has an inability to assess their own feelings, as well as identify and react to the emotions of others. We know that some people on the autism spectrum deal with this inability to assess, describe, and relate with emotions in themselves and others. Obviously, this can be an issue as we move through the world because we make decisions every second of every day based on the emotional cues we’re getting from those around us. We can hear words coming from somebody standing right in front of us but get a completely different signal emotionally based on their tone, their body language, and how the information is being processed through our own emotional intelligence centers. How we interpret the words, the tone, the body language, and the information triggers a set of response options from within our own personal set of emotional intelligence responses. 

One of the methods for properly responding, and also for growth in the area of emotional intelligence, is to practice the simple habit of role reversal. It sounds simple, but it’s rarely used. We can see people’s posts, and other people’s responses, in many of the social media platforms where one or both of the parties doesn’t understand and practice reasonable emotional intelligence. In a world where our voice, our tone, our body language, the context of a message, our ability to explain and adjust our position, has been completely stripped from the message, it’s never been more important to employ and inject some emotional intelligence where we can. Remember, emotional intelligence often means being good at self awareness and knowing when its best to keep your mouth shut. It means knowing how your words and message might come across and actually caring if its going to be offensive or inflammatory in some way. It means recognizing that you might be interpreting the other person’s post, email, text, or voicemail through your own emotionally triggered filters and to step back a bit before responding. 

Role reversal is simply a way of thinking before acting which will allow you greater perspective on a situation where your initial response might do more harm than good. You can write in reverse, think in reverse, act in reverse, and speak in reverse, as I refer to it, which is to simply reverse the roles and imagine yourself on the other side of the response. Writing, speaking, and acting in reverse can help because it keeps us from writing solely and purely from an emotional perspective, which is almost always a no no; it keep us from writing and saying way too much, and from writing, responding, or saying something that isnt helpful at all in a situation. You can learn from and practice by going through any post on an appraiser forum, a realtor forum, or a lender forum. You can go through emails you’ve received from AMCs, from agents, from appraisers, or from lender clients. You can listen back to voicemails you’ve received that triggered you emotionally to want to quickly fire back a nasty response and then reverse the roles. You put yourself in the role of the person who called, emailed, texted, or even maybe some kind of interaction on social media. Try to imagine the emotional state they were in when they posted and what may have prompted the message. Then go back to checking in with your own emotions and ask yourself what about the message triggers you. Is it the way it’s written or posed? Is it who its coming from? Is it the topic of the question or message that you’re just really sensitive or passionate about? What is it? Before responding, emotionally intelligent people check in with themselves first, then try to see the situation from the other person’s perspective before they respond. 

An example of this happens in our office almost every day, just like it likely does yours. Although we don’t accept or do business with or for AMC’s, we do business with our direct lender clients that might use an AMC for managing that side of their business. First and foremost for us is the recognition that our client has chosen this particular company and, therefore, represents some kind of relationship for them. That alone deserves some respect. If you wouldn’t treat your client like shit, why treat one of their hired representatives like shit? We teach all of our talent that everybody is somebody’s somebody, regardless of whether or not you like or agree with what they do or how they do it. Much to all of our chagrin, we get the follow up emails, texts, and phone calls throughout the day for updates on files. And, while they can be annoying and triggering, the reversal process has made it much easier for us to understand the process, why it occurs, and how to handle it in the most emotionally intelligent way. We tell everybody to first breathe, step back from the situation, and see it from the sender or caller’s perspective before responding. Jennifer calls or emails from XYC company looking for an update. You get triggered because you hate the interruptions, you hate the whole concept, the fact that you used to work for yourself and now you feel like you’re answering to this other entity, you think these companies have ruined the whole industry, you think they’re crooks and thieves, and all of this is informing your response in your mind. You say to yourself, “oh, I’ll tell you what’s up with that damn file, and I’ll tell you a few other things in the process you damn desk jockey!” 

Let’s pull back a second. What if that was your son or daughter? What if that was your wife or husband who is in that role looking for updates? What in you believes that they woke up today and said, “I cant wait to get to work and make somebody’s day miserable?” They likely didn’t wake up and say that so why respond in a way that, not only makes you look and sound like a miserable cuss, it’s likely not helpful to the situation long term. So here are some of the recommended rules: when it comes to email, text, or any written communication, acknowledge the correspondence by simply saying, “hey, I got your message and cant explain or reply at the moment, but I’ll be in touch soon.” This lets any hot air out of the situation before you respond. It puts the other person at some ease that you’re not ignoring them and that you’re on it. After that, if you’ve been really triggered in some way, I recommend waiting at least an hour or two before responding. By the way, I recommend the waiting method for social media posts and responses as well. Write out your post or response first before posting and then let’s it marinate. While its marinating, you can play the reversal game and imagine how its going to come across to others. You can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and ask, “how does this come across?, what kinds of responses would I expect? How does it sound? Is it angry, aggressive, annoying, inflammatory, and is that what I’m going for? How will I feel and respond if somebody misunderstands or misinterprets my message in this way?, is is positive? Will people learn from it? Is it just to stroke my own ego?”, and so on. Ask yourself a long series of questions from another person’s perspective. If it all still holds up 2 hours later, have at it. 

When it comes to writing (emails, texts, slack), your first response is almost always 90% from emotion. If you get in the habit of writing out a response as a draft first and let it marinate, you’ll often find when you go back to it that the emotion is largely gone now and you can make it a more fruitful response. When you write messages as drafts first, you’ll also find after some time you’ve likely written too much. You can strip out 30-40% of the message to get to the point faster and more clearly. What’s the plan? The plan is to chill out and wait. Don’t go with your first instinct in these situations. Our instincts are often wrong when emotions come into play. 

I’ve mentioned in prior podcasts about investing and having rules for your investing. It doesn’t matter if you’re choosing an index fund to just throw your money in for the long term so that you don’t have to really know or understand anything about the markets or investing, or if you’re going to day trade, swing trade, or buy individual stocks in the market, the same rules apply. You have to remove your emotions from the situation to see it clearly. You have to be able to step back and see the situation clearly and that often means largely removing your emotion from situation. What I’ve learned over the years from making my own mistakes in this area is that my instincts have been very wrong on many situations. I fire off some kind of nasty response based on my own issues and the other person comes back with, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.” You end up feeling horrible or stupid for not waiting a little bit and thinking through the situation. I’ll also share with you that since recognizing this process and practicing applying emotional intelligence, I almost always prefer to talk with people in person, even after they’ve sent something emotionally charged. Everybody knows around our office that Blaine is the one to give the tough calls and emails to because I love the process of calling somebody up and deescalating the situation using empathy, thoughtful language, active listening, seeking first to understand, and a few other simple rules for communication and the situations always end up with a very thankful party on the other end.

I find myself weekly on a call with a lender client, an agent, or a private party client about an appraisal. Often the person on the other end of the communication is upset over value, and rightly so. I say ‘rightly so’ because, from their perspective, they almost always have a good reason for being upset, and the reason is very rarely me, us as a company, or the actual appraisal. The reason they have to be upset is usually some kind of very simple difference in understanding and expectation. I get on the call with them and the first thing I try to do is match their tone. I try to quickly assess how they communicate and like to be communicated with so that we can have quick rapport. From there its an empathy game. I’m trying to gather as much info as I can for why they feel the way they do, what their understanding and expectations were about the process, and how I might be able to add some clarity to the situation. One thing I find myself saying often is, “listen, Mr or Mrs Smith, I’m right there with you based on the way you’ve explained it. That makes complete sense why you feel that way.” People want to know and feel that their views and feelings are being validated. It does no good to respond to somebody and say, “well you just don’t understand appraisals!” I see appraisers responding to agents and lenders all the time in this tone. “You’re stupid, I’m smart, you don’t understand, I do!”, and nothing gets accomplished. If you step back, listen, and then reverse the roles, you’ll quite often recognize after some time that, although they probably legitimately don’t understand it the way you do, they don’t know that they don’t understand the way you do. You play role reversal and then you recognize that they’re being genuine in their response, they just need somebody with some emotional intelligence to help them by first understanding and validating their point of view, then easing them into a different understanding or view of the situation. 

I was on a call just yesterday for a divorce appraisal where the wife, who was going to be bought out of the house by the husband, was upset that the appraised value wasn’t what she was hoping. She had done a ton of work on several areas of the house, one of which was that she dug a massive trench along the back of the house by hand to put in a French drain and solve their moisture problem in the lower level. Even the husband thought this was a really value added feature and really pumped up how much work she did in that project. They tore off the old deck and put in a much bigger Trex composite deck at much greater cost. They had epoxy coated the garage floor and a few other really nice things to the house. They get the appraisal back, which mentioned all of those things and we did our best to capture and support what we could from market data, but she thought it should be worth much more than what the 6 comps from within the neighborhood showed. She wasn’t wrong in her thinking or her understanding, she’s just not an appraiser so why would I expect her to understand our process? I listened to her long list of concerns, I acknowledged every one of them as valid, I listened, asked questions about her concerns, and I essentially let her get all the steam out before I started talking. Then I acknowledged all of her thoughts and concerns again as being very valid, and then how those things all fit into a very specific process called an appraisal. See, she comes into this conversation thinking she’s coming to a fight, an ego battle where one of us must lose for the other to win. That’s not the case at all. She can be right, and I can be right in the same interaction. We can both win and leave the interaction as winners without making the other a loser when we use emotional intelligence as our guide.

I spent about 30 minutes on a conference call with the husband and wife, had a great conversation, answered their questions, shared some knowledge about the market, as well as some very real limitations about the appraisal and the appraisal process, and left with them both thanking me again and again for taking the time, and being so empathetic to an emotionally charged situation. They left the call with a new perspective, maybe new respect, but also some recognition that they weren’t wrong in how they felt, their emotions just aren’t always captured in an appraisal. You have the power to give that to people in your communications when you come from a place of emotional intelligence. 

Step back, put yourself in another person’s place, reverse roles, make drafts and let them sit for a while, practice removing your emotions from your responses, especially when those emotions are negative, and try to employ a little emotional intelligence when communicating. The world we live in today seems to reward people for showing less emotional intelligence over more of it. Because we all can post and say whatever we want whenever we want and have a group of people who will support us, no matter how silly and immature our communications might be, the message is that its ok to do that. Back in the day, when all messages were written in letter form and took 3 weeks to arrive, we thought about what we wanted to say. You had time to let the letter sit for a while, you could think it through, you could decide on your way to the mailbox not to send the letter if you want. Today, thoughts, words, and feelings fly out of people with very little forethought or concern for their impact. In essence, over the last 20 years or so it would seem emotional intelligence has declined in favor of immediate rewards in the way of dopamine hits via social media, text messages, and email where there is no immediate or apparent repercussion for being less than emotionally intelligent in our communications. 

There is something called the Gyges Effect, which comes from Platos Republic and the the story of the Ring of Gyges, which bestowed the wearer of the ring the power of invisibility. With this power of invisibility, the owner could either do good or evil and, in the story, much like the Lord of the Rings stories, the owner of the ring almost always used it to do evil. In Plato’s tale, Plato’s brother asks the question, “whether any man can be so virtuous that he could resist the temptation of being able to perform any act without being known or discovered.” The Gyges Effect is the disinhibition people feel when they believe themselves to be more or less anonymous, or with the perceived distance of email, text, and internet communications. The Gyges Effect plays itself out all throughout email, text, and social media communications when we dehumanize the person on the other end of the communication, in whatever form it may take. The call of emotional intelligence is the call to imagine that we are standing in front of the person on the other end of the communication and then to take it a step further by reversing roles. Would we want said to us what we are about to say to them? If the answer is no, step back, rethink it, and then reframe it so as to make the communication fruitful, empathetic, educational, uplifting, and to leave the recipient with a little more hope in humanity. 

Thank you my friends for tuning in again this week! I hope I’ve been able to add some value for you. For all of you who are not on our email list and maybe just listen to the podcast via Itunes, Spotify, or some other podcasting service, we have a new website for the Coaching Academy, which means a new home for the podcast and blog. The former website for the podcast will stay there for a long time into the future and that was at www.realvaluecast.com. However, we have also moved all of that information over to www.Realvaluecoach.com so that the blog and podcast can exist together in one convenient spot. If you’re one of those people who likes to read, as well as listen, if you go to www.realvaluecoach.com/blog , you can find the podcast embedded right above the transcription of the episode so you can read right along with my voice if you choose. I’d also recommend making our website a favorite on your browser and checking back every now and then as we post updates on upcoming events, we have a free downloadable training series that will be out soon, some free coaching materials from time to time, and so on.