Elite Relationship Building Strategies to Grow Your Social Capital | Toolbox

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2:57So whether you're introverted or extroverted, your communication skills can always be improved. If influence and charm come natural for you, great. But for others, it's a skill that can be learned. After coaching over 10 ,000 clients on how to communicate powerfully, we've learned a thing or two about what it actually takes to be influential and persuasive. We've packaged these insights inside our Social Capital Networking masterclass. And as a thank you for being a podcast listener, we want to give you this masterclass for free. Inside the social capital networking, you'll get three resources to help you build high value relationships quickly and grow your social capital.

3:37To get your hands on this free masterclass and immediately start improving your relationships, go to theartofcharm.com slash capital. Remember, you can learn all the skills and elite communication concepts from the show and more. Start with our social capital networking masterclass for free at theartofcharm.com slash capital, linked in the show notes. All right, let's kick off today's show. We started the show over 16 years ago to build better relationships and grow our own social capital. Today's guests are experts in relationship building and rapidly growing your social capital. The experts you'll hear on this episode are Jeffrey Cohen, Stanford professor and author of Belonging, the science of creating connection and bridging divides.

4:24He joined us in September of last year to discuss the three ingredients to build empathy and foster deep relationships. Dr. Carol Robin joins us, who's been teaching the legendary course, Interpersonal Dynamics, at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And her episode, How to Build World-Class Connections and Lead with Vulnerability, is from May of 2021. Now, Colin Coggins and Garrick Brown are authors of The Unsold Mindset, the four lessons you can take from sales to improve your relationship aired in February of 2023. And our good friend, David Siegel, the CEO of meetup.com, joins us to discuss how to build an epic social circle anywhere.

4:59And last but not least, Susan McPherson, the author of The Lost Art of Connecting, shares with us the secret to building exceptional relationships. And it's not what you think. We also discuss the real problem with building relationships and how we can overcome it, as well as a simple strategy to meet new people and how to turn your acquaintances into real friends. Up first, we have Jeffrey Cohen explaining what makes a great relationship. Well, a sense of belonging is a sense that we're part of a group that values us, accepts us, and to which we can contribute. Evolutionarily, as human beings, we're wired to be social and we're exquisitely attuned to whether or not the people in our groups are accepting of us, welcoming of us.

5:45So it makes sense that belonging would be a really important concept. And it's something that we really care about, that we're exquisitely attuned to. You heard Jeffrey, and we discussed this on the show at length. You are a herd animal and your strength, influence, and safety depends on that herd. The more supported and engaged you are in the group, the more you'll get out of it. This is what being high value is all about. Now, Carol Robbins shares what our confidence and why has the number of confidants that we have, that is the people we have an exceptional relationship with, declined over the past decade.

6:21We're becoming isolated, lazy, and losing our ability to connect. You must actively work at building, maintaining, and strengthening your relationships or you'll find yourself with a shrinking social circle. I think as human beings, we need the experience of feeling known and seen, and it's reciprocal, if in fact the relationship is functional. Never mind exceptional, which the book talks about, but let's just get to functional. So you're right that a confidant is a person that you trust, that you can be honest with, and that you're not afraid is going to use whatever you tell them against you.

7:01All of which are hallmarks of relationships that are moving on this continuum from mere contact to actual connection and then exception. Now, in the last 10 years, there's been a lot of studies coming out about Americans losing this connection. And in fact, over 25 % of Americans report zero confidence in their life. Another 50 only have one, which tends to be a spouse. Why do you think we're losing confidence in our life? at such a drastic rate. And by the way, so core to why we decided this book needed to be written. And of course, you know, it's tied to this legendary course where the students at the Stanford Business School learned all the skills and competencies that you need in order to create these kinds of relationships.

7:50What's happened over the last 20 years? First of all, let's just think about what's happened over the last year. I mean, we've become so polarized so tribal so quick to judge we've lost curiosity about each other and all we do is look for people that think and see the world and want to affirm that the way we see the world the same way so you know the course at the business school was called interpersonal dynamics the students of course as you know called it touchy-feely which we can come back to but I always used to say the course, really should have been called connecting across differences. Being isolated is an environmental toxin similar to smoking.

8:36Being excluded from a group hurts just like physical pain, even if being excluded happens in a computer simulation. It's toxic. It's toxic. At least when a sense of not belonging or being ostracized is chronic or prolonged, And it is, as Steve Cole at UCLA Medical School puts it, one of the worst environmental toxins out there. So research suggests, for instance, that the damage to our bodies as a result of chronic isolation or chronic sense of being alone, being disconnected from humanity is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of even longevity. So we don't really think about environmental toxins this way.

9:25We're kind of usually thinking about the radon and micellar or secondhand smoke, but it turns out that these social toxins are pretty harmful too, even though they're kind of less visible and we don't really think about them. Then in terms of kind of acute effects, one of my favorite studies is from a social psychologist named Kip Williams, where he just looks at the, you know, kind of these momentary experiences of ostracism, where in his famous paradigm, people are online playing a game of catch with graphic avatars, and they don't even know who these other people are that they're ostensibly playing catch with.

10:03Unbeknownst to the subjects, the avatars are actually just pre-programmed entities coded to stop passing the ball to the participant's avatar after a few tosses. And they just pass it back and forth amongst themselves. And there's this kind of experience of, wait a minute, why am I on the out here? Why am I on the outside? And when Kip Williams explains the effects of this kind of momentary experience, he says it's basically pain, pain, and actually activates some of the same ring regions associated with the experience of physical pain. Again, kind of going back to this idea that we're really evolved to be highly attuned to whether or not we're accepted or rejected by others, sometimes exquisitely so.

10:46So being on the out can be very painful, especially when chronic. You heard Jeffrey. In order to have a healthy lifestyle, you must add some social time to your calendar. You can't expect your relationships to endure and neglect and stay healthy. Let's start by looking at exceptional relationships and what makes our relationships exceptional. Let's first underscore that relationships exist on a continuum. And at one end of the continuum is contact with no connection. And at the other end of the continuum is exceptional. And we're not advocating you turn every single relationship in your life into exceptional because that would be exhausting and impossible.

11:24But you can move any relationship along the continuum to at least robust and functional. And then you can, in some cases, move it even farther. So the characteristics of an exceptional relationship are you can both be more fully yourselves and you don't have to hide behind these fun images. You are both willing to be vulnerable and you're not afraid that what you say will be used against you. We already talked about that. You're both willing to be honest and you have learned how to deal with conflict productively. And you're both committed to your own and each other's growth and development. when you have all of those present in sufficient intensity at the exceptional end of the continuum.

12:14You can have some of those present along the way. You can have some of them present in less intensity along the way, which is why the book is not just for people who want to learn how to build exceptional relationships. It's for anybody who wants to know how to deepen any relationship in any way towards that. This is why people love our show and more importantly, our programs, because we explore the mechanisms that allow you to control how those relationships evolve. It gives you the power to take your relationships and set them to any place in that continuum. That is a superpowers that others can only hope for.

12:56Now, there could be a problem with making friends. You can't run a sales script to make new friends. People are trying to sell themselves to one another, but that person has a great bullshit detector. Instead, truly care about the questions you ask and course correct if needed, instead of following a script, as Coggins and Brown share with us. Salespeople were like very aware, these great salespeople. They were aware. They could say something, know it didn't land, and course correct real time, as opposed to the other people that were saying something, trying to remember what comes next, right?

13:30Like you had this, these people would talk, you'd watch them on Zooms. They would be talking to people and you could see it. They knew the person did not think that they were listening. The person thought they were waiting to speak and they were shifting. The questions, everybody's like, tell me the questions to ask. What are the best questions to ask in the interview? Like, what are the best questions? It's like, what they're really asking, you know, is like, give me a leading question that I know the answer to that someone else doesn't so it makes me look smart. You know what the new cool science is saying?

13:59We smell bullshit a mile away. Like we know when you're bullshitting us. You can't act authentic. You can't copy other people and be authentic. And what we see a ton with young salespeople especially, but it's true across the board, but we see it a lot with students who get out into the real world, is they get out there and they find themselves in a selling situation. And they think that they're supposed to act a certain way and they're supposed to know certain things And they're supposed to do what a quote unquote great seller is supposed to do. And so they'll go out there and they'll do these things.

14:33They'll look to some example, somebody in their company, maybe the best, the best salesperson, the top performer in their company. They'll look at that person and they'll say, what is he or she doing? And I'm going to do exactly what they're doing. I'm going to ask the same questions. I'm going to use the same script. I'm going to tell the same jokes. And then they go out in front of a customer and they do just that. And the customer doesn't buy. And they're like, well, wait a minute. I did exactly what the best person on the team is doing. Why didn't it work? Can't be my fault. Now it's got to be the customer's fault or it's got to be something outside of me because it's not me.

15:04I did everything that that person's doing. And, you know, that's really the core of authenticity. The reason that it works for the best performer in the room is because it's authentic to them. And they ask questions that they actually want to know the answers to. And they tell jokes that they think are funny that maybe somebody else doesn't quite think is funny. And so when you start to try to pretend to be something, you know, we say in our book and remind people often, you can't act authentic. You literally can't. By definition, you can't act authentic. There you have it. People know when they're being sold to, and we intuitively can see other people are incongruent when doing so.

15:39We've been saying this for the last 16 years. This is why we give our clients all the tools and help them learn how to use them so they're well-versed in all the communication concepts we've been discussing on the show. In the next few clips, our guests discuss mindset shifts that are needed to be successful in relationships. Learning mental flexibility is important for learning from mistakes, building resiliency, and having a healthy outlook on the inevitable challenges that you will face daily. Dealing with rejection, reframing it, changing the mindset around it, and learning from it. I think it starts with understanding learned optimism.

16:14them. I think that that's really interesting. For instance, Garrett and I did not meet our wives because our ex-girlfriends were perfect. No offense to our ex-girlfriends, right? So at some point, what ends up happening is with age and experience, you start to realize that if you want to have a breakthrough, you actually have to break through something. There has to be an obstacle. There has to be a rejection. So when you look at these people and you say, wait, how are you so okay with what's happening right now, with you getting rejected, with you not winning? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

16:52It's like they're not looking at this as a mile marker or as a finish line. They're looking at it as a mile marker. If they think that they will actually succeed, they will continue to try as naive as it sounds, and eventually they'll be right. And so we were finding that these people were attaching purpose to everything that they were doing, right? Even though we were so goal-oriented, right? And we were trying to figure out like, yo, how are you hitting these goals? How are you mastering goal orientation? Are you looking at it every single day? And they were just trying to figure out a way to tell us what their purpose was.

17:29And it was like this, every time we would see it, they just weren't looking at the goal of hitting it or not hitting it. It wasn't causing them to go into a place of scarcity. It was just causing them to want to figure it out even more. They cared differently about the goal because it was attached to a purpose. So resiliency has a lot to do with the conversations you have with yourself. Yeah. Purpose is definitely a big one. And there's a lot of what these great people are doing from a mindset standpoint too, is reframing things. And it can sound really cringy and cheesy to say, oh, you reframe your failure as a positive thing.

18:06But Colin's example about meeting our wives is a good one. It's easier to do in the past. What these great people do is they do it in the moment. And there's a concept in the book that we talk about a lot as well called celebrating the process. And that's really, really important to us. It's something that we discovered from all of these greats. And it's something that we've definitely incorporated into our own lives. And what we mean by celebrating the process is they're not just celebrating the wins. They're not celebrating the closed deals. They're celebrating the failures and the hangups and the lessons along the way, because they know that, okay, I got hung up on, or I got rejected, or I got this objection that I couldn't, that I couldn't overcome because it was legitimate.

18:47I'm going to celebrate that because now I'm going to learn from it. And I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do next time. So that I, so that it doesn't happen again. We hate hearing or saying no as Coggins and brown share. I got to add, I wouldn't be doing my job as the logical partner in this duo here of not talking about why people are wishy-washy on giving a no and why we don't like getting those in the first place. And that's all just evolution because, you know, thousands of years ago when humans were just starting to evolve, if you got shunned by the group, you were dead. You were getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger or something crazy like that.

19:22So, you know, we, We are everything in our DNA wants us to be accepted. So whether we're telling somebody, no, we don't want them to reject us. We don't want them to think negatively, negatively of us when we say no, just like we don't like to hear the word no, because we're, it feels like rejection and we feel like we're going to get cast out. So it is in our DNA. So when you talk about the fact, Johnny, that it's, it's no fun to get a no, and you do take it personally, that's not our fault. That is, that is our DNA. That is human nature. And that is why we do it. And it's why it's so important to reframe it and do some of the things that we talk about in the book, Colin.

19:55I mean, you know this from dating, right? It's like, you want to avoid the objection. Like, please lie to me. Make me feel like I got this deal. Like, we're going to go all the way high until I ask you to buy, and then you're going to shut me down. But you know, like, what if you wanted to know where the friction was as early as possible, not to like win, but to like actually solve the problems. Like, you would ask hard questions like often and early. And like, that's an example, you know? My girlfriend example, my ex-girlfriend example is one of many that Garrett and I use a lot around these really successful people.

20:29Early on in your career, you try to avoid the friction until you realize that anything really awesome that happened to you happened because you learned from something, right? Where there was friction, you were able to overcome it, you were able to build from it. And at some point, you realize that if you want that, you have to look for it. So then you start seeking friction. You start looking for problems to solve. You're looking for no's, right? I mean, that's a whole mindset shift that takes time. And that's sales IQ, right? Sales IQ is directly correlated to this awareness that we're talking about.

21:02But yeah, we love no's. Reject us all day. How else are we going to get better? They describe the difference between their approach of pathological optimism, their spin on learned optimism versus toxic positivity. We totally understand the backlash against toxic positivity and it's fair. I think what toxic positivity is saying is that if the message is just cheer up, if you decide to be happy, you can be happy. That's sort of like end of story period. That is what toxic positivity backlash is against. It's like, yeah, something really, really existentially terrible could have happened today. And I can't just think, Oh, I'm going to be happy about this.

21:48I'm going to, I'm going to look back on this and it's going to be okay. That's not fair. And we agree with that, but there's this concept. I'm going to go science again on you, Colin, but there's this concept of the hedonic treadmill that comes up sometimes in psychological research. And it basically says that when something good happens, you know, our happiness goes up when something bad happens, our happiness goes down. But at the end of the day, our happiness always reverts to this default baseline level for each individual. And that can be different for you than it is for me and different for Colin than it is for someone else.

22:20But we all default to our baseline. And so as we were talking to all of these successful people and sort of crystallizing the concept of pathological optimism, what we realized is that what they're doing is they're creating habits that are ultimately raising that baseline level of happiness. So no, they are not happy when a tragic thing happens to a family member or when business goes bad one day, like really bad. But over time, because of the ability to look back and to reframe certain situations and to be a learner, they're able to increase that default level of happiness. And that's really what we mean when we're talking about pathological optimism is that in the long term, that's the mindset and that's the trend that they're going after.

23:03Now, what gets in the way of forming meaningful connections? Stereotyping or trying to read other people's minds. Yeah, there's a few things that get in the way of our ability to form genuine connection. And one, as you're alluding to, is stereotypes. We see the other along these simplified caricatures in terms of, you know, we have images of what the average Trump supporter is or the average Trump opposer is. And then what we end up doing in these interactions or encounters across the political line, say, is to interact with a projection in our mind rather than the flesh and blood person right before us.

23:51And this happens all the time. I mean, I know I am frequent. When I go back to New Jersey, my hometown, I'm frequently stereotyped as the egghead academic. And I can just feel the quicksand of judgment. I'm sliding into it as I try to explain my point of view on some academic matter. Anyway, but I think that is a big problem. And so I think one way out is through respect, respect, which is a word whose etymology means to look again, respectate. So looking harder, looking more deeply is one antidote to the effects of stereotypes. And there's a lot of research that suggests that just pausing and thinking, why am I thinking this, can do a lot of good in terms of breaking the hold of stereotypes on our perception.

24:45The other element here that I think would be, is kind of interesting to talk about is this work on perspective getting. Too often when we're trying to understand another person, we try to take their perspective, imagine it, when really what we should be doing is asking people for it. And this is research from Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder showing that we vastly overestimate our ability to read other people's minds. We get it wrong, even when reading our friends' minds, even when reading our own minds. We don't really know ourselves as well as we think we do. Yeah. And so it's like sometimes less well.

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