Gilbert Eijkelenboon
People Skills for Analytical Thinkers: Boost Your Communication and Advance Your Career - and Life
Gilbert is a former professional poker player with an academic background in Behavioural Science. He is the founder of MindSpeaking, a company that trains and coaches analytical thinkers to grow their people skills. He has discussed his work on numerous data science podcasts.
His book People Skills for Analytical Thinkers: Boost Your Communication and Advance Your Career -and Life explores the algorithms of emotional intelligence (EQ). It uses analytical language in order to describe human behaviour and for showcasing the importance of ‘soft skills’ development.
The core of the book is split into four parts:
Be Self-Aware: Understand Your Own Algorithms
- Focuses on how we can understand our own behavioural patterns and emotions.
Optimise: Change Your Behaviour
- Focuses on how we can reprogram our mind in order to achieve goals and set clear boundaries.
Interact: Understand Other People’s Algorithms
- Focuses on how we can develop our social confidence to improve communication and collaboration with others.
Influence: Steer Other People’s Behaviour
- Focuses on how we can move towards positive outcomes when working with others.
This book is full of practical takeaways! Below are four ideas that stood out for us after we finished reading.
The keep/start/stop method
A useful feedback formula.
When it comes to self-awareness, we are prone to seeing our own behaviour from a biased perspective. In order to get a more objective overview, it’s important to actively seek feedback from others. However, giving and receiving feedback can be a daunting prospect for both parties. The person asking may feel uncomfortable and defensive at the prospect of hearing anything negative, whilst the person offering it may be concerned that you’ll dislike them for sharing anything unfavourable. But feedback is crucial for our personal and professional development! It helps us to better understand our ‘bright spots’ (the things we are doing well) and our ‘blind spots’ (the things we are doing less well).
The keep/start/stop method is an easy to replicate approach where the person requesting the feedback asks three specific questions in order to get data insights on their behaviour. It also provides the person giving the feedback with a useful set of guidelines to work with:
What should I keep doing?
Helps you clarify (or discover) the things you are doing well that are of benefit to you and others.
What should I start doing?
Helps you become aware of the things you are not doing that could benefit you and others.
What should I stop doing?
Helps you understand the things you are doing that are not of benefit to you and/or others.
It’s important to remember that even if you feel the feedback is inaccurate, it is still informing you of how you are being perceived. Plus, the more often you ask for feedback, the more comfortable you’ll feel about receiving it. Also bear in mind that the person giving the feedback has made an effort by responding to your request, even though they may have experienced an initial sense of discomfort about doing it!
Moving from ‘complain to change’
A question that can help you shift an individual or group mindset.
Our environment has a big impact on how we behave - delivering us with constant stream of inputs outside of control. How we face these external factors has a large bearing on our ability to thrive or languish in our personal and professional development.
A natural human tendency for dealing with an unfavourable input from our environment is to complain about it. Pushing away responsibility from ourselves happens because our limbic brain (the emotional part) chooses the easier path to take - but ultimately the less rewarding one.
At work, the author suggests that this type of response can play out in the following context. Imagine having back to back meetings which makes it difficult to get work done. It’s easy to start shifting blame onto another person:
“Why do they set up so many meetings? Don’t they realise it’s stopping me getting work done?
Maybe we complain to a colleague to get validation on our opinion - but after that, we probably do nothing (!) and stick to feeling justified in our frustration.
In order to address this we should look to move from ‘complain to change’ by asking ourselves a different question:
“What can we do to improve the situation?”
This helps to kick your neocortex part of the brain into gear (the rational part) and nudges you towards a more rewarding path to take. Ideas start to form about how the situation could be addressed. For example:
“Let’s suggest to the person setting up the meetings we do them standing up. This may shorten the amount of time we spend in each one”.
Changing the question we ask encourages us to take a proactive approach. It helps us to avoid the temporary feeling of gratification that we get from complaining into a more sustained feeling of gratification that we get from changing (and improving) a situation.
The Keys to Collaboration
Creating your own user manual.
Sharing our beliefs and needs helps people to understand what is important to us.
Or Skolnik put this into practice by developing a one-page personal user manual which offered suggestions on how to work with him effectively. It became a way of sharing pieces of data about his personality with others so they could acknowledge how his mind worked. It outlined his perspective on what his strengths, weaknesses and triggers (both good and bad) were.
This inspired the author to develop a list of his own points - which he calls the Keys to Collaboration - that could be shared with people. Here’s an example of one of those points:
Show interest in what I’m thinking. Ask for my opinion and listen.
Even if you decide not to share your own Keys to Collaboration directly with others - it can act as a useful blueprint to refer to when you feel an upcoming interaction will be enhanced if you are upfront about one or more of your preferences. Further to that it a useful exercise when it comes to developing your own self awareness.
A silent TV experience
Testing out your non-verbal recognition skills.
Becoming a more conscious observer of human behaviour can help us learn more about other people. The more you learn about someone the better you can predict their behaviour.
Understanding non-verbal behaviour can also enrich the data we collect during our interactions. With so many physical interactions limited at present, a great way to practice this skill is by watching your favourite TV series without the sound or subtitles on! Analyse what you think is going on and then rewind and see how accurate you were in your prediction.
Your thoughts:
Have you read People Skills for Analytical Thinkers: Boost Your Communication and Advance Your Career -and Life already?
Do you think these ideas are useful?
Please feel free to leave a comment below.
