How many times have we been in a business meeting and we have had some kind of alarm go off in our heads, something just doesn’t feel quite right about the situation. We feel uneasy and out of balance and all this happens in the time it takes to blink your eye. This as we say raises alarms because often it’s our intuition that lets know this not our cognitive logical part of our brains. It could be so many things, here are some examples; the tone change in their voice, the lack of interest in their body language, or seeing an expression on their face. I am very tuned in to how long it takes for a client to return a phone call. There are different categories
The book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html deals with these kind issues in a way that engages you right from the start. The first story on the Getty museums statue being false or real and gets right to the point and clearly highlights our judgement with many alarm bells going off. I have learned so much from reading “blink” when Gladwell talks about “thin slicing and how we use gut instinct”. We often need buckets of data to make decisions about situations that would be best addressed by relying on that gut instinct. Gladwell provides so many real examples and encourages us to trust in ourselves and finely tune these great gifts.
In the closing sections of the book Galdwell highlights the work and it’s value of Paul Ekman http://face.paulekman.com/default.aspx who has done extensive work on facial expressions and written several books and papers on the subject. He breaks facial expressions down to a number of precise muscular movements which are either used on their own or in combination. The new drama series “Lie to Me” picks up on much of Ekmans work. As we are experts in communications in business visiting Blink is a great starting place to begin to understand what our gut tells us in a blink of an eye. We have to learn when to use it and to trust in our judgement of these finely tuned instincts.
I have included this video as it promotes what the book is about and in my view this book is an absolute must for anyone in business so there's also an amazon link below the video. It will transform the way you think about thinking.
