Social Awareness: The Key to Peace and Harmony
SUMMARY
The key to overcoming conflict in the world is a greater level of social awareness. We all have our own views on things. We carry your own unconscious biases about particular things, people, parts of the world—and it goes on and on and on.
What you need to do is take stock. Step back and go, “Hold on a minute. Am I looking through a single lens here? Or do I really care what other people think as well?” That is the first step to eliminate the unnecessary conflict that goes on in every part of your life.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to start a conversation for this month that will help you understand that social awareness is the key to peace and harmony.
Conflict has a major impact on every area of life. If you take it into the workplace, you’ll see that it reduces productivity. It creates attraction and retention problems. People are leaving to get away from the conflict. It creates unrest and therefore has a major effect financially—on you, your practice, your firm, and your business.
The key to reducing conflict and restoring peace and harmony—so that everyone can work together again—is for you to take personal responsibility for your role in it. And that begins with social awareness.
Social awareness is about other people. It’s about considering what could be going on for them. Social intelligence adds the curiosity to want to understand what could be going on for others in that same moment.
And to do that, you need to develop some key skills.
The first one is empathy.
The second thing is situational awareness.
And the third element of social awareness is service orientation.
So, there you have it—three key elements of social awareness: empathy, situational awareness, and service orientation. These are the keys to peace and harmony in your home, workplace, community, and across the world.
What I’m going to do this week is drop some short videos again and step through each of those three, and go a little bit deeper.
But in the meantime, I want you to join the conversation. Leave a comment. Share your thoughts. Let’s have a dialogue about how you might shift your perspective and grow in your social awareness.
I’ll see you then.
TRANSCRIPT
The key to overcoming conflict in the world is a greater level of social awareness. We all have our own views on things. We carry your own unconscious biases about particular things, people, parts of the world—and it goes on and on and on.
What you need to do is take stock. Step back and go, “Hold on a minute. Am I looking through a single lens here? Or do I really care what other people think as well?” That is the first step to eliminate the unnecessary conflict that goes on in every part of your life.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to start a conversation for this month that will help you understand that social awareness is the key to peace and harmony.
Wherever you look right now, there’s conflict on a global scale. There are countries fighting with each other. There are people in your community fighting with each other. Even football teams and their spectators fight with each other. They all have differing opinions around the refereeing or whatever it is. And in the political sector, there is a huge amount of disagreement right across the world.
As I’m recording this, we’re about to go into a federal election next week. And wherever you look—whether it’s on the television or the spam texts that keep getting sent from different political parties—all they want to do is tell you about what they think is right and what the other people are doing wrong.
So it’s not a matter of whether or not there’s conflict—there’s plenty of that. It’s about what you can do about it.
Conflict has a major impact on every area of life. If you take it into the workplace, you’ll see that it reduces productivity. It creates attraction and retention problems. People are leaving to get away from the conflict. It creates unrest and therefore has a major effect financially—on you, your practice, your firm, and your business.
The key to reducing conflict and restoring peace and harmony—so that everyone can work together again—is for you to take personal responsibility for your role in it. And that begins with social awareness.
You’ve already explored self-awareness, which is all about recognising what’s going on for you—especially when it comes to your emotions. What triggers you? What thoughts tend to lead to unhealthy behaviours?
Social awareness is about other people. It’s about considering what could be going on for them.
And it’s important that you do this—that instead of just having your own agenda, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, you consider that every single person on the planet has the right to their opinion.
It doesn’t mean that if their opinion is different to yours, that yours is wrong—and neither is theirs.
What it means is people have different experiences. They look at things through their own filtering, identity and conditioning.
They’ve had things happen in their life that are perhaps different from yours, and they’ve seen whatever it is you’re in conflict about differently from you, because they’ve experienced something different to you.
Conflict has a major effect in every one of your lives. If you take it into the workplace, you’ll see that it reduces productivity. It creates attraction and retention problems. People are leaving to get away from the conflict. It creates unrest and therefore has a major effect financially—on you, on your practice, on your firm, on your business.
So, the key to being able to mitigate this conflict and get some peace and harmony—to get everyone working together again, is for every single one of you to take responsibility for your part in that.
And to do this, it starts with social awareness.
You’ve talked before about self-awareness, which is about you. It’s about having an understanding, particularly in the context of your emotions—what’s going on in the moment? What are your triggers? What are the things that you normally think about that lead you to your unhealthy behaviour?
Social awareness is about other people. It’s about considering what could be going on for them.
And it’s important that you do this—that instead of just having your own agenda, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, you consider that every single person on the planet has the right to their opinion.
It doesn’t mean that if their opinion is different to yours, that yours is wrong—and neither is theirs.
What it means is people have different experiences. They look at things through their own filtering, through their own identity and their own conditioning.
They’ve had things happen in their life that are perhaps different to yours, and they’ve seen whatever it is you’re in conflict about differently to you, because they’ve experienced something different to you.
To navigate with peace and harmony, you need to be aware of what could be going on for others. In emotional intelligence, you focus on being aware of what’s going on in the moment for yourself. Social intelligence adds the curiosity to want to understand what could be going on for others in that same moment.
And to do that, you need to develop some key skills.
The first one is empathy.
Empathy is in short supply in the world right now. It means you want to understand what someone else is going through. You want to see it through their eyes and experiences—not just judge what they say or do through your own filter. Empathy is not apathy—that says, “I don’t care.” And it’s not sympathy—that says, “I feel sorry for you.”
No—empathy is that beautiful sweet spot in the middle that says, “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, but I really would like to understand. I value the fact that you have an opinion, that you have an experience which is different to mine, that’s formed your opinion. And therefore, let me try and understand that.”
It says: I value you as a person. It’s not just all about me.
So, empathy is extremely important in being able to get this peace and this harmony that you all so richly deserve.
The second thing is situational awareness.
You need to understand, in the moment, what’s going on in a situation. You need to read the current. You need to be able to read—if it’s in a group—the power situation. You need to look at who’s influencing whom.
And you need to do what you can do to understand everything that’s going on. To do that, you need to be present.
A lot of times, I find in my own life that I’m in my own world. I’ve got my head down, my tail up, I’m just doing stuff, getting it done—right? It’s all about me.
This was a serious issue that I had. It was pointed out to me by several people during my military and corporate careers. I was just focused on being the best that I could be, and didn’t really care about anyone else.
And that’s great to get results, but it’s not if you want to enjoy the process along the way. So, to have situational awareness, you need to be present. You need to be able to be in the situation. You need to have a wide-angled view, rather than just a narrow view. You need to use your peripheral vision, hear what’s going, and feel what’s being said and what’s not being said.
You also need to have conversations with people, so that instead of thinking, “This is what’s actually happening,” you find out what is really going on. And you see it through their eyes and through their perspective.
And the third element of social awareness is service orientation.
This is where everything that you do as a leader is about serving someone else. And inadvertently, what you get out of that is you get your own results as well. But taking your eyes off yourself and putting them on others—serving them with what they need, giving them what it is that they need so they can thrive—means that, in return, you get what you want as well.
Seeing everything that you do as an act of service for somebody else.
So, there you have it—three key elements of social awareness: empathy, situational awareness, and service orientation. These are the keys to peace and harmony in your home, workplace, community, and across the world.
What I’m going to do this week is drop some short videos again and step through each of those three, and go a little bit deeper.
But in the meantime, I want you to join the conversation. Leave a comment. Share your thoughts. Let’s have a dialogue about how you might shift your perspective and grow in your social awareness.
I’ll see you then.
