Tweet

Behavioural Intelligence – The Subtle Art of Controlling the Conversation

Guest post by: Clive Hook

Article Overview: Practising the skills and disciplines of Behavioural Intelligence will give you an almost unfair advantage in meetings, interactions and negotiations. Making a conscious decision on your next behaviour rather than just reacting is the heart of Behavioural Intelligence. Controlling a conversation or meeting with Behavioural Intelligence is a subtle art. It’s not about being dominating and demanding, it’s about noticing what’s happening (or not happening) and choosing a behaviour to advance towards your chosen objectives - and it's very important to recognise the difference between Push and Pull behaviours.

Behavioural Intelligence – The Subtle Art of Controlling the Conversation

Practising the skills and disciplines of Behavioural Intelligence will give you an almost unfair advantage in meetings, interactions and negotiations. A surprisingly high number of people in corporations and companies do not prepare well for important meeting and, when in the meeting, rely on instinct and reactive behaviour to achieve the results they want.

The practitioners of Behavioural Intelligence are fully engaged in the meeting but somehow manage to maintain a distance which helps them focus on the process and make informed judgments about what to say or do next. Making a conscious decision on your next behaviour rather than just reacting is the heart of Behavioural Intelligence.

Some parts of your brain just replay instinctive patters or learned behaviour whilst others (notably the pre-frontal cortex) examine the situation and can select what is the most appropriate course of action. This entails interrupting the instinct long enough to choose an alternative. It may seem instantaneous and it can be very quick – that’s what makes the professional seem so slick; they practise focusing on the behaviours in play and choosing from the menu available.

Controlling a conversation or meeting with Behavioural Intelligence is a subtle art. It’s not about being dominating and demanding, it’s about noticing what’s happening (or not happening) and choosing a behaviour to advance towards your chosen objectives. This objective will, perhaps, be a balance between Results and Relationship – a classic negotiating and persuasion dilemma.

In other articles on Behavioural Intelligence I have described how to model excellent behaviour – that’s the foundation of control. If you are in charge of your own behaviour you are much better placed to manage others’ behaviour. As well as the powerful “Behaviour Labelling” technique described in that article it’s important to recognise the difference between Push and Pull behaviours.

For example in the Initiating class of behaviours (which are about getting things moving or keeping things moving) there are two ways to arrive at a proposal:-

“I propose we hear from everyone what their thinking is” (Making Proposal – Push)

“What ideas do you have for how we should do this?” (Seeking Proposal – Pull)



In the Clarifying class (which is about increasing understanding) you could Give Information (Push) or Seek information (Pull)

“This is how I see things at the moment” (Push)

“What information do we have that’s useful?”(Pull)

Push behaviours have information coming from you, Pull behaviours are designed to get information from others and are typically in the form of a question. One of the surprises to many people is the realisation that the successful influencers, negotiators and leaders displaying Behavioural Intelligence use twice the number of questions that less successful practitioners do.

This does not mean that Pull is better than Push. But there is definitely a correlation between how much the most Behaviourally Intelligent practitioners engage people in the discussions and negotiations to achieve their objectives rather than just talking at them or making presentations. Subtle control comes from moving between Push and Pull by design not by accident.

Related Articles
  Behavioural Intelligence – Modelling Excellent Behaviour
  Behavioural Intelligence – Mistakes and Behaviours to Avoid
  Personal Impact and Influence – Push and Pull on The Conversation Control Map
  Behavioural Intelligence - Deepening Your Understanding of Different Behaviours
  Behavioural Intelligence – Noticing What Goes on in Meetings
  Behavioural Intelligence – Attack Defend Behaviour in Negotiating
  Personal Impact and Influence – The Conversation Control Map
  Maintaining High Emotional Intelligence for Employees
  What is Emotional Intelligence?
  Personal Impact and Influence – Behaviours on The Conversation Control Map
  Behavioural Intelligence – The Secrets of the Most Successful Negotiators
  Behavioural Intelligence – Summarising is Your Best Friend
  If You're So Dumb, Why Aren't You Rich? Part II
  The Buzz About Emotional Intelligence
  Betterment is a way to lead…
  How Business intelligence tools can Strengthen your Competitive Advantage
  Emotional Intelligence for Managers
  Interviewing using behavioural questioning techniques
  What is Cognitive Behavioural Coaching?
  General Intelligence Is Not Enough

Article Tags: behavioural intelligence, communications skills, managing meetings, negotiation skills



Related Forum Posts
Re: LEADERS - Nice post, i like the Doers and the listeners comments from my handbook 8.5 HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LEADERSHIP? Planning Problem Solving Vision Innovation Leadership Emotional Intelligence Delegation Communication Self-Development Relationship Building Commercial Financial skills Personal Energy Ethics Transparency Even there I see that we are missing "PASSION"
Social Media & Digg, Google, MySpace, and YouTube - Conversation about Google and their search engine dominance, creating websites to their standards, ranking high, SEO, AdSense, keyword optimization, Google WebmasterTools, Checkout, and anything related to helping develop social content-media-networks-etc. Social bookmarking and network creation with Digg and Ning. Anything related to developing communities of people with similar interests. Share websites that work well with these companies, ideas on the Webs future, and your Social Media related profiles with Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Ning, YouTube etc.
Re: Search Engine Optimization - There are a great number of reasons a person can have difficulty with Google indexing there site. One of the most important aspects is doing initial keyword research properly. I'm amazed at how many times people will just pick a keyword phrase "they think makes the most sense" without doing the research to explore all of the windows of data. This does not take weeks and hours if you follow the guidelines in the book on this site I offer for free to Evan's members. It's called Wordtracker Magic 2.0 - Keyword Forensics for SEO. Once you have 4 or 5 keyword phrases with fair search volume and the right window of opportunity, you will find it extremely easy to grab top visibility even with only mild optimization. This is one of the most stress free ways to grab organic top visibility and traffic, without the stress. It's been working for me since 1997. Other easy tips. If you write sloppy copy you will will not get nearly as effective results as if you write very focused, useful and engaging content that readers will find helpful. Some people find writing harder than others. If you find it difficult personally, then chunk the process down into 2 steps. Step 1. Write the content first. There should be a beginning a middle and an end. Write your content with the knowledge of which keyword phrase you are going to target - but do not worry about optimization or where the keywords go or character counts or anything technical (in this first step.) Write something and work on it for whatever time it needs for you to feel proud of the finished work. Don't forget to include a call to action near the end. Step 2. Once the article is written and looking good, read it out loud to see how it flows. Next in the second step, just do a mild rewrite of the article for the SEO specs. One of the single most important things is not keyword density, but it's keyword proximity (meaning to use your phrase as a whole group of words together.) By writing in this 2 step method, you will with practice, find that you are writing far higher quality because so many have trouble writing and optimizing at the same time. Why is high quality important? Google uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the background. For a number of years now, Google has been able to gather the context of a message. You see it is no longer just the primary keyword phrase that is important (because it is all the entire body of supporting words other than the keyword phrase that matters including synonyms etc.) In our workshops we teach significant in-depth studies in each of these areas plus more. Remember that if you are new to SEO focus on optimizing for just 1 keyword phrase per page and it will be much easier. As to why your site may not be showing up in Google, it is difficult for me to say without seeing your site. But you might check to ensure you are using a Doctype tag at the top of the page and also the ISO character set tag must be there as they are required by Google for compliance. Google actually follows very closely to any guidelines set by the W3C org and you may want to brush up on Google Webmaster guidelines too, because things do change in there and they are a helpful resource. These are just very basic tips, but if you follow them you can grab your traffic fairly easy without all the stress. If you visit my site, I have hundreds of free tips I can send you (just a tip a day but they are short, easy to understand and free.)


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Here's a great ROI

Multilevel Marketing: 4 Tips To MLM Success

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.