Interaction Optimization

Cheat Sheet

• Body Language
• Friendship maintenance
• Invoking Rule Omega
• Saying No when needed
• Status and not being ruled by it
• Understanding yourself
• Conscious thought
• Inspiring comfort, safety, and support. Stability.
• Use senses to enable a diffuse gaze, calm sounds, resonant voice, strong, orderly environment, warm and welcoming. Calm.
• Notice the health of one’s eyes, their movement, smell, voice wavering or strong, etc. Detect subtle cues to see if somebody needs help or is receptive. Somebody may say they are well but intuition says otherwise.    

Being a Good Human (Jeremy Nixon notes)

Why we need healthy relationships:

• Social connections are necessary to fulfil our primary physiological needs.
• We learn to understand other humans via shared experience.
• Relationships that encourage openness are vital for our health and collaboration.
• A person’s default setting is “foe” until enough positive data is collected to suggest otherwise.
• To facilitate synergistic collaboration, frequent social upkeep is required. 

How to initiate healthy relationships:

1. Make an effort to connect on a human level as early as possible to reduce the threat response.
2. Become friends with people you work with by sharing personal experiences. Avoid using this as an opportunity to gossip about others.   
3. Actively encourage people around you to interact and collaborate in a healthy manner. Include others and avoid “in-groups when possible.”

Why a sense of fairness and unfairness (right and wrong) is naturally established during social transactions:

• A sense of fairness can be a primary reward.
• A sense of unfairness can be a primary threat.
• Linking fairness and expectations helps explain the delight of the kindness of strangers, as well as the intense emotions of betrayal from people close to you.
• When you accept an unfair situation, you do so by labeling or reappraising.
• Men apparently don’t experience empathy with someone who is in pain, who has also been unfair, whereas women do.
• Punishing unfair people can be rewarding, and not punishing unfairness can generate a sense of unfairness in itself.

How to manage fairness in your interactions:

1. Be open and transparent about your dealings with people, remembering that unfairness is easy to trigger.
2. Find ways to sense increasing fairness around you, perhaps by volunteering or donating money or resources regularly.
3. Don’t let unfairness go unpunished (not an opportunity to exact revenge, just don’t allow or encourage this behavior).
4. Watch out for fairness being linked to other issues such as certainty, autonomy, or relatedness, where you can get intense emotional responses.

Battling for status/hierarchy:

• Status is a significant driver of behavior at work and across life experiences.
• A sense of status going up, even in a small way, activates your reward circuits.
• A sense of status going down activates your threat circuitry.
• Just speaking to your boss or a person of higher status generally activates a status threat.
• People pay a lot of attention to protecting and building their status, at least in organizations.
• There is no one fixed status scale; there are virtually infinite ways of feeling better than others.
• When everyone is trying to be higher status than others there is a decrease in relatedness.
• Because we perceive ourselves using the same circuits we use when perceiving others, you can trick your brain into a status reward by playing against yourself.
• Playing against yourself increases your status without threatening others.
• Status is one of five major social domains that are all either primary rewards or threats, which form the model for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

Management of status fluctuation and perceived threat:

1. Watch out for people’s status being threatened
2. Reduce status threats in others by lowering your status through sharing your own humanity or mistakes.
3. Reduce status threats in others by giving people positive feedback.
4. Find ways to play against yourself, and pay a lot of attention to any incremental improvements. The slightest feeling of improvement can generate a pleasant and helpful reward.
5. Playing against yourself to improve your understanding of your own brain can be a powerful way of increasing your performance.

Providing feedback to others:

• Giving feedback often creates an intense threat response that doesn’t help people improve performance.
• The problem-solving approach may not be the most effective pathway to solutions.
• Providing suggestions often results in a lot of wasted time.
• Bringing people to their own insights is a fast way of getting people back on track.

Long-term social solutions vs. short-term solution focus:

1. Catch yourself when you go to give feedback, problem solve, or provide solutions.
2. Help people think about their own thinking by focusing them on their own subtle internal thoughts, without getting into too much detail.
3. Find ways to make it valuable for people to give themselves feedback; reward them for activating their director.

General consensus of change/learning:

• While human change appears hard, change in the brain is constant.
• Focused attention changes the brain.
• Attention goes all too easily to the threat.
• Once you focus attention away from threat, you can create new connections with the right questions.
• Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new.

Negotiation and achieving social solutions:

1. Practice watching for people’s emotional state when you want to facilitate change.
2. Don’t try to influence people when they are in a strong away state.
3. Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state.
4. Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people’s attention directly on the specific circuits you want to bring to life.
5. Invent ways to have people pay repeated attention to new circuits.