“You’re a lot less fun in person than you came across in your messages”, said the lady sat opposite me.
We were about an hour into a first date and I could feel it was going badly 💔.
How was this happening?
We’d matched on a Dating app [I know, I know, I said I’d give them up but don’t shoot me] and the chat there had been great.
We’d swapped plenty of messages 📨 in the build-up to the date and I’d sent her a range of witty messages, funny voice notes, gifs and more which had gone down very well; apparently as a writer I’m hilarious.
But here, in real-time, I was bombing and the inevitable happened: She politely finished her drink and there was to be no second date 😔.
On the way home, I ran through the evening in my head, what had gone wrong?
Maybe I was just having an off-evening and shouldn’t worry about it.
Or maybe, more likely, she was right and I’m not as funny nor spontaneous when I don’t have the luxury of time to think of a perfect response 🤷🏻♂️.
It’s an EQ problem not an IQ problem
If you’re anything like me, there’ll be many a time that you’ve walked away from a conversation, particularly one full of charged Emotions, and later thought: “Damn it, I should have said…”.
That’s exactly what happened with the date; by the time I got home I had realised a range of great stories I could have said but it was too late.
But this “post-match analysis” was flawed, the problem wasn’t an IQ problem [i.e. that I didn’t have great content — trust me, I’m a brilliant raconteur, just check out any of my podcasts or my recent TEDx if you want proof].
It bugged me so much that I dropped the lady a line and asked for more detailed “feedback” [feedback is a gift after all].
“I thought your stories were great and you are a fascinating guy. It was more that you seemed a lot more closed and disinterested than I imagined you would be.”
And there it was; it was an EQ problem.
And I’m an EQ specialist! 🙈
This is a growing problem
Damn it! Of course it was an EQ problem.
It’s a trend I’m seeing more and more, not just in me but in society as a whole.
Through my work at Shiageto Consulting, when we work with teams that aren’t hitting their strategy, often the most common, immediate fix we have to put in is to make them get to know each other better and spend more time together breaking down barriers 🫂.
We find that team members are spending too much time communicating to each other through emails, Slack, Teams messages, etc. or not at all, and this is putting a barrier between them and their success ⚠️.
Sure it’s easy to create perfect responses to difficult questions when you have all the time in the world or to send a difficult message via a recorded message but we see teams struggle when they have to say things openly to each other in real time 🤐.
It’s a similar trend outside of work where we spend more of our life online communicating via WhatsApps, DMs and social media posts. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned phone call or in-person meet ups.
It’s no wonder that we live in a world where some people post extreme views from the safety of their bedroom and one where friends regularly fall out over text.
It makes me think: have we lost the skills to have conversations in real time?
Asynchronicity and the move to hybrid working has definitely contributed to this problem.
Being dislocated and not responding in real time takes out most of the emotion from a conversation; people think less about and have to deal less with the immediate reactions of the recipient.
Similarly the more people spend time alone, the more they spend time in their own thoughts and don’t get to practice empathy which in turn creates a flywheel of poor EQ 🎡.
I’m definitely guilty of this at times and it’s something I am particularly worried about for younger generations.
I recently met a young man at a start-up event who had raised over a £1.5m in funding to build an app that meant he would never have to have a real conversation with his friends — the AI in his app would monitor his friends’ social media and send them messages based on its interpretation of their mood.
I’m not sure if I was more shocked at his mission to outsource all the empathy or the fact that so many investors agreed with him — clearly we are heading to a dystopian future where the robots really will rule.
On the plus side hopefully that means more work for Shiageto Consulting 😂
How you can turn your EQ skills around
Fortunately all is not lost; as with many things that I realise I can do better in, over the years I have conducted a range of experiments with my own life to improve my EQ 🔬 and here is what I have found helps:
So, next time you have the choice between synchronous or asynchronous conversation, take the synchronous every time.
As for me and my failed date; I’m going to get out of my own head and be even more EQ-first on future dates [I read a great tip the other day that if you can’t recall the eye colour of the person you’ve just been speaking to then you haven’t been invested in the conversation enough; that’ll be my benchmark from now on 👁️].
It’s either that or be less witty in the build-up so as not to raise false hopes 😉.
Stick with me to see how I get on 😊
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
Originally Published on https://farisaranki.medium.com/
