Improve Your People Skills

If you walk through the day and can’t find a single person to engage in friendly banter with, it’s not because everyone is “unfriendly” or “awkward”—it’s because you are

Passive-aggressive communicators use subtlety, misdirection, and contrived tests to communicate their message and attempt to get their way. Therefore, they may appear passive, but they are still trying to enact the approach of the aggressive communicator.

Aggressive individuals display a low tolerance for frustration and tend to use humiliation and conversation interruption to try to assert themselves.

Aggressive communicators tend to be self-centered. It’s not intentional, but they think more about themselves and thus tend to violate the space of others because they prioritize themselves.

Passive communicators avoid expressing their opinions or feelings

four styles are passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, and assertive.

The currency of an aggressive communicator is progress toward their goals—and feeling that you can help them to those ends is how you can become likable to someone like that.

How might your thoughts and actions might be misinterpreted?
· What are other people’s primary motivations and what unspoken, underlying motivations might they have that they (and you) are not even aware of?
· Consider people’s built-in biases and life circumstances that give rise to certain emotions. What is their background and upbringing?
· How do people display their emotions both positively and negatively?
· How are emotions displayed in different ways?
· What is their baseline emotional state and preferred interaction style?

That’s the meaning of responding versus reacting. Letting your emotions govern you means you are reacting instead of responding. Responding is crucial because it involves premeditation. You’re taking all the factors into consideration and making an informed choice as to what to say and how to act

The third step is to practice responding instead of reacting.