How Resonance Works
Welcome to Get Gotten. This series explains and explores the ultimate form of engagement—Resonance. Each entry in this series includes an explanation of a key concept that helps you build resonance with the people you seek to engage. I also provide an application for the concept that you can put into practice. If you haven’t already, sign up for my mailing list to have this series delivered directly to your inbox.
You can do more than merely engage people. You can create resonance. That was the message of the last post.
But how does resonance actually work? There are three things you need to know to answer this question.
Let’s begin with an experiment you can try at your next meeting:
Take a drink of water or whatever beverage you have with you. Notice what happens next. There’s a good chance someone else will take a drink. Why?
The answer lay in a discovery a group neuroscientists made while studying monkeys in the mid-1990s. They noticed that a specific neuron fired when a monkey ate a peanut. This didn’t surprise them. It’s what they expected.
What surprised them was that the exact same neuron fired in the monkeys who watched another monkey eat a peanut.
This explains why that co-worker who notices you taking a drink will likely mimic your actions. Whether they take a drink or not, you can know that the “take a drink” neuron fired in their brain.
The scientists named their discovery “mirror neurons”. Mirror neurons comprise the foundation of resonance.
Takeaway #1:
Mirror neurons cause us to mimic the actions of people around us.
But There’s a bit more that we need to know in order to understand how resonance works.
Not only do we mirror and mimic the actions of others, such as taking a drink of water, checking our phone, or yawning, we also detect and reflect another person’s emotional state.
As Daniel Siegel writes in his book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, “We sense not only what action is coming next, but also the emotional energy that underlies the behavior.”
Neurologists call this tendency we have to transfer our emotions to one another emotional contagion.
This is the second important step to understanding resonance.
Takeaway #2:
We use our mirroring capabilities to sense another person’s emotional state.
There’s one more layer.
You know that feeling you have when you’re talking with a really good listener? It’s among the most meaningful and memorable experience in life.
What you don’t realize is that in that moment four parts of your brain activate to create this experience. The signals from our mirror neurons travel to your superior temporal cortex, then to the insula cortex, and finally to the middle prefrontal cortex.
Knowing specific regions of the brain isn’t as important as recognizing that this circuit exists. Resonance can’t happen without them.
This is what Daniel Siegel calls our resonance circuits.
“When our resonance circuits are engaged, we can feel another’s feelings and create a cortical imprint that lets us understand what may be going on in the other’s mind,” he writes.
Takeaway #3:
Resonance activates four distinct regions of our brain.
Put this into practice:
You have interactions coming up in your personal and professional life. Pick one.
Ask yourself, "What does this person want me to know?" Pay attention to what they say and how they say it in their tone and body language.
How can you let them know you’ve heard them?
Resonance is a complex, transformative phenomenon that takes place under ideal conditions. Our job is to create those conditions. But how?
In the next three posts I’ll explore the role of Care, Curiosity, and Creativity, and what we can all do to strengthen our ability to foster resonance.
Drop me a note with any questions or comments you have: andrew@afrobinson.com. And if you haven’t already, sign up for my mailing list to receive the next entry in the Get Gotten series.
© Andrew F. Robinson 2017. All rights reserved.
Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
The Spectrum of Engagement
Welcome to Get Gotten. This series explains and explores the ultimate form of engagement—Resonance. Each entry in this series includes an explanation of a key concept that helps you build resonance with the people you seek to engage. I also provide an application for the concept that you can put into practice. If you haven’t already, sign up for my mailing list to have this series delivered directly to your inbox.
We all want to engage people. Whether we’re trying to get another individual or team on board with our initiative, or we’re trying reach our customers, clients, and stakeholders, we have the same goal in mind — engagement.
But engagement is not engagement is not engagement.
Merely getting someone’s attention isn’t sufficient. Without knowing it we can settle for something less than the kind of engagement that truly affects the people we want to reach.
Engagement exists on a spectrum. At the beginning of my free ebook, The Narrative Thinking Framework, I include The Spectrum of Engagement. In it I highlight five kinds of engagement.
The Spectrum of Engagement arose from a conversation I had more than fifteen years ago with a small group of teenagers in which they raved about a motivational speaker that came to their high school. He used humor and powerful stories to sustain the attention of hundreds of high school students for about an hour. Not an easy task.
This is why I was surprised when they said they weren’t moved at all by the speaker’s message. They were just entertained. In other words, the speaker, though he was able to keep their attention, fell short of resonance.
Resonance is the experience of getting gotten by another person.
Resonance can take place directly between people, such as an exceptional customer experience at a restaurant. We can also experience resonance through the things we use each day, like an easy-to-use app that alleviates stress during our daily commute. Thank you, Waze!
Everything you do, say, and make communicates something. This means that everything is an opportunity to create resonance. But in order for people to get gotten you need to understand them at least as well as they understand themselves. Your ability to create resonance depends on it.
Simply put, the way you communicate reveals how well you know and care for the people you seek to engage.
So how well do you know the people you’re trying to reach? And how can you know them better?
A simple question can yield deep insights. One question that I ask in my Unfocus Groups is:
What do you consider a good day?
Pose this question, or one like it, to the people you’re trying to engage. You’ll gain insights that help you deepen your connection with them and make it more likely that they will get that you get them.
Resonance is the most transformative kind of engagement. Remember the motivational speaker I mentioned? Don’t be satisfied with getting people's’ attention. We can do better.
Let’s put this into practice.
- Select the person or group of people you most want to engage.
- Rate your knowledge of this audience on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “I hardly know them” and 5 is “I know them very well”.
- Identify one thing you can do to deepen your understanding of your audience.
- Identify one thing you can do to communicate that you know your audience.
Let me know how this goes, or if you have any questions. And if you haven’t already, sign up for my mailing list to receive the next entry in the Get Gotten series.