Be nice until 10 in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself. Elbert Hubbard.
It's a delight to sit down and watch an interview by James Lipton with any of his highly acclaimed guest stars on Film & Arts Channel's From the Actor's Studio. During the last nine months, and without trying, I have been fortunate to tune in three times the small, great and always captivating stories of one of the "monsters of the big screen", one of my favorite talents: Al Pacino.
Observing and listening carefully to a character in this category leaves nothing but lessons. At this point, more or less included in what is known as the third age (I would say that in glorious old age), Pacino dazzles with his grace, his naturalness and his personality. The role of having returned to being himself is, without a doubt, the one that suits him best (along with that of The Devil's Advocate) and, in his own words, that formidable return to simplicity has been one of his greatest achievements.
Pacino spoke of self-awareness, a technical word widely used in psychology, in performing arts and in some business training processes. Self-awareness, to which I briefly alluded in one of my previous articles, is nothing other than the echo of what we believe others perceive in us, in our way of being and acting. We want support, we want to seduce, we want to act convincingly and, therefore, we raise our sensitivity to the appearance of others. When we feel observed, when we are the center of attention and comments, it is common that at the same time we feel threatened, judged or misunderstood. In these circumstances it is said that we are loaded with negative self-awareness, and managers can already imagine what this represents for the exercise of their positions.
Pacino recounted how, in his early days with Lee Strasberg, a teacher and mentor to great stars of theater and film, his self-conscious mechanisms helped him to know himself better and develop his artistic abilities, but not to become an outstanding actor. Much later he realized that the techniques and the purpose of being one with the character were provisional aspects that served the same function as the small side wheels on the boys' bikes. That care to see himself in a certain way was calculation, technique, but not mastery.
The study of self-awareness in human relationships in general and in the world of work in particular, among other aspects, greatly facilitates the diagnosis that will allow us to know why any work environment is or is not highly productive and rewarding. There is a tendency to look for complex reasons to explain the lack of affinity and understanding between a boss and his subordinates, of a service advisor with his clients, or the incompatibilities between one department and another, when the substance of the matter, on many occasions, is not it reveals more than a stunted and poorly promoted culture of good person-to-person communication.
Measuring the quality of our emotional, physical and gestural responses to the real or imagined behaviors, work styles and judgments of those around us, trying to better interpret external signals, projecting a motivating image and learning to be perceptive-non-reactive is a a task that involves, in the first instance, managers and those who wish to achieve a highly effective level of leadership. As I have just pointed out, friction and disagreements are exacerbated by the simple fact that we often forget that we are not mere carriers of messages, but that we are the message itself.
To begin the process of educating ourselves in these skills, we must begin by dealing with the first thing that is perceived: our appearance and our body language. The posture, gestures and eye contact that we establish with our peers largely determine the degree of acceptance and adherence that we intend to obtain from them. Why are certain people attracted to us at first sight? Why are others indifferent to us, or warning us, or intimidating us? Beyond the relativities inherent in these questions, or how very circumstantial they may seem, it is clear that some people take much more effort than others to cultivate an intelligent and sensitive gestural image with respect to their environment.
He who is capable of "dressing" his humanity, his corporeity, with positive and stimulating gestures has undoubtedly understood that the gift of people, the charisma, is not simply a gift from nature. We build ourselves on the basis of effort and experience, we adapt, we make ourselves accessible and we learn to be pleasing in the eyes of others through the awareness of the self that we project and through the interpretation of perceptions about others. Mastery is achieved with maturity, when that deliberate and conscious search to be fitter and better flows gracefully, naturally.
No current, no administrative or psychological school can ever underestimate the importance of starting by analyzing these apparently elementary intrapersonal and interpersonal notions. On the contrary, in the last ten years, NLP and Emotional Intelligence have aroused a renewed interest in knowing the most subtle mechanisms of human behavior, expressed in a language that does not lie: that of gestures. The fruitful and harmonious coexistence with others is a learning that deserves our full attention, since our successes and our failures depend, to a great extent, on it.
A more or less recent encounter with a group of personalities from Colombian politics and jurisprudence comes to mind after the presentation of a biographical book, written by the great-nephew of the well-known character. We were on the first floor of an old English-style house, on the edge of downtown Bogotá. As I was chatting with the head of the ceremonial house, we were approached by an impeccable-looking, tall, and handsome man, a character I recognized almost immediately. He was a famous radio and television actor, a comedian, to be exact. In a matter of minutes he monopolized the conversation, raised his voice, opened his mouth wide and brought his face so close to mine that I could even feel droplets of saliva hitting my face.
Nothing more mortifying than that. I tried, of course, to evade the annoying situation in the most appropriate way, that is, by sending all kinds of physical and gestural signals to the subject, signals that that irrepressible lingo did not want or could not interpret. He wanted to feel important no matter what.
I had to endure this ridiculous display of exacerbated egocentricity and no capacity for self-awareness for about ten minutes, which, of course, seemed eternal. Such heaviness almost moved me to react abruptly. The little man on television was, what a surprise, a complete rude, or better, a "retarded" gesture.
Let's transpose a situation similar to this to the daily routine, to work. If we share our day-to-day activities with people with low gestural and emotional intelligence, quarrels and ill-wills will proliferate and end up spoiling the work environment. Becoming better readers and gestural actors must be a personal and corporate purpose, a subject of study integrated into the training plans in the development of a practical and vigorous communicative and organizational culture, capable of adding many points to the quality of work coexistence and the sense of belonging.
