Eric Waisman, the founder of Jaunty, has been advancing social intelligence since 2013 at the popularly dubbed “gym for social skills”.
Brad has a great sense of humour. Sign up your dog for Yelp Elite. There’s this obnoxious blaring bleeping noise although everyone is muted. Without further ado, school with Eric.
Eric is so grateful to Yelp for great eats and the best nights he’s ever had.
The three main pillars that make you feel in a community are friends/family, romantic partners, and networking. The internal things Jaunty works on are managing social anxiety.
Social exercises in a safe place and breakout rooms to wake up our body language up. Feel free to practice with your mask on right now. Practice that projection.
Thought exercise: think of your social life and how it has changed for 30 seconds.
Eye contact. Where in your body do the alarms go off? Does your chest tighten? Do you get sweaty? Mom’s spaghetti? So knowing where social anxiety manifests is great starting place, e.g. public speaking.
Main takeaway: awareness. Self-awareness, to be specific. Body language. Noticing your environment and understanding your own reaction take away some power from anxiety.
Take notes on a notepad and put it next to your bed.
3 of 6 skills:
1. Body language: voice and tonality. Release that serotonin and engage that parasympathetic nervous system. Now, slow everything down. Stand up and expose your jugular. Insert Game of Thrones reference. Open body language. Being physically relaxed translates to being emotional relaxed. Body language also influences how we are perceived.
2. Conversational agility: what you say. Let’s play another game. Eric guarantees that we’ll never be at a loss for words after this association exercise. Threading and speaking of. Back and forth. Partner 1 says A. Partner 2 transitions with “speaking of”. Steal a word and use it to segue. Grab more words. Then back and forth. Break out for 5 minutes. I actually kind of enjoyed being in a break out room by myself but later was put into a room with Sheila. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation about apples, doctors, and David Tenant. This was called building wide rapport, not going deep with questions. It’s like snorkeling instead of scuba diving. It’s like best friends reuniting in one sitting. Open with a similarity instead of grilling into interviewer mode.
3. Assertiveness: turns nice people into great people. Learn to say no. Start with positivity, then “however”, then politely decline, then shut up. Don’t fill in the gap with apologetics. Say no to Brad when he asks you to help him move. Break out room time!
4. Humor
5. Approach/Introductions
6. Charisma/Storytelling/Flirting
Other topics:
Trait psychology
Loneliness is just an alarm for social time
Develop sensitivity to social pain
Exit a conversation with honesty, as long as it’s not mean.
This was by far the most mentally, emotionally, and socially engaging virtual Yelp event I’ve attended so far this year. I’m not sure I can do another virtual cooking, baking, mixology, home decor, meditation, or yoga class after being spoiled by so much self-actualization in one hour.
