There are two things that can hinder creative thinking so let's address those first.

The first one is stress. When we experience stress, this puts us in the fight, flight, or freeze mode, which is essentially our survival mode. When we are in this state, we become laser-focused on the threat in front of us, which leaves no space for creative thinking. Our brains do not have the capacity to think of new ideas when we are in a high-stress state. Researchers have carried out multiple experiments now to prove this theory and the results are conclusive; the higher our levels of stress, the lower our levels of creativity. So if we’re going to come up with good ideas and think outside the box, we need to learn to relax. 

We know equally that we can’t put a time-pressure on creativity. Research has also shown us that when we are trying to be creative under the pressure of a tight deadline, it just doesn’t happen. 

The other thing that can kill creativity is money. Yes, that’s right, a cash incentive can actually make us perform worse in creative tasks. Researchers proved this through running an experiment where groups of people were asked to solve the famous candle problem. If you haven’t seen it before, people are presented with a candle and some items and they are asked to fix the candle to the wall, using those items. You’ll find pictures online if you want to have a go yourself. Solving the problem isn’t rocket science but it does require thinking outside the box. 

So a psychologist called Sam Glucksberg came along – a professor of psychology at Princeton University and he used the candle problem to test how people respond to financial incentives. 

He split individuals into two groups and asked them how quickly they could solve the candle problem.

He said to Group 1: I’m going to time you to establish some averages for how long it typically takes people to solve this problem.  

He said to Group 2: I’m going to time you to see how long it takes you to solve this problem. If you’re in the top 25% of the fastest times to solve this problem, we will give you $5 

If you are the fastest of all the people we’ve tested here today you get $20

Which group do you think solved the problem quickest?

It took group 2 3 ½ minutes longer to solve the problem

This is down to what we call the overjustification effect. This is because financial incentives actually cause the opposite effect than desired. So offered bonuses or cash incentives usually stifle creativity and make us perform worse at tasks that require us to think creatively. 

One of the most important traits that social scientists have identified as the key to getting along with people is agreeableness. This is really about being cooperative, friendly, considerate and helpful. This doesn’t of course mean being a push-over and agreeing with everything. It’s important to know when to be assertive and stand up for yourself when you need to, but these traits of being friendly and considerate you’ll find are common in individuals we may describe as a people person. So this is something to bear in mind as we move through this module. 

I wanted to start this section with a quote by Dale Carnegie. He wrote a book back in the 1930s called How to Win Friends and Influence People, a title you may have heard of. What’s amazing is how relevant so many of the concepts he talks about in the book are to us today. 

He said: You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

So if we want to create better social interactions, we want to become curious about others. Some may have this innate curiosity but I want you to think about when you meet someone new – how interested are you in what they have to say, versus how much would you prefer to talk about yourself and your own experiences. This is something that takes some self-awareness, so next time you go into a conversation like this, try to be aware of the balance of the conversation. 

I’m not sure if you remember the talking stick from our days at school. You could only talk if you had the stick. Let’s imagine a metaphorical talking stick in our conversations. The talking stick should pass equally around all members of the conversation. If one person is hogging the talking stick, it’s probably not a great conversation for the other person. The key to showing interest in others is partly in being able to ask quality questions. Asking open questions that will help you learn more about that person and allow them to feel heard. 

There are other things that can get in the way of us having good social interactions with others. One of those is our desire to be right. This is our ego usually leading that one. 

We all like being right, but often this comes at the expense of someone else feeling bad or ‘put down’, which never really makes us feel good. Being right or defending our position takes a huge amount of mental energy and often ends up alienating us from people in our lives. No one will ever thank you for correcting them or for you proving they were wrong. We have to think to ourselves, does it really matter? If you’re still telling yourself ‘yes’ then it’s probably the ego speaking. If we want healthier relationships and better social interactions, we need to let go of the desire to be right. 

Next time you feel the urge to correct someone or make sure they know you were right, try to notice yourself doing it and see if you can hold back. Think about what outcome you’re really hoping for. It probably won’t come from staunchly defending your position. 

When thinking about creating better social interactions, I’d like us to think about the concept of impact vs. intention. This is the fact that sometimes what we say doesn’t always match up to the way we make other people feel. We may say something that feels insignificant or minor to us, but in some way, it upsets or offends another person. This is an example where the impact of our behaviour is very different to the intention. We didn’t mean to make the other person feel bad and we can’t really understand why they’ve taken offence to what we’ve said. 

The overall message in all of these conversations is that when someone does something harmful or offensive to another person, the perpetrator's intent is not what's most important when gauging the appropriateness of an action. Was someone hurt by something? Was there a negative outcome? If so, that is what’s important. Whether or not the perpetrator meant to cause harm is not.

So what happens when your intent doesn’t match up with the intended impact? Part of being a successful communicator is being able to identify these potential situations and taking feedback on them. Identifying these situations starts with awareness and understanding. Often we feel we have the right to express our opinion because it’s what we think and feel (and sometimes of course it’s important to do this) but if expressing your opinion causes offence or upset to someone, do we really need to express it? Again thinking about why we feel the people around us need to know what our opinion is. 

It is important to try and understand the other parties’ point of view, possible filters and the way in which they may see and hear things. You must adapt your style to work with these things in order to maintain positive communication and strong relationships. 

When we are told that the impact of our actions or words is hurtful, we can start by apologizing without any caveats, rather than trying to defend ourselves by saying we didn’t mean it in that way. 

You may say to a colleague that you didn’t ask her to be involved in a project because she seemed like she had too much on and had a busy home life. That colleague may take that as you saying that you thought she was not able to keep up and prioritised her home life overwork. She may be hurt by this because she felt she was denied an opportunity. 

We shouldn’t brush this off as the other person being over sensitive. 

If people are offended by the things we say on a regular basis, we may really need to reflect on this. 

When thinking about creating positive social interactions, we also need to bear in mind our stress levels. 

We know that stress inhibits our ability to:

Accurately read another person’s non-verbal communications

Stress releases a chemical called cortisol. When we have a lot of cortisol in our systems, it suppresses a natural chemical called oxytocin – which is responsible for empathy, trust and building social bonds. So it can make it very hard to have productive conversations with others when we’re feeling very stressed. 

So particularly when we need to have a difficult or sensitive conversation with someone, we need to think about our stress levels at that time. It might not be the best time to do it if we’re highly stressed. 

Remember you can always explain to someone that you’re not in the right headspace for a particular conversation and ask for a time out. We don’t want to get drawn into a conversation and say things that we might later regret. We’re unlikely to come to a level of understanding with someone if we have too much cortisol running through our system. 

If you feel you’re highly stressed a lot of the time, this will have an impact on the relationships in your life so this is certainly something worth addressing. 

The last thing we’re going to touch on in this section is the concept of giving feedback. We often feel like giving our feedback or constructive criticism to someone will help them improve or change, but this is very rarely the case and I’ll explain why.

We have two independent networks in our brain that are significant to us here. They are the analytic network and the emphatic network. 

The analytic network enables us to focus, make a decision & solve a problem. 

But it closes a person down to change, new ideas & possibilities.

The emphatic network on the other hand enables us to be open to new ideas, people and emotions. 

These two networks act independently but the interesting fact is that they suppress each other, they cannot be activated at the same time. 

Scientists have studied what happens to our brains when we receive criticism or negative feedback of some kind. They found when this happens the analytic network lights up and the emphatic network is suppressed. 

It means when someone tries to give us constructive feedback, the part of our brain that is open to change and new ideas are shut down. Meaning we’re highly unlikely to take that feedback on board and change from it. 

The truth is when we criticize others it says little about that person and more about our need to be critical. We often see this as feedback, but it’s very rare that anyone will take this ‘constructive feedback’ onboard and change from it. How many times have we tried to get someone to change by giving them feedback, but they never change how we’d like them to. 

Change has to come from internal motivation or being inspired positively. It doesn’t generally come from someone else telling us we should change. 

Unless someone expressly asks for your feedback, in which case they will be open to it, I would resist the urge to give it. 

One of the most important traits that social scientists have identified as the key to getting along with people is agreeableness. This is really about being cooperative, friendly, considerate and helpful.

Let’s look into how we can strengthen our relationships.

I want us to think about the idea of having a relationship bank account with each significant person in our lives. Like with a regular bank account you make deposits or withdrawals. If you make too many withdrawals and not enough deposits, you’re likely to be in a negative balance. 

I want us to think about our relationships in this same way. A deposit represents any kind of positive interaction with that person. Whereas a withdrawal represents a negative interaction. Let’s look at some examples of both:

Complaining to your partner because he hasn’t taken out the bins

Disagreement with your colleague & friend about the outcome of a project

Remembering to text your partner ‘good luck’ before an important meeting at work

Offering to help your colleague with a project as he looks overwhelmed

Baking your sister her favourite cake out of the blue

With each relationship you’ll have an account. So keep asking yourself, what do you currently have in the bank with that person? Is there a healthy bank balance there? Have you made lots of deposits? Or is the bank balance in the red? Have you made too many withdrawals? 

If you feel like there’ve been too many withdrawals recently, what can you do to create some more deposits? A compliment to someone? Telling them how much you care about them? Doing something nice for them unprompted? These little acts go a long way to building up your relationships. 

Something that will really help us strengthen our relationships is developing empathy and compassion. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. It’s another key emotional intelligence skill and will make a big difference to how we relate to others. 

If you’re struggling to relate to someone or understand them it’s worth being curious about what that person’s story is. Remembering everyone is shaped by their life experiences. People may have gone through something that you don’t know about and this could be impacting their behaviour. 

We can also practice acceptance here. There may be aspects of people’s personalities that we don’t like or get on with, but remembering back to the idea of how futile giving feedback is, it’s much easier to learn to accept the parts of people that we don’t like rather than trying to change them.

When creating a deeper understanding of other people, it’s really useful to look at how we judge the behaviour of others vs. how we judge our own behaviour. 

There are two classes of explanation for why people do what they do:

Dispositional is the idea that we all have a set of traits that are more or less stable throughout our lifetimes and we act in accordance to those traits. 

Situational is the idea that momentary circumstances contribute in a large way to any situation.

Research shows that we’re more likely to decide that other people are acting in a way because that’s just who they are – so dispositional. Whereas we tend to explain our own behaviour more according to the situation. 

This is because for our own behaviour we have access to not just what people see on the outside but the thought processes behind our actions. We see ourselves as complex beings whose actions are influenced by the rich inner-workings of our minds. 

For others, we only see the outcome of their behaviour or actions. 

An example of this is if we were going through the ticket gates in the tube station and the person behind us tuts because for some reason our card isn’t working, we would probably label that person in our head as impatient. 

But if we reverse the situation and imagine you were late for a very important interview and someone in front of you seemed to be taking ages at the gate, you might tut yourself. You probably wouldn’t think of yourself as impatient because of that one incident, because you have the background information to your situation, but we rarely have that for others around us. 

In a famous study which illustrated this, two groups of students were asked to travel from one campus to another for the second part of their lecture. The first group were told to hurry as the other professor was expecting them a few minutes ago. The second group were told they weren’t expected for a few minutes but they may as well start heading over.

Between the two campuses the researchers had placed a person slumped over on the side of the road who looked like they were injured and in need of medical attention. When each student passed by the person coughed and groaned. Which group do you think were more likely to stop and help the injured person?

We all like to think that we would stop to help them regardless of which group we were in. But the results showed that the people who were in a hurry were six times as likely to pass by the visibly injured person without helping them. This is really to demonstrate how quick we are to judge others on their behaviour, but we rarely have all the facts about why they are behaving that way. Situational factors are often much more influential than we might think and we should bear this in mind when trying to understand others.

Another fascinating psychological model is the drama triangle (which was first described by Stephen Karpman in 1961). It is used in psychology to describe the roles we often fall into during times of conflict. You can imagine a triangle and at each point is a different role. These roles are the persecutor, the victim and the rescuer. These are not roles we take on for life, but roles that we sometimes fall into in times of conflict. We can move interchangeably between different roles.

The persecutor is often the person that tends to be quite angry, critical and often condescending and superior. They may feel like if someone is wrong, they need to be told and they should be the one to do this.

The victim is often the person on the other end of the persecutors anger or criticism. This is someone who tends to feel oppressed, powerless and helpless. They often feel like the world is against them and that they are suffering at the hands of others.

Lastly we have the rescuer who is the person that needs to save the victim and keep them dependent. This is often what we might describe as enabling behaviour – they enable the victim to stay in the victim role but being their rescuer. This is someone who seems to be striving to solve a victim’s problems but in fact does so in ways that result in the victim having less power, with the rescuer benefiting more than the victim.

Although all three are 'roles' and none may be true to who we really are, we can all get caught in a cycle that is hard to escape. We tend to fall into particular roles in different relationship dynamics. So within our family, it might be one role, in our friendship group another and in our romantic relationship another role entirely. 

The drama triangle creates a toxic dynamic and one we want to step out of. This can be particularly hard to do if we’ve been playing a certain role for a long time. 

But the first step is simply to be aware of the game, how it works, and what roles you play most frequently. What role did you play as a child? Can you identify the roles that others in your family played? Are they still playing them?

The only way to win in this equation is not to play. We can choose to disengage from these roles. Notice when we start playing the victim, or playing the rescuer and see if we can break that cycle. Only then can we start to build healthier relationships. 

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