Finding the Love of Your Life
02/22/2004 - Developing Relational Intelligence
When I was in college and thinking about a career and talking to my Dad about what he thought, he recommended that I read a book that had impacted his life when he was a young man. The title of the book sounded a little strange to me, but he said that it was a classic and everybody should read it. Of course, you know what a classic is? A classic is a book that everybody's heard about but nobody's read.
The book he suggested was called How to Win Friends and Influence People written in 1936 by Dale Carnegie. Maybe you've heard of it, but probably never read it. Carnegie started out as a sale person for Armour and Company, then eventually became a motivational speaker and ended up teaching public speaking to businessmen and women. Along the way he wrote newspaper columns and had a daily radio show, was a sought after counselor to world leaders, and sold over 50 million copies of his books. He was the "Dr. Phil" of his generation.
And in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People he lists six ways to make people like you. First, become genuinely interested in other people. Second, smile. Third, remember that a person's name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in the English language. Fourth, be a good listener and encourage others to talk about themselves. Fifth, talk in terms of the other person's interests. And sixth, make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.
Not bad counsel. In fact, you can find support for every one of those principles in the Bible. They didn't originate with Dr. Phil or Dale Carnegie. He just packaged them. They come to us from God himself who's written THE book on human relationships. The Bible is all about how to get along with God and how to get along with ourselves and how to get along with each other.
This morning we continue our series called Finding the Love of Your Life with a teaching I've called "Developing Relational Intelligence." This is week six of the series and it's all been about finding out how to become a better lover. The kind of love we're after is called agape love. It's the Greek word used most often for love in the New Testament. It means unconditional, self-sacrificing love, the kind of love that drove Jesus to the cross, and the kind of love that he says is to be the mark of his followers.
Did you notice how many of Carnegie's six principles had other people's interests coming before our own? Be genuinely interested in other people, remember their name, be a good listener, talk about their interests, make them feel important and do it sincerely.
I've asked you to look at this series as a sequence of love lessons. Lesson number one was that all of us are slightly irregular, we all come "as is," every one of us carries a mat. Lesson number two was that all of us "as is" people were created for community. We need each other. It's not good to be alone. Lesson number three was that the community we were created for has the incredible power to heal our lives. We looked at the story of the paraplegic being carried to Jesus by his friends and how his life was healed both inside and out.
Lesson number four was that community starts with being real, being authentic. It moves from guarded communication to appropriate self-disclosure and then to confession with a chosen one or two. And last week's lesson, from the story of the woman caught in adultery, was that authenticity must be followed by acceptance. If it's not, then community ceases to be a safe place. But after acceptance comes empathy, that ability to enter into another person's shoes and listen to their heart.
So today, we want to do some empathy training. We want to talk very practically about developing our relational intelligence, because the church was meant to be a highly relational community and all of us can benefit by sharpening our people skills. In his book, John Ortberg titles this chapter "Empathy: The Art of Reading People." Some of us come from homes that were great at building and maintaining relationships. Others of us don't have a clue how to do that. We never saw much of it growing up. So we need a lot of help.
Remember as people we were all created to be relational beings. We were made in the image of a highly relational God who lives in community with himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and who created us to live in community with him and with each other. So God wants us to learn to relate well to one another, to know each other, to pay attention to what's going on in each other's lives, to listen to what's happening inside each other's heart.
But that takes skill. That kind of relational intelligence needs to be developed. It's not always easy to enter into this level of community because our feelings are not often put into words. Most of the time we express our feelings in other subtle ways like through body language and tone of voice, facial expressions and eye movements, posture and gestures. In fact, experts say that between 60 and 90 percent of our communication with each other is nonverbal. We're sending signals all the time to those around us. But can we read them?
Dallas Willard in his book Renovation of the Heart writes, "The tendencies and feelings that run our life, whether we are aware of it or not, reside in fairly specific parts of our body, and they reveal themselves to others through our body language ... They not only govern our immediate responses in actions, but also are read with great accuracy by observant people around us and then determine how they react to us. We wear our souls 'on our sleeve,' even when we ourselves are oblivious to them, and that governs the quality of our relations to others."
Learning how to read people will help us grow deeper in community. Some people use the word "attunement" to describe that ability to read and respond well to someone else's heart. Relationally intelligent people are geniuses at it. They know how to read people, how to listen beneath the words. Others aren't so good at it, which is why they often struggle relationally without even being aware that they're doing anything wrong. But the good news is that relational intelligence can be learned.
Develop this skill and you'll have opportunities you never thought possible to help people, to encourage people, to influence people, and to love people. You'll have friendships that are deep and last a lifetime. People will start to seek you out at school, at work, in the neighborhood, in the church. And most importantly you'll be a much better spouse, parent, and friend.
So let's talk about five relational road signs that can help us read each other a little bit better and develop deeper community. In his book, Ortberg credits the significant research done in this area by David Givens published in his book The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs, and Body Language.
The first relational road sign is stop. People send out signals all the time that tell us to stop ... stop talking, stop advising, stop rambling, stop criticizing, stop gossiping, just stop! The most common way we send this signal is with our eyes. Eye contact produces strong emotions. In fact, in a normal conversation we can usually only maintain it for about three seconds until we feel the urge to look away. And when someone wants us to stop talking they'll often cut that three seconds way down or eliminate it altogether. I can tell when I'm talking to you whose tuned in and who isn't by eye contact. Hello! I'm up here!
Ladies you have a greater challenge on this one. I discovered this week that the average woman speaks about 30,000 words a day, while the average man speaks only about 15,000 words a day. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to go any further down that road!
So just like in driving, don't run stop signs. When you're in a conversation and the person isn't engaging you with his or her eyes that's a signal to stop talking. It's time to give them a chance to say something, because if you keep running stop signs in your communication you may gain an audience for a minute, but you might lose the chance to gain a friendship for a lifetime.
The Bible cautions us against talking too much. Proverbs 10:19 says, When words are many, sin is not absent, but the wise hold their tongues. Talking too much can get us in trouble. We don't always have to have the last word or win the argument or control what other people think about us or keep drawing attention to ourselves. Just stop.
Besides, talking too much robs us of the most important relational skill in the world and that is listening. In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman writes, "Listening is the single most important relational skill a person can develop." It was one of Dale Carnegie's top six ways of making people like you. Be a good listener. Did you hear that? Is anybody listening to me?
James, the brother of Jesus, wrote 2,000 years ago in James 1:19, My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.
And you become a good listener by asking good questions and being open-minded and understanding and not interrupting. Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever lived. He could have talked constantly. Everything he said was profound. But he didn't. Instead, he spent an enormous amount of time listening to people and drawing them out and asking them questions. We have the expression "pay attention." That's because attention paid to another person is the most valuable currency we have.
The second relational road sign is lighten up. Proverbs 15:30 says, A cheerful look brings joy to the heart, and good news gives health to the bones. Carnegie simply says, "Smile." People are drawn to joy and joy is something that Jesus came to give all of us. We don't have to try and fake joy. Joy is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It was a mark of the very first church community. Acts 2:46 describes Jerusalem Community Church as a group of people with glad and sincere hearts. The Bible says we can even have joy in trials and we all have plenty of those. Don't wait till life is perfect to be joyful. It will never happen.
Studies show that joy is so contagious that even seeing a picture of someone smiling causes us to smile back. Smiles and laughter release dopamine and endorphins and other chemicals in our body that relieve stress. Joy does bring health to the bones.
Life is hard and can really slap us around sometimes. But how refreshing it is to be around a community of people who can inject joy into our lives. We're all hungry for joy-bringers. Joy experts say that we're about thirty times more likely to laugh when we're with other people than when we're alone.
Some of us struggle relationally because we are way too intense. We take ourselves too seriously. I know I can. That's why I am drawn to people I can laugh with and joke with. Jesus was the most intense, focused person who ever lived. But he also knew how to laugh and how to have a good time. How do we know that? Because people were drawn to him. Kids loved to hang with him. At one point he was accused of being an overeater and an alcoholic because he enjoyed a good party.
I'm sure he would have loved the joke about the little boy who was learning the Ten Commandments. He had just learned the fifth commandment, "Honor your father and your mother" when his Sunday teacher asked, "Now is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat the kid said, "Yeah, number six, do not kill!"
The third road sign says proceed with caution. Every relationship we have takes work. They won't just flourish on their own. If you're in a marriage or part of a family, friendship, club, team, organization, department, small group, or church you're a part of what Daniel Goleman calls an "emotional economy."
And every single time we interact with a person in that economy we either come away feeling better and more energized or worse and more emotionally drained. Because we're not just exchanging information, we're influencing each other's moods and attitudes.
It's like we all carry around our own little emotional ATM cards and every encounter we have either makes a deposit or a withdrawal on the vitality of those around us.
Ortberg says that's even true for interactions between people and animals. It's why people have pets and why some pets are more life giving than others. For instance, a dog says, "You love me, feed me, shelter me, care for me - you must be God." While a cat says, "You love me, feed me, shelter me, care for me - I must be God." We all have dog people and cat people in our lives.
So proceeding with caution means that we need to keep an eye on the emotional gauge of our lives. We can't keep giving out emotionally. That's what leads to burnout. We all need a rhythm in our lives and a balance between life giving and life draining relationships.
Relationally intelligent people know the people who contribute to their emotional economy. And they meet with them often enough so that they can keep giving out to others.
Proverbs 27:17 describes a replenishing relationship like this. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
The fourth relational road sign says road closed. Relationally intelligent people can sense tension in a relationship. And they know that a breakdown in community is often communicated through body language long before words are spoken. They have the intuitive capacity to read the emotional economy of a group or of a relationship. They can sense fear and anger, hurt and disappointment.
When people are uncomfortable with each other they'll avoid each other, they won't look at each other, they'll angle their bodies away from each other, they'll always be in hurry to move on to something or someone else.
Jesus was a master at this. We read accounts in the gospels where he's walking down the road with his disciples and senses that there's tension. And so he stops and very skillfully says, "What were you arguing about?" Or sometimes he doesn't say anything at all. Like in the upper room when he just gets up from the table, takes a bowl of water, and washes their feet. Yet in performing that simple act he says volumes.
Relationally intelligent people can sense when the road is closed to community and they know what steps to take to try and open it up again. But they never force their way into another person's heart. You can't. Even Jesus won't do that.
Jesus says in Revelation 3:20, Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me. In the Bible, eating is a picture of community. Jesus wants to be in community with us, but we must invite him to the table.
Finally, the fifth road sign is shoulder work ahead. Every single one of us needs encouragement in life. Every one of us needs someone to call the best out of us, to challenge us, to help us reach our greatest potential. Relationally intelligent people do that. They look for ways to encourage people.
They practice 1 Thessalonians 5:11, Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.
They know that the universal sign for discouragement is slumped shoulders. Our shoulders can say more than our mouths sometimes. We often say that a person who has the capacity to handle anything life throws at them has broad shoulders. Squared shoulders suggest confidence and certainty, but hunched shoulders are a sign of defeat.
We weren't made to go through life with slumped shoulders. We were made to face life head on with shoulders squared, not in our own strength, but with the strength that God gives us and often that comes from people who do shoulder work.
A few verses later Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:14, And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone.
All of us need someone who accepts us and believes in us and encourages us and calls the best out of us. That is one of the most beautiful expressions of community. Don't miss it!
Valley View Community Church is a biblical community where these things are going on all the time unlike any community I've ever been a part of. But we can get better. We can become better lovers.
So those are five relational road signs that will strengthen community in any relationship. Stop. Lighten up. Proceed with caution. Road closed. Shoulder work ahead. Which one do you need help with? We have the power to build up or to tear down community by how well we read the signs. And it's all because Jesus shouldered the burdens of the whole human race, died in our place, rose again, to give us life and life to full.