Situational awareness

This can be described as a person’s ability to sense a situation, a kind of intuitive understanding of what is happening. We say that some people are good at reading and understanding situations. Situational awareness is also linked to the ability to detect the intentions of other people. To succeed in doing this, one must show respect for other people’s feelings, ideas and opinions. A self-obsessed person will never be able to develop situational awareness. A person with a high level of situational awareness will be able to read a context, allowing them to understand the signals that the context is sending. In a social situation, there may be many different types of groups that are sending different signals. A person with situational awareness will be able to read the different subgroups’ opinions and develop a clear synthesis of the different signals that are being sent.

Presence

This concerns how a person interprets signals emitted by a social context. In everyday terms, we can understand this as having intuition about things that are gestating before they actually happen. A person who has ‘presence’ will influence a social situation simply by being there. The whole situation will be framed differently when that person is present. A person with a high degree of presence will be highly approachable and will be experienced as present by the other people there. Such a person’s humour, friendliness and engagement are infectious. This person has an attitude that transmits positivity to the situation.

Authenticity

This is about how we radiate signals that other people sense and that are experienced as indicators that we are trustworthy, honest, ethical and reliable. A feeling of sincerity will characterize how other people experience an authentic person. In this context, the opposite of authenticity is being manipulative and using other people for one’s own ends. Authentic persons keep their word, i.e. we can trust them, even if we are not present when they are speaking on our behalf.

Clarity

This says something about our ability to be open and to communicate clearly and unambiguously, without packaging our ideas or opinions in a lot of meaningless waffle. People who use language to create possible escape routes for themselves, regardless of how the situation develops, are not using clarity in their communications, but precise ambiguity. In such cases, the speaker is apparently precise, but if one pays careful attention, one finds that their formulations include an element of ambiguity, allowing them to be used on a later occasion as evidence that the speaker is keeping their word. Accordingly, people who use precise ambiguity will always be able to claim that they are keeping their word, because their statements can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. In contrast, a person who communicates with clarity has not inserted this kind of ambiguity into their language. Another way of communicating that lacks clarity even more than precise ambiguity involves using abstractions to create room for manoeuvre. People communicating in this way use language as a kind of abstract ladder to create positive situations for themselves and to put the other person in a linguistic predicament.

Empathy

In our context, this means more than simply understanding the situation of another person and sympathizing with them. Obviously, this is part of what it means to be empathic. But here we are also referring to the emergence of a shared feeling of

Figure 3.7 A method for developing social and emotional competence

empathy between the people concerned. What we are talking about here is how one experiences a connection to another person’s feelings when one is in a state of empathy.

Participating in another person’s emotional state and showing sensitivity and understanding is part of being empathic. This is how one develops mutual respect. This respect is generated through listening to the other person and telling them that one understands them. Mutual respect is also developed by paying attention to the other person and vice versa. Valuing the other person also plays a part in the development of mutual respect. These two factors, attention and valuing, create a situation in which each person feels a sense of affirmation that they mean something to the other. This is about behaving in such a way that the other person is represented in the way in which they want to be understood.

The five elements described earlier are shown in Figure 3.7.