Learning to Succeed

Last week I had dinner with an old friend. I had grown up near his family and even though I had already left for college when he was born, the social gap in our ages diminished with each decade. He had several siblings, most of whom I had not seen in several years including his younger brother. As the wine flowed I asked Nelson, my friend, about his brother Alfie, and heard the hard tale of this fine young man. He married a local girl, but they had never been able to have children. Alfie seemed to change jobs frequently. Rather than the slow progressive climb up the employment ladder, he seemed, instead, to have spent his life climbing downward. The current financial climate hit him heavier than most. When unemployment insurance ran out, so also did his ability to pay his mortgage; the bank threatened foreclosure.

Nelson on the other hand, only fifteen months older, owned a prosperous investment company. He and his wife lived in a fine house overlooking Oyster Bay; his two kids had gotten good grades in high school, the older was now in college.

My question to him -- what made the difference between Alfie and him? Same parents. Both were middle children raised in an intact upper middle income family; both attended the same high school; both played sports; and both did well enough to graduate from college.

Nelson answered, “Alfie was always like that. He was always a little different, and in high school, he was never accepted by the in-crowd. He always seemed to be on the outside of things.”

Nelson found acceptance important and he worked at keeping up these social connections. During his stay with us, he took and sent numerous calls – all with the ready bonhomie that he did so well – and which seemed very credible. Over the course of the dinner, we learned of the extraordinarily wealthy men with whom he mixed regularly, at poker each week, or at their pools or on their boats. I presumed that Nelson worked his social network to achieve inclusion in ever richer heights, justifying this as good for business – yet obviously enjoying the personal opportunity to rub shoulders with those who had impressive toys.

In high school Alfie “always a little different” either did not care to be included, or he did not have the right social credentials for in-group membership. I’ve watched adolescents for well over three decades and I’ve noticed that some teens know the right topics, they know the lingo; perhaps even more importantly they have a fine tuned sense of timing. Much like a gifted actor, they know when to use silences and when to chime in, when to punctuate their stories with emphasis or when to stay dead pan. They know how to use their faces to communicate. They practice on the playing fields, in the hallways, in classes and at parties.

Recently I watched the pre-election speeches given by our sophomores running for next year’s junior class offices. Three positions; twelve candidates. I kept an informal tab on the number of times each candidate communicated with his or her face: a smile, a twitch of a dimple, crinkling laugh lines around the eyes, eyebrows raised, a wink, a smile or special tilt of the head. I noted when the candidates accompanied these muscular movements with direct audience eye contact. Some facial movements preceded the spoken word, some occurred simultaneously and others followed. The most audience provocative gestures seemed to exist in their own time, followed by a silent pause before the utterance of any vocal language.

When the posted results of the election appeared the next day, the two speakers with the highest number of intentional facial “sentences” also had won the election for junior class president and vice-president. Coincidence? What an interesting research project this might be.

Alfie never had this timing; he did not know how to use his body, particularly his face to communicate. Though also partially true of Nelson, the two differed by the degree of their efforts to change. Nelson practiced his speech and his delivery. I remember when he officed in Houston how he worked to master the various accents of East, Central and Western Texas. He learned to use sports and local stories to bolster his credibility.

Alfie, from his family and his affluent suburban high school, had the patois of a successful middle class man, but the impoverished inventory of his social tool kit hampered his ability to cope with situations that required more sophisticated approaches. Had he just acquired a simple social mirror, a hint of self awareness, he might gradually have adjusted. Many men marry that social mirror, and that often makes all the difference.

With Nelson, I recognized the slightest social limp so reminiscent of his siblings and parents. He differed from his brother only by behavior learned through self awareness. Like another friend of mine who trained himself to toggle off his native South African in order to secure better paying acting jobs on Broadway, Nelson worked at crafting his social skills, accents, dress, and mannerisms to near perfect in-crowd speak.

Nelson’s comment and my election speech observances seem to suggest leadership criteria honed in high school: a) the ability to use verbal, facial and body language to advantage in both formal and informal settings b) a well developed sense of timing c) the social mirror of self reflection d) the desire to increase ones communications skill set and e) the tenacity to practice, test out and revise.

Can high schools teach their students the skills needed for social success? Should they? Should they presume the role of social change agents? Are these leadership traits which can be learned?

Genetics and their pre-adolescent environments provided Nelson and Alfie with their base social ore with all its potentialities and imperfections, but it took the heat of adolescence and the high school’s infusion of new ideas and the opportunity to alloy various other metals, that influenced the quality of social steel with which they entered the adult world.

What prompted Nelson but not Alfie to add to his communications tool box? Can we bring communication down to basics? Is teaching a speaker to talk with his or her face anything more than a public speaking trick? We break other skills down to their alphabet basics, everything from reading to shooting baskets, what if we could do this with human relationships, well at least communication?

Teaching affective social skills will not overcome the 305 million-to-one odds of becoming president, but it might mean not losing one’s home.