Playing Well With Others With Eric Barker
Laurie Ruettimann
Trailblazing Workplace Expert | Bestselling Author & Speaker | Top LinkedIn Learning Leadership & HR Instructor | Still trying to fix work.
Welcome to this bonus episode of Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Eric Barker. He’s the bestselling author of the new book Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. Eric is a repeat guest and came on the show in 2018 to talk about his book and amazing newsletter called Barking Up the Wrong Tree, where he tells us why everything we know about success in leadership and life is mostly wrong.
Eric has blogged for years about human behavior and self-improvement science. In his first book, he tested the maxims of success that we all grew up with, like “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Now in his new book, Eric takes the same approach, but this time focusing on relationships. He wants people to question whether love does conquer all and if a friend in need is a friend indeed. After all, since the pandemic began, relationships have taken a hit.?
Eric debunks the myths around marriage, loneliness, relationships and even work. It is always fun talking to Eric, and if you want to learn more about the research he is doing, grab his new book Plays Well With Others, which is available everywhere books are sold.
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Loneliness: The Epidemic
Loneliness is something that we get wrong. Eric talks about the research of John Cacioppo, who found that loneliness isn’t about the amount of time you spend with people but about the quality of your connections with those around you.?
“Loneliness is how you feel about your relationships — just being proximate to people, if we don’t feel a connection with them, that’s really not very nourishing,” Eric says. “Loneliness is correlated with every negative health metric you can imagine.” Loneliness is subjective, based on how we feel about our relationships.?
And in today’s world, loneliness is an epidemic that deserves extra attention. Eric shares that, long before the pandemic and continuing till the present day, some of the social connections we had with people have been displaced by parasocial relationships.
“There’s a lot of research that during the 20th century, we used to hear about bowling leagues and the Elks lodge, and people used to be more religious. And there were all of these things that used to tie people together and add meaning to their life and create community. And basically, a lot of those are gone now,” Eric says.
It all started with television. Eric explains that our TVs became these pseudo-relationships that began to pull us away from communal relationships and activities. With the evolution of technology, we now deal with social media platforms that effectively replace face-to-face contact.?
Now social media isn’t evil, because it has many positive aspects, but we need to be vigilant when using it. “The amount of time we spend on social media ends up coming out of the buddy budget. It ends up coming out of the time that we do spend in actual face-to-face relationships or community activities,” he says. “So we’re often cannibalizing our actual face-to-face and group activities with social media. So we just need to be careful about how we use it.”
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Handling Difficult Issues Better
We get many things wrong in life, but more often than not, we get a lot wrong about relationships, specifically romantic relationships. It’s hard at times to express our emotions, but Eric found that bottling up feelings for the sake of peace does more harm than good.
“The big issue is people think that if we get into this serious issue, we’re going to fight, and if we fight, we're going to get divorced, so I better not bring it up,” he explains. “And the truth is, that’s the wrong way to go, because yelling and screaming really only leads to divorce 40% of the time. What more often leads to divorce is people bottling up and people not expressing their emotions.”
Simply relying on body language is overrated—especially when it comes to a romantic partner. In research done by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago, about two-thirds of the time when you think you know your spouse, you’re wrong.?
“There’s a pretty low ceiling on how much better we can get at reading people. We need to ask them. Or another strategy is, instead of trying to improve our reading skills, we need to make them more readable. Most often when we’re able to read people accurately, it's because they are readable people,” Eric shares.
Develop Lasting Relationships
First dates can be nerve-wracking. Despite what some self-proclaimed “love coaches” may say, one-on-one activities like coffee aren’t the greatest way to get to know someone. Eric found that doing an activity or being around other people can help you get more context and improve your readability.?
“Both first dates, but also for long-term marriages, doing stuff that is exciting and fun. Putting yourself in a context that already provides the excitement, the fun, the energy, this is really powerful,” he says. These activities should continue throughout the relationship.
Eric shares that there are many times in which marriages will go through a phenomenon known as marital entropy. It’s when the relational energy dies down for some reason or the other. It’s not something that we can treat with a simple activity, and we might not be able to recreate the feeling of new love, but Eric believes that we can leverage our surroundings to rekindle our connections.?
Eric cites research comparing date nights with exciting activities versus those with pleasant activities. “In psychology, they call it emotional contagion,” he says. “The fact that the energy around you, the emotions around you, you are going to associate them with whoever's nearby. And so that can help to revitalize and keep a marriage going instead of just Netflix and pizza again.”
People in This Episode
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This quote from Eric Barker brings up such an important point: close proximity to others does not automatically translate to having fulfilling relationships. While remote work is often blamed for disparities in company culture, it has in fact exposed an ongoing lack of effort to engage employees at many businesses. If managers want to promote meaningful connections in the workplace, they need to lead by example. This means recognizing the efforts of their employees. This means creating programming that brings people together regardless of where work. This means listening to employee feedback in order to better promote a healthier and more productive community.
Senior HR Partner | I help people navigate complexity and change.
2 年Loneliness isn't an easy topic. I think he nailed it though!