Kate Murphy

But the thing that's so wonderful about interpersonal synchrony is that you can never tell how your vibe is going to interact with another person's vibe.

And that can be a totally different alchemy than with somebody else.

So it's really hard to predict.

But in terms of what you can do about it, you can be really mindful of how you're showing up.

For example, if you're running late for a meeting and you arrive and you're sort of dramatic and say, oh, I can't believe the traffic, you're coming in and you're bringing that energy with you.

And that energy is contagious.

Versus when you arrive and you say something like, I am so glad I finally made it.

There's a big difference.

And so being mindful of the energy you're bringing with you into the room, because as we've discussed, people pick that up.

They embody that.

And this is mostly subconscious, but you can really set the tone and the tenor of your interactions.

And so that would be a way that I would say that you could really be mindful of how you're impacting other people and whether they connect with you or not.

Absolutely.

You also have agency in whether or not you connect with somebody and whether you're even paying attention to them, whether you're inside your own head and you're not attending to the other person.

Because synchrony is very much a dynamic process.

It's a dance.

And if you're not paying attention to the other person's move, you can't sync up with them.

So part of it is just really, number one, being aware that we even do this with another person on all these subconscious levels, but also really paying attention to people.

Actually, how I got this idea for this book, or what was the seed,

My first book was about listening, and I was talking with a neuroscientist, and he showed me how when the listener and speaker were really understanding one another and having a sense of connection, their neural patterns, their brainwaves actually synced up.