Latent Ability?

[Tahroh]

I was chatting with Aynfean last night and mentioned that i tend to give really good advice. Although a majority of the time, I have no experience with the subject matter that i am giving the counsel on. I had a thought that perhaps it could be a latent ability, and Aynfean suggested perhaps a form of empathy. I was wondering if perhaps anyone else has had any experience with instances like this and whether you have any insight as to a possible reason for it?

[StarlitNox]

There must be some ability behind it, I totally suck at advising things I have zero experience with. :D Lucky you XDD

[aynfean]

Well like I said last night I think there's a link to a kind of psychic/clairvoyant ability. Whether it is a separate ability or a fringe of having either of those I'm not sure.

I've also noticed that my ability to give good advice correlates to how much time I've spent with the Goddess lately.

[Corr]

IMHO some people are good at people skills. You may give simply shitty advice, but are aware enough of your and their perceptions of the individual to be able to be perceived as being a good advice giver merely by virtue of your communication/social/whatever skills. I know on several occasions I have given people excellent advice that damn well would work if they implemented it without question, only to find they have disregarded my suggestions out of hand because of my lack of presentation ability. Alternatively I have given people shitty advice, they have also disregarded, in a bundle of compliments and social fluff that made the person feel better about their situation and resulted in positive changes within their situation devoid of my direct input.
There are dozens of variables to consider prior to examining potential latent abilities, not the least of which is your own influence on the situation or the person itself. Merely being present with a positive or negative attitude changes the perceptions (and ultimately the reality) of those you encounter. Sadly, without more info, determining latent ability or existent unknown ability/influence is premature.

I would recommend determining your own ability to influence people before declaring a state of empathic ability.

If you don't mind playing with people for your own amusement...
Try approaching every situation regardless of your own opinion or inclination in a negative manner, watch the results unfold.
Try the same, except with the opposite positive responses, and watch for the changes in those you encounter.
Break it down, try not to smile when dealing with people, or frown, try to give no facial expression what so ever and examine how your interactions with people change. Social ability, and unconscious communications are often linked to facial/body movements you may not be entirely aware of, but that make a huge difference to those you are communicating.

If on the interwebs your communication be, then eliminate emotional words, make statements of fact, and simply observe the situation or conversation. You can imaginatively respond positively for an extended period and then negatively for an extended period to determine if it is your presence, or your abilities that have the perceived results.

Of course this requires a certain detachment from the whole... social thing... Sorry if that is impossible. But without further info suggesting a path to pursue to extenuate or alleviate the ability/inability is impossible with any reliability.

Alternatively, meditate and examine your interactions with people to determine if they are responses to situations, impressions, or social ques (sp probably, sry).

[Pyrohawk]

My experience is that often I am better at teaching people to do something than actually doing it. For example, I have been snowboarding less than a year and I haven't even gotten an S-curve completely down yet without falling. However, I was able to teach my friend how to do it better than another one of my friends whose been snowboarding for years. I'm not sure if this is the same thing but maybe that helps.

[aynfean]

Oh interesting!

I wonder if they'll ever study empathy and psychic abilities as a proper science. Without all the freaky experiments please lol.

[grug]

Aynfean, if you're interested in the scientific approach you may be interested in this. I'll warn you that it's quite heavy; I needed a few breaks while watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew

[R. Eugene Laughlin]

I was chatting with Aynfean last night and mentioned that i tend to give really good advice. Although a majority of the time, I have no experience with the subject matter that i am giving the counsel on. I had a thought that perhaps it could be a latent ability, and Aynfean suggested perhaps a form of empathy. I was wondering if perhaps anyone else has had any experience with instances like this and whether you have any insight as to a possible reason for it?

Empathy is a natural response to the emotions of others; the response is, basically, to experience the same emotions. We all do that to a degree, though some are clearly more sensitive than others, by their personal nature, or possibly as a result of certain kinds of training. But there's no informational content in the empathic experience. I mean, unless you know a lot about a person and can infer why they're feeling sad, or happy, or whatever from what know about them and their current events, all you'd know is how they feel, the sadness/happiness/etc. So if you really are able to give advice about things you don't think you know, that's not empathy, that's something else that's coming to you though a more informational channel, intuition, for lack of a better term. We're all intuitive to some degree, and we vary in that ability in the same way. The experience of intuition is knowledge without a source, but of course there are sources, they just don't register as conscious thoughts when we're exposed to them. In early cognitive science literature researchers recognized that people (and apparently animals too) can learn things without intending to and without awareness that anything was learned. They called it, interestingly enough, latent learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_learning). Perhaps you're naturally very good at that sort of thing.

[aynfean]

@R Eugene: Woah didn't mean that scientific/technical.

@grug: I'll take a look at that at some time when I'm not just waking up lmao.