14. Dec, 2023

Level Up Mentalizing: Amplifying Social Intelligence in Professional Settings

Do you often struggle understanding others’ perspectives and emotions, especially at work? Are you keen on forging stronger relationships with your colleagues? If so, you may be interested to learn about mentalizing. In this blog post, ‘Level Up Mentalizing: Amplifying Social Intelligence in Professional Settings,’ we’ll explore mentalizing, how to adopt a mentalizing stance, and how it can help improve your work relationships.

What is Mentalizing?

It is a complicated word, yet the basic idea of mentalization is straightforward. It is ” a focus on mental states in oneself and others, especially in connection with the explanation of behavior” ( Bateman & Fonagy, 2007, p33).

Mentalizing involves being aware (self-awareness) of your thoughts and emotions and understanding the thoughts and emotions of others (other-awareness). It helps make sense of behavior by interpreting it based on underlying mental states.

Mentalizing is a form of imaginative mental activity about others or oneself, namely perceiving and interpreting human behavior in terms of intentional mental states (e.g., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons).

Interestingly, we naturally do this, and yet it can be beneficial not only to understand the behavior of someone at work (missing deadlines, being difficult during meetings, etc.) but also to take it a step further by being curious and posing what might be going on in someone’s mind, what might have happened to lead them to feel this way.