Secret of Socrates/ Reporter/ Social Interactions

Secret of Socrates
When applying the Secret of Socrates this past week it seemed to work very well. I applied this technique to one of teammates during our tournament. Of course in softball or baseball you are bound to go through hitting slumps along the course of a season. Being a captain I noticed one of the girls on my team was having a very bad experience at the plate. I began to calm her down by asking her, “ Are you seeing the ball?” She responded, “Yes, but I’m not hitting it as hard as I would like to.” Then I asked, “Aren’t you happy with making solid contact rather then striking out?” She then responded, “Yes, absolutely, I know I can hit the ball I just can’t find the perfect hole.” I reminded her to keep her head up and to think positive. She then stood up and continued to focus on the game and her next at bat, in which she hit a double. As soon as the inning was over she thanked me for reminding her to stay positive, and not to dwell on the negative.

Social Interaction
My most successful interaction this week was at the Cheesecake Factory in Columbia. Several of my teammates and I had went out for some food around the peak time of dinner. Not to our knowledge we had a server who just started working there about three weeks ago wait on our table by himself. I noticed the young man having trouble organizing his note pad and remembering orders in which people had placed. So I tried remembering what Carnegie said about praising the improvements. At first he kept asking our drink order over and over again until he got the hang of it, and was able to refill our cups with out a reminder. So I praised him upon his improvement and asked if it would be easier for him to just look at the order instead of consistently trying to remember? He acknowledged me and simply replied that he never thought about doing it that way. Finally, once we received our bills I noticed I was not charged for any of my drinks and he told me my advice helped a lot.

Reporter
As far as the reporter interaction, I was able to get coverage of the softball tournament we hosted here two weeks ago. Michelle was a big help in getting reporters and photographers to our game and advised me that there will be more coverage during the season especially in conference. She also gave me her email address and told me to email her if I had any further questions.