Interpersonal experience. My father's legacy

"Interpersonal" is written with "I" as in "Isaac". Such a thematic way to start blogging in English.

Talk with me for about an hour and I would have at least hinted how dysfunctional my relationship with my father was. I'm sorry for the people who lived in a picture-perfect family; I'm just not one of them! Wont ever be! And that, among many other things might make a distinction of me from the others, right away. Nonetheless, as tragic as that intro appeared to be, my father taught me two major life lessons that influenced my personality and that might compensate my difference from others. One has to do with money management and finances - my dad certainly loved the "kachin" sound even more than I do. The other contribution to him to my world was all the (by that time) developing theory of the interpersonal intelligence. Interpersonal, across people, from me to someone else and so on: one does not need to be a scholar to split the word and infer the meaning. Interpersonal intelligence, hence, is the ability to understand others and being able to interact with them efficiently.Theory is easy, isn't? It has always been. People rarely acknowledge that they are terrible listeners or too full of themselves to see into the others.
Right, right, this is when I come down to my father's lesson. He was an evangelical pastor, one of the very few that by the early 90s were aware that leading people takes more than only reading the Bible. He was hungry for secular knowledge as well, and I remember being five, going over his library while he typed his sermons in an electronic typewriter (go figure!) and listening to him going for hours about what researchers called interpersonal intelligence. "It is all about truly caring about others" he said. I idealized my dad back then so I'm unable to say whether he accomplished this principle or not, but the idea remained in my mind for sure.
So that's how I became a good listener, thanks to my dad. It would take me years to develop the skill of talking and being socially desirable and fitting - I'm being pretentious here, but I can't go on that just now. We have been told so often that we are social animals that it sounds cliche. Here is news: we happen to be social animals, and that's it. Go on, try to listen and talk to others and see how they respond. Based on my experience talking to people from many cultural contexts, I just can assert that it is an universal principle, almost like gravity. Add humor to your conversation, give your opinion if you can - that is relating as well, but keep listening. Pretend that you care might elicit the same affective responses for a while, but no one would believe in you after then. We're talking about people here, and they are the most precious material one can work with.
I find hard to think that theorist still classify interpersonal intelligence as one of the skills a human might or might not develop. As if the shaping of proper relationships were optional and not a choice. I'm not saying "befriend the world, forget your enemy, let's make love not war, blah blah." I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of people interacting with us daily. We find them nice, so why would it be so difficult to truly care about them?

So yeah, I'm not stalker. I was just paying attention to what you said.