Many misunderstandings arise when social awareness is lacking. Why? First off, because without social awareness you cannot understand why the others are behaving in a certain way: for instance, gossiping, ignoring you, or trying to manipulate you. You then have fewer options for managing their behavior. We can see below the major consequences of lacking social awareness:

• You take your colleague's or boss's behavior as a personal attack and feel hurt, when no hurt was intended, and it was nothing to do with you.
• You cannot read your audience's feelings about you, your ideas or your organization. Therefore, you pitch your presentation at the wrong level, raising hostility and negation in your audience, which requires considerable relationship repair to recover from it and, because you lack social awareness, you don't know how to repair relationships.
• If you cannot read other people's feelings, you cannot be a successful negotiator. You are not able to persuade or influence them. On the other hand, you also cannot realize when someone is lying to you.