here is some other way :
(1) Pay attention to your first impression because it might be the only time you can view a person apart from their “spin.”
Malcolm Gladwell’s big idea in Blink, his breezy, much-maligned but nevertheless useful bestseller, is that our brains have evolved to make split-second decisions. Often this pristine moment prior to any framing or selling will give us valuable insight into the person we are encountering.
In the month after I read this book, I began to take notes on what I thought in those first seconds and then waited to see if these insights were later born out. In one instance, I observed a stunningly attractive woman at a club talking in a group and noticed my brain saying that’s a bad one. Something just a little too cunning showed in her face. There was also a certain note of emotional hardness. Later, when I encountered her at the bar, we talked in a friendly way for 15 or 20 minutes. Interestingly, she now seemed very warm and straightforward — entirely unlike my prediction. Still, because I had already judged her so negatively, I didn’t relate to her as a potential romantic interest. This neutrality on my part along with the fact that we had an interesting conversation — a rare occurrence in Los Angeles, as she would later say — left her intrigued. She actually came back to the club several days later to ask the bartender if he knew who I was. She found me interesting but was not used to men acting so indifferently toward her. Was I married? Was I gay? How could she get in touch with me? The bartender was a friend and he called me.
A few dates later my intuitions turned out to be entirely right. She was living with someone else — married or not, I would never discover — but playing the field. I suspect that she also had some very bad habits. (She would disappear into the bathroom for longer than normal periods of time, then come back oddly energized.) Besides this, she had a chillingly manipulative quality that left me uneasy. She would call me late at night, or drop by unannounced, and then not return my calls for days, only to surface with some near-unbelievable story and an apparently renewed desire to see me again. I bailed early and was spared the worst.
Of course, initial reactions can be entirely misguided. In most cases, for intuition to be reliable, you need to have relevant life experience. You also need to know yourself well enough to detect your own biases and neuroses, and know when they might be interfering with your judgment.
But very often, if you just listen carefully enough, your brain serves up the right answer straight off the bat.
(2) Learn to watch what the face expresses, not what people try to express with their faces.
Around this same time, I was reading about Paul Ekman’s research on “micro-expressions,” involuntary flashes of true emotion that last less than a second — temporary breaks in the ongoing poker game we humans normally play with each other. In spite of some training through Ekman’s website, I don’t believe I ever became as skilled as others in picking up these constant involuntary clues given off by people’s faces, but this was nevertheless a paradigm shift for me.
Instead of paying attention to what people say (always a temptation for a highly verbal person like me), I realized it was just as important to watch the body since this is something people have much less control over. If you want the truth — the hidden truth — here is where you will find it. The body is a foolproof mirror of one’s inward intentions. The face is such an intimate part of the body, and so closely tied to what is going on in the mind, it simply can’t help but reveal what is on the inside.
There were a few absolutely remarkable moments on dates or in professional relationships in which, just for a split second, I saw someone’s true emotion — lust or disgust, anger or envy — and knew how to proceed. I was convinced of Ekman’s thesis, and to this day I always pay attention to these little flashes of the true self.
(3) If you want to know who a person is, or what they really mean, pay attention to how they speak as much as to what they say.
What a person says will be selected based on what they want to believe or what they want you to believe. But how they say it will be largely out of their control, and it is here where you can often find very valuable information.
First, there is a person’s habitual way of speaking — things like accent, diction, sentence structure, and the way they frame and organize their ideas. The accent is a very subtle thing; to identify an accent and understand what it reveals requires a lot of familiarity with the specific culture in which the language is used. (Part of what impressed the woman at the bar mentioned above was that, after talking to her for just five minutes, I guessed correctly that she was originally from a “small town in Michigan,” something that I was able to do because I had once lived in Ann Arbor.) Accent not only reveals region but also social class, or aspiration to social class. There is almost a tone of superiority or modesty to different accents. In this regard, it is also worth noting whether someone’s accent seems strenuous and unnatural. Are they trying to be something other than what they have always been? Besides the accent, there is the question of diction. What kind of vocabulary is this person working with? Vocabulary reflects experience. Is this a reader? A poorly- or well-educated person? Does their word choice reveal an awareness of some professional patois or another? If they use big words, how natural does this use seem to them? Do they misuse words? There is also the general style of thinking revealed in the speech. Do they tend to the abstract and the theoretical, or do they speak in simpler and more concrete terms? Do they speak in long, multi-clausal sentences, semi-colons appearing virtually in their well-organized constructions, or do they amble along in a Trump-like stutter? What kinds of cultural references are they at home with pop culture, sports, and news, or history, literature, and science? if they seem “cultured,” do they seem pretentiously cultured or naturally so? In all these ways, one can make some good guesses about where a person is from, how well-educated they are, and what they do with their time.
Apart from these habitual aspects of a person’s speech, there is the question of how they speak at the moment. I could try to offer some rules of thumb, but the point to make here is too subtle for that. Really, what we are looking for is just the sound of the speech, the music of it. The voice is an organ of sound no less expressive than a guitar or piano. Tempo, rhythm, volume, tone, pitch — all of these reveal something. What does the sound say to you? Are a person’s words flat and without feeling, or are they sprightly and full of emotion? Do they convey confidence or timidity? Masculinity or femininity? Sensitivity of bluntness? Indifference or passion? Rigidity or easygoingness? Is the tone a little too striving; can you sense something false in it? Are they trying too hard to hit the notes just right? Or do they speak in warm, calming tones of someone who has nothing to hide and no agenda to advance?
From the very beginning of life, before we even speak a language, we are greeted by both faces and voices. These locate our original means of contact with other minds. I would rate the voice as being every bit as powerful a revelation of the person as the face: no less distinctive, no less full of expressive nuance.
(4) How a person moves tells you who they are in the world.
The body itself, apart from face and voice, is an instrument of great expressiveness. There is a whole science here and I remain an amateur, but here’s what I know. Posture is famously revealing. What does their spine say? What do the shoulders say? Is this a person hiding and turning in on himself, as if preparing to defend from a beating, or is this person open and assertive? Watch the back, the shoulders, the chin. A person’s gait, the way they stride along, is even more full of information, for now, we see the whole body in motion. Where is their line of sight as they walk? Do they look around, look straightforward, or do they look down? Notice the arms, follow the movement of the legs. Are these precise linear movements, or are they lose and easy? Are they going somewhere, or are they going anywhere? Is this person a conformist or a rebel, normoxic or eccentric, dutiful or free-spirited? Shoulders speak of confidence or a lack thereof. Hips can too. Hips also speak of sexuality. Can you imagine them having sexual intercourse? Are they discrete in this matter or do they flaunt it? A person’s sexuality is full of information about what kind of balance they have struck between their animality and the requirements of civilization. What do you see?
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(5) People dress for the roles they play — who they believe they are and who they aspire to be.
Our clothing is our home away from home. All clothing functions as a costume, preparing the person for the part they aspire to play. It expresses who we want to be in the world. This one can be a little harder to read, since fashion changes so quickly, but there are some basic questions one can ask. Does somebody dress up all the time? Do they dress down all the time? And, crucially, what does this all mean? (Sometimes dressing down can be an expression of social superiority, just as dressing up can be an expression of social inferiority). Most importantly, who are they trying to look like? Where are they getting their script? (And if they are indifferent, then what does that mean?) In clothing, we have a powerful tribal identifier. People are highly imitative. They dress to fit in and impress. Who does this person want to fit in with? What archetypes are they invoking? Figure out whose style someone is copying and you will know what their tribal affiliation is or what they want it to be. You will have a great source of insight into their values and loyalties.
To read it right you’ve got to know the idiom of fashion — what this or that style means in the culture. Clothing might seem trivial, but it is a profoundly expressive part of our humanity. As someone who has had dozens of dating relationships, I have found it a very reliable rule in these matters. If I am offended by a woman’s taste in clothing, this clash in aesthetic sensibility is likely suggestive of some deeper incompatibility. We conceive beauty differently! That’s important. The women I have had the best relationships with are always women whose fashion choices I admired right from the start.
(6) Meta-principle: Use the power of metaphor to tap into your own intuitive and unconscious comprehension of people. Let your own body lead your judgment.
Let’s turn this around now. How can being more physical and less cerebral yourself help you to understand other people?
There are many things we know that we don’t know we know — insight that is just beneath the level of consciousness. Often this subconscious knowledge is best accessed through myth, metaphor, symbolism, and other ways of understanding that bypass the usual highly cognitive, linguistically-based sorts of thinking that so many of us get hung upon. Carl Jung is of course one person to read on these topics. Roland Barthes can also give one a sense of how pervasive such mythic levels of meaning are in our experience of the world. At any rate, the amount of insight one can gain from learning to use one’s mind in this different way is tremendous.
Here are a couple of admittedly silly examples to help make this point. In those first years of dating after fleeing the academic world, I started asking myself what I would think of any woman I was dating if she were a man. What kind of dude would she be? Would I be friends with her? Would I enjoy hanging out with her? Would I respect her? Even though what I wanted from women was quite different from what I wanted from men, this was a useful exercise for getting past the purely sexual aspect of my attraction to a woman and allowing me to think more disinterestedly about who she was. Another trick I used was to ask myself what kind of dog she would make. A big dog or a little dog? A barky dog, or a quiet dog? Would she be one that shits the rug all the time and attacks the mailman? Or would she be a calm, loyal, affectionate best friend? This sounds ridiculous, no doubt, but it’s remarkable how clarifying these types of exercises were. They allowed me to entirely reframe a problem in order to bring new insight to my thinking — in effect exploiting latent knowledge that I already possessed. I understood dudes better than women, and also probably dogs better than women, so by making these comparisons, I was enabled to better tap into my own intuitive sense for who a person is and to gain clarity about their likely character. Again, it’s an example of moving away from merely verbal thinking and engaging in a deeper kind of observation of the person one seeks to understand.
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