Reading People

Can we really know what someone else is feeling and therefore thinking or does that fill our heads with unnecessary noise? When we make up the thoughts and feelings of another person, that is a reflection of our perception and thoughts not theirs. We can only perceive through the lenses of our own thinking and when we realise this, it stops making so much sense to make up the psychological contents of other people. And that's then something else you don't have on your mind. What a relief!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying,

And I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today I am going to talk about reading people.

I remember my first kind of forays into this idea probably came from previous coaching training and NLP training and things like that,

Where you were told or taught how to read people,

Looking at eye movements,

Body language,

Tone of voice,

What was happening on their face,

Their facial expressions and things like that.

But then I thought,

Well,

I thought about my previous career as a teacher and how we start to even teach children back then to read people.

Maybe even before that,

Actually,

Let's go further back than that when I'm thinking about it.

Like even when we say to our children,

I'm angry with you,

And they learn to recognize that that look on the face means something.

And maybe that's when it starts,

This idea that we know what's in somebody else's head and why they're feeling the way they're feeling or even what they're feeling.

Because if a small child is,

The words coming out of the mouth and the child is learning from the parent,

That that is the expression that parent has towards them in the moment,

Which goes with this certain look on the face that might be angry or upset or whatever.

And that learning maybe starts even back then from very,

Very young.

And of course,

That learning is happening absolutely without knowing.

This is not deliberate learning,

It's accidental learning.

And it's also learning that is absolutely filled with misunderstanding.

And that's the basis on which we are functioning as adults now,

Which is fine when she starts to see through that.

And it doesn't really matter where any of it came from,

Really.

It's just understanding that that's kind of how we learned that there was an idea that there was something going on inside somebody else that we could somehow know without actually hearing it,

Even just through seeing an expression on somebody's face.

But then I thought about in primary school when I taught children to read.

And in the reading scheme books,

There would be characters with very clear,

Angry expressions or happy expressions or whatever.

And you would know from the text what that character was feeling,

What they were thinking.

And so again,

We're starting to say,

Oh,

Yes,

We know what's in somebody else's head.

We can know just by looking at their face what's inside their heads.

And then I remember doing activities with children who were perhaps struggling to learn emotional cues from other people of any description.

So they wouldn't have known even that somebody was a little bit angry at all.

Even if they were shouting,

They wouldn't have known.

We would have had very simple emoji faces for that child to learn what each emoji face meant.

I mean,

I don't know about you,

But when I put an emoji in a text or a message,

I have to really consider what it actually means because there's so many of them.

But these were much simpler and they were to help children understand that these kind of faces mean certain things.

And I think where it maybe goes wrong is that we start to think that's got something to do with us.

That's maybe the confusion because I think you can kind of know when someone's perhaps a little bit off or not feeling okay,

But you can't know why and you can't know what's in their head.

But it starts so young,

This idea that we do.

I remember we used to have a phase in what we call in the UK year four,

Which is the eight and nine-year-old children,

That the girls in particular would start to say,

Start to get very upset with each other and fall out quite a bit.

And yeah,

Girls do fall out quite unpleasantly in primary school and quite prolonged periods.

And there would be these accusations that so-and-so was looking at me in a certain way in the cloakroom.

I know that what they're thinking about me,

That kind of story.

And I see that in the people I work with,

That that is pervading our adult experience of life,

That we really do think that not only we can read people,

But that it's got something to do with us.

The anger on somebody's face,

The disdain on somebody's face.

I remember a while ago,

Maybe a couple of years ago,

Maybe not quite that long.

I can't remember.

Time's a bit of a blur at the moment,

Isn't it?

I saw a post on,

I think it was on LinkedIn,

From a woman who said that she experienced going into networking events where there were mostly men and being looked down upon,

Being judged,

Being seen as not supposed to be there,

That kind of thing,

Without them saying any words at all.

And when I sadly got involved in this post,

Which I hadn't,

But I did say,

Well,

How can you know what somebody's thinking just by the look on their face?

And she was absolutely adamant that she did.

She was adamant,

This woman,

That she knew exactly what somebody else was thinking just by looking on their face.

I mean,

You don't know,

Do you,

How somebody else is feeling or why,

Particularly more why they're feeling that way and what they're thinking while they're feeling that way.

But we do,

You know,

We do see it in other people.

And I think what's worth realizing here is that everything we see in the outside world is created through our perception of the outside world.

It isn't created by the outside world.

So when we look at other people and we say,

You know,

That other person's thinking such and such about me or about whatever,

Or even that person's think,

Feeling such and such,

We can't really know that that's true.

In fact,

Having a healthy dose of skepticism about that is probably quite helpful.

My fiance visited one of my relatives yesterday.

When he came back,

He said that she'd shouted at him,

That she'd ranted at him basically about something.

And I,

You know,

Much as I was sympathetic towards him and,

You know,

Spoke to him about what happened,

But I then spoke to him about the fact that,

You know,

Our perception of this person is laced with experiences of her shouting us.

And so sometimes we can hear shouting.

I know sometimes he says I'm shouting and I don't think I am.

I don't think I'm particularly loud,

But we have to realize that we have certain sensitivities,

I suppose,

Towards certain ways that people are because of that layer upon layer of,

You know,

Belief system that tells us we're this way,

The world's that way,

Other people are this way,

Other people treat me this way regularly.

And with that belief system underplaying how we go out into the world and what we see,

There's a deleting.

I mean,

The NLP delete,

Distort,

And generalize comes to play.

It's knowing that that is happening all the time.

I don't work with NLP,

But I just love,

I do love the delete,

Distort,

Generalize phrase because that is what we're doing all day,

Every day.

And there is something really powerful in knowing that that's what's happening because it means when we're,

Because what tends to happen then is we feel a feeling,

We feel an uncomfortable feeling about what we think somebody else is thinking about us or what they're thinking about the situation or whatever from the made up thinking that we've made up in their heads.

And when we feel that uncomfortable feeling,

We think that's coming from the other person.

But really that feeling is not,

It's coming from what we've made up about what the other person's thinking.

And knowing that can just bring some relief because I think in the moment of knowing that we know to give ourselves time and space to settle down and the realization of the story can really help us to do that.

So yeah,

Reading people,

Watch out for that one because it turns out you might be able to read a book and you've learned very well how to do that,

But you learn a lot of misunderstandings about reading people from the adults around you,

From the reading scheme books,

From the strange sheets with emoji faces on.

So perhaps that does need a healthy dose of skepticism as you go through life.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now,

But bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the Calmcast with Clare Downer,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.