Is Your Ability To Read Minds Spoiling Your Relationships?

During this track Jacci talks about how much of what we think is true is actually stories, assumptions and mind reading. Although this is a perfectly normal unconcious process that is designed us keep us safe, sometimes it can get in the way of our perceptions, communication and relationships. Jacci shares a simple question to check if what you are thinking is actually what is happening, opening the door to compassion and better relationships.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this track which is all about how we can really spoil our relationships by mind reading and by making assumptions.

So my question as we start this track,

I want you to think about this as we go through,

Is are you a mind reader?

Now this is this is something that I learned when I was learning NLP and that's why I'd like to share this with you because I found it one of the most useful things to use as a tool when it comes to helping me in my relationships and NLP is just such a huge huge technology and I like to break it down into these little chocolate chunks,

These tiny little morsels that are really really useful.

So thank you for joining me today and let's talk about are you a mind reader?

So why do we mind read?

Why do we make assumptions?

Why do we take the smallest amount of information and sometimes almost none at all and create a story around it?

Well actually this is part of evolution.

This is an evolutionary thing that's happened for us and it helps to keep us safe.

What it helps us to do if we take ourselves way back in time to when we didn't have the big societies that we do now where we lived in small discrete villages and we would have just a small number of people around us.

If anybody came from outside of those groups that we were living in then we'd want to understand straight away whether this person was somebody that we could trust,

Whether this was somebody that we'd want to have around us.

It's an evolutionary imperative and in fact it's not just unique to humans it's actually unique to all life.

It is about being able to know if a stranger that's coming towards you is somebody that you can trust.

Now that means that we've got to make some really quick snap decisions about if that person is somebody that we can trust.

So what our unconscious mind does and it's absolutely hard wired to do is to pick up from all kinds of clues that might be there for us to see and experience and it also then goes through our back catalogue of experiences,

The things that we have experienced in the past for similar situations and how they've played out and it does all of this in an absolutely miniscule amount of time.

So it takes those clues,

It makes those connections,

It creates assumptions and stories and then it can tell us straight away whether this person is safe to be with or not.

It's a basic allowing us to trust or not and also if we're anticipating anything else it means that we can perhaps project into the future as to how this whole encounter is going to turn out.

So that's quite a normal natural process,

It's how we're wired to be.

But it can sometimes get out of hand and sometimes we can use that,

What our unconscious mind is doing,

Of course we're not consciously doing this,

This is all very much in our unconscious and start to make assumptions that aren't particularly true or useful.

Example,

If you were,

I'm absolutely certain,

I know it's happened to me,

I'm sure it's happened to you,

That you have been walking past somebody that you perhaps know and they have walked past and maybe ignored you.

And as they've walked past and ignored you,

You've started to make assumptions about that behaviour,

That you've started to take clues from other things,

That you may have started to create a story as to why that person was ignoring you.

And you'll also add into that a bit of a mind read.

You'll be trying to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it and you'll be thinking,

I know what they were thinking,

I know what they were doing and it is all assumption and mind reading.

Because the fact of the matter is that they might just have not seen you,

Maybe they're completely preoccupied,

Maybe something else is going on that they were absolutely consumed by.

It may not have anything to do with you at all.

So clues and connections,

Assumptions and stories,

Mind reading all come together.

And so there's huge downsides to that kind of mind reading activity.

The huge downsides are that you can be very,

Very wrong.

How many times do you see somebody sat with crossed arms?

Does it always mean that they are being defensive?

No,

They might just be a bit cold.

If you see somebody with a stern face,

Does it actually mean that they are angry?

No,

That may just be,

That may just be actually their resting face.

Also,

We tend to read into intent for emails.

We may read an email and we may take it that this person's perhaps being aggressive or not answering your questions or whatever that situation might be.

The fact of the matter is that unless we were a mind reader,

We would not know what somebody's intention is until it becomes very plain and obvious.

99 times out of 100,

It's mind reading.

So because this has such a big downside to our lives,

It can affect our relationships.

And everything that I know about NLP that I really love to share with you is how it can help your relationships be so much better.

And I've used this particular way of thinking around,

Is somebody intent what I think it is,

To help my relationship certainly with my husband.

So I'll give you a quick piece of context here,

How what I've done helped me and it's by using a very simple question.

So as soon as I find myself in that realm of mind reading,

Making assumptions,

Creating stories with almost no or very little content,

And I can ask myself this question,

It's a very powerful one,

And that is,

How do I know that?

How do I know that what I'm thinking is true?

Where's my evidence?

Where's the evidence my love?

Now I use this very much with my relationship with my husband.

I've used it in loads and loads of ways but I'm just going to give you a quick story about how that helped me.

So I got married when I was 19,

19 and 12 days old actually,

And my husband was just over 19 himself.

So we kind of grew up together and it was back in 1978 when there are a lot of assumptions around what a woman's role would be in a marriage.

So I just kind of like did everything.

I did the cleaning,

I did the washing,

I did the hoovering,

I kind of almost made him rely on me,

But that was all because of mind reading.

Over time I started to build another story around that which was,

He doesn't care about the house because he leaves me to do everything.

Actually what happened was,

I'd made him reliant on me.

He had no real need to do what the jobs around the house,

Because I was doing it,

Why would he?

But I didn't interpret it that way.

How I saw it was,

He doesn't care about the house.

That was my frame of reference.

The reason he doesn't do it,

Is because he doesn't care.

And that really got me to the point where I was very upset,

Uptight,

It was a constant nagging in my own head,

He doesn't,

He doesn't care about the house.

And then it's like,

He doesn't care about me because I'm having to work hard.

Now when I started to learn NLP,

The question that I asked myself around that,

Because it was a thought process that was no good for me and no good for a relationship,

It was causing a lot of bad feeling between us.

Not that he knew about it,

It was all in my head and me snapping at it.

My question is,

How do I know that?

How do I know that he doesn't care about the house?

How do I know that he doesn't care about the fact that I do it all?

How do I know that?

And the more I asked myself that question,

What I found was,

There was no evidence.

There was no evidence that he didn't care about the house,

There was no evidence that he didn't care about the fact that I was doing all the work.

I had made a really big story and I'd made a really good one too over several years.

So what did I do?

After I've asked my question,

How do I know that?

And there was no evidence,

Absolutely none.

I started to ask,

I started to observe,

I started to see what he did and how he did it.

On my side,

I became curious because I'm asking the question,

How do I know that?

And now I'm open to really observing what's absolutely going on.

I stopped being annoyed.

I stopped having that conversation in my head,

That imaginary argument that left me feeling really,

Really resentful and only seeing what confirmed for me what was in my imagination.

What I started to do was just be very open about things and actually ask him.

I've got a lot on my plate today,

I've got several things to do in the house,

I'd like you to do one of them,

Is there any one of those that you could do?

Okay,

At the beginning,

This is many years of him doing nothing.

There is a little bit of resistance but I offered him the possibility.

Now several years on,

I've got to tell you my husband absolutely loves a vacuum cleaner.

That man loves a vacuum cleaner.

He will do top to bottom of our house with that vacuum cleaner and it will strip it down and he'll clean it and he'll put some essential oils in it so that when he's actually using it,

It smells nice,

Oh my word,

Is that a million times better.

So how did all of that happen?

I addressed my story.

My story that he didn't care about the house,

He didn't care about me because I did it all.

I stopped and asked my question,

How do I know that he doesn't care about the house?

How do I know that he doesn't care that I am doing all of this?

And looked for the evidence and I could find none and that's all because of the one question,

How do I know that?

So my invitation to you is to start to look for those times when the story that you have in your head that's actually causing a barrier,

Causing friction in your relationship with somebody,

Whether it's somebody you work with,

Whether it's a member of your family,

Maybe it's a friend,

Whatever that might be,

Remember you are not a mind reader,

Nobody is and allow yourself to put the brakes on that very natural process of creating a story,

If that story is absolutely doing you no good and spoiling your relationship.

So thank you for listening and taking the time to listen to this track.

I'll leave you now and if you want to follow me that would be fabulous,

You'll always get notification when my next tracks are coming up and please visit some of the others if you haven't already.

Thank you for listening,

Much love,

Take care.

Reviews

Wow! Really eye opening talk. I tend to listen to meditations And not talks on here but I'm doing your course right now and this morning a bunch of your talks were recommended. This title hit home and piqued my curiosity. After listening, I can really identify this pattern in my mar riage and sometimes in my encounters with my grown son. I will be mindful of it now as I learn about nlp and more ways to deal with the patterns I've created.