just as most of us thought everyone around us had the same skill-set we did growing up
A comment on reading people ~
When I was a kid, I relied on logic to determine my behavior (just as I do now), and as we are wont to do when we are young, assumed all the other kids did too. So when another child was mean or hateful, I thought they'd thought it out and had chosen to behave as they did. I had no idea they were just feeling shitty and sharing the magic (thank-you very much). My behavior was thought out and intentional ~ and if I'd hurt somebody thusly, it would have been because I meant to do that.
Imagine my amazement when I found out that a lot of people just fly off the handle and don't mean anything by it. Really? Okay, so I learned. There are many reasons for observable behavior, and in fact very few people actually do things for the same reasons I do things.
This same lesson applies in reading people. You've got to be able to step outside yourself and look at all the reasons for the emotion; not just those reasons that pertain to why you yourself might feel that way. It's all well and good to read the raw emotion and identify it, but without the context, which may be outside of your normal purview, you're only getting a partial picture.
And then there are the nuances in emotions. Excitement can appear as anger or anxiety; concentration can appear as withdrawal or depression; shyness can appear as aloofness; etc. The only way to be able tease out these nuances is to be able to put the feeling together with all the possible reasons for why.
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ninetydegrees
(no subject)
A comment on reading people ~
When I was a kid, I relied on logic to determine my behavior (just as I do now), and as we are wont to do when we are young, assumed all the other kids did too. So when another child was mean or hateful, I thought they'd thought it out and had chosen to behave as they did. I had no idea they were just feeling shitty and sharing the magic (thank-you very much). My behavior was thought out and intentional ~ and if I'd hurt somebody thusly, it would have been because I meant to do that.
Imagine my amazement when I found out that a lot of people just fly off the handle and don't mean anything by it. Really? Okay, so I learned. There are many reasons for observable behavior, and in fact very few people actually do things for the same reasons I do things.
This same lesson applies in reading people. You've got to be able to step outside yourself and look at all the reasons for the emotion; not just those reasons that pertain to why you yourself might feel that way. It's all well and good to read the raw emotion and identify it, but without the context, which may be outside of your normal purview, you're only getting a partial picture.
And then there are the nuances in emotions. Excitement can appear as anger or anxiety; concentration can appear as withdrawal or depression; shyness can appear as aloofness; etc. The only way to be able tease out these nuances is to be able to put the feeling together with all the possible reasons for why.