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Can you read people?

by matthewferry
7 replies
I just had a discussion with my gym partner. He mentioned that after 15 years of being a sales person, he can tell what type of person someone is as soon as he meets them.

I completely disagree.

I've been in sales for 19 years and I've trained tens of thousands of sales people. I have noticed that The Drunk Monkey (your mind) is designed to judge, assess and generalize as a safety measure.

You judge people by their facial expressions, clothes, posture etc. You assess the surroundings and the context of your interaction with them and then you process all that data in milliseconds and compare it to the past. The Drunk Monkey then feeds you a generalization about who this person is and what you can expect.

The problem is that you are now pretending to know who this person is. But you don't.

You can not know somebody's insides by looking at their outsides.
In my sales training I ask you to stay neutral and find out who the person really is. Ask questions, be curious and engage the mystery. Don't be quick to jump to conclusions. Your conclusions are just speculation.

To be influential, you must seek to understand someone and move into a state of total acceptance with them. As you do that you will gain deep knowledge of their desires. Now you have the capacity to advise them powerfully.
#law of attraction #life coach #life coaching #people #read
  • Profile picture of the author Kim Davis
    I recently spoke to a fellow that has been a car salesman for the past 28 years and he says he would not do business with anyone who is high maintenance. He has the made the judgment that if they look good then they think they are too good and he can't be bothered. He won't date anyone that is high maintenance either. I wondered how many sales he has missed out on. And yes he is single....hmmm
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  • Profile picture of the author Kirahster
    Also, I believe that if you think that you know the "type of person" that someone is then you will alter the way that you treat them.

    Last night, I met this lady that appeared to be very cold. I like to give people that act like this the benefit of the doubt. So instead of not being friendly towards her, I acted warmly back.

    What do ya know, she turned out to be very kind and gracious.

    Had i treated her how I had initially thought that she was, I would never have seen that side of her!
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  • Profile picture of the author EIH888
    I think you can read people in a kind of Jungian-archetype way, but you have to keep in mind that people have good and bad days and that influences their behavior.
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  • Profile picture of the author KenThompson
    Hello Matthew,

    Interesting topic.

    Originally Posted by matthewferry View Post

    I just had a discussion with my gym partner. He mentioned that after 15 years of being a sales person, he can tell what type of person someone is as soon as he meets them.
    I'm sure he can. As for accuracy or fairness, that may be another matter.

    I've been in sales for 19 years and I've trained tens of thousands of sales people. I have noticed that The Drunk Monkey (your mind) is designed to judge, assess and generalize as a safety measure.
    I'd add to that: Judge, assess, generalize, then judge some more. lol.

    People have told me their initial impression of me was that I'm arrogant. But this has
    always been before they ever spoke to me. After getting to know me, at least a little,
    they don't think that.

    My nature is reserved and quiet. So I'm sure that contributes to this inaccuracy.
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  • Profile picture of the author David Chung
    There is a practice of Face Reading from China in which you can supposedly gauge certain things about a person and their life through facial features.

    Malcolm Gladwell dives into the idea of 'rapid cognition', those two seconds your mind takes to reach conclusions the first time you meet someone, or read a book, etc, in his bestselling book Blink. I'm guessing this is similar to what you're referring to as the Drunk Monkey?

    Perhaps it would be more productive, instead of simply speculating about how many teeth the horse has, to go out and count them yourself. Perhaps take your gym partner and introduce him to maybe 10 people you know, and ask him to give you his 'gut feeling' about the person. Then you can see how many he gets right, how many he gets wrong, and have some sort of crude percentage of how accurate he is.
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  • Profile picture of the author countkenshin
    nice topic you got here.thanks
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