We are all unconscious experts in reading other people’s intentions toward us.  We learned these skills in the woolly mammoth era because our lives depended on them, and the unconscious mind works must faster than the conscious mind.

But we are not very good at making this unconscious awareness conscious.

We can react with blinding speed, literally before we can think consciously, to duck a punch that some drunken lout throws in our direction, or to hop out of the way of an oncoming object.

That’s a good thing; it’s unconscious, and it works. But we are far less adept in general at noting consciously what everyone else in a meeting is really thinking, say, or evaluating who the chief ringleaders are in the party that’s against your plan for expansion, for example.

Yet those intentions are there to see. In the body language.  The problem is that, far from too little information about what others are intending, you actually get too much. People are constantly shifting, twitching, looking up, down, and sideways, raising their eyebrows, narrowing their eyes, scratching their noses. What does it all mean? How can you possibly monitor all of it in a room of ten people, or many more, and do so in time to react appropriately?

You can’t. It is too much information, too fast, and there is too much chaff intermixed with the wheat. Is Jane stroking her chin because she’s pondering your proposal? Or is she merely scratching an itchy chin as surreptitiously as she can? Is Jack folding his arms because he’s resisting your best attempts to talk the whole group into changing direction, or is he merely cold?

You can make yourself crazy trying to consciously monitor the constantly changing body signals of a roomful of people to little avail, because by the time you sort it all out, the conversation has moved on. Meanwhile, you haven’t been attending to the content of the conversation as closely as you probably need to.

Is there a way around this dilemma of needing to monitor gigabytes of streaming data about people’s intentions consciously and rapidly, while at the same paying close attention to the content of the conversations? There is. If, rather than monitoring the data generally, you look for confirmation of your own hypotheses about intention, then you can speed up and narrow the stream of information you need to take in.

So the real question is this: If you want to become a conscious expert in reading other people’s unconscious expression of their intent, how do you form hypotheses about that expression and confirm or reject them? The answer is to restrict your possible hypotheses to a few that you’ve identified before your meeting, conversation, or presentation. Then you can pose the single question to your subconscious mind and use that unconscious expertise we all have to give you a clear, reliable answer.

In the next 7 posts, I’ll discuss some useful ways to think about what other people intend:

Open — closed

Sincere — insincere

Allied — opposed

Powerful — subservient

Committed — uncommitted

You can, of course, add your own for specific situations that these don’t cover, but you’ll find that these work with a great percentage of human interactions where you need to monitor body language in detail.

I’ll examine each continuum in turn. The idea is to spend some time thinking about the nonverbal conversation in an upcoming interaction — an important one — and choose the continuum that most closely fits what you’re worried about or interested in, or represents the crux of the issue between you and the others involved.

Then, as I'll discuss, you let the power of your unconscious mind go to work and — as if by magic — you'll get a quick, accurate reading of what others are intending.  It takes a little practice, but it will change the way you 'read' others and it will improve your communications ability. 

Let's call it informed intuition.  I discuss it at much greater length in my book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.