How to Become Better at Reading People

At work and outside of work, we are surrounded by diverse groups of people most of our social lives. In business, learning how to deal with various personalities could serve as an asset in establishing positive working relationships and attract more clients. Not only salesmen should learn how to read their customers in order to capitalize on successfully identifying someone’s personality traits and playing on their strengths and weaknesses. Successful Entrepreneurs and Business Professionals should develop an ability to read others and utilize it as an asset in their soft skill toolbox. To leverage the experience of successful entrepreneurs and business professionals, Moomkin.com have compiled a short list of tips on how to become better at reading people.

Here are some of the key points on what to pay attention to, with a few online resources that you could also learn from.

1. Don’t judge the book by its cover.
This says it all! For an untrained mind snap judgments are almost instinctive. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, outlines in a very convincing way that our impulsive desires to jump to quick conclusions about a person are most often incorrect. Retrain your brain to look for meanings behind those first impressions before you formalize more intelligent, fact-based conclusions about that person.

2. Take experts’ explanations of non-verbal behavior with a grain of salt.
Psychologists are trained on how to read and understand people and their behaviors. Their research and analysis helps us to learn more about various patterns. According to their findings, certain clues and mannerisms should provide a reasonable explanation to certain personality traits. For instance, based on psychology, folding arms means insecurity or defensiveness. However, if you see a person in this pose, don’t automatically label him/her as insecure. What if he is physically cold? The point is to learn how to read a person based on behavior patterns, then to identify the obvious inconsistencies outside of that person’s patterns. Many Successful Entrepreneurs and Business Professionals understand the power of nonverbal communication and put heavy emphasis on it in order to become successful. Do not base it on one isolated snapshot. http://ping.fm/ZHdCN

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3. Express your trustworthiness.
People tend to open up quicker to those who appear to be more trustworthy. To jump over the barriers, show your sincerity and genuine interest in that person. The layers and personal guards get peeled away faster when an initial trust is solidified. Once a person feels comfortable with your interest, he or she will be easier to decipher. http://ping.fm/gpksd

4. Learn more about person’s work and home environments.
To fully understand a person, these two key environments could reveal the most about a person. Are the two in conjunction with one another, or are they extremely contradictory to each other? This alone shows quite a bit about an individual’s personality.

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Article written and contributed by Kamilla Kay, PMP. She can be contacted via email at: kamillabk@hotmail.com


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