Robert Greene: The Key to Becoming a Superior Observer

there's an animal part of our nature which is we completely take appearances for reality that's sort of the source of our problems and our misery to be honest with in life so the front that people present the way they look the way they talked was their words we sort of take it face value and although we might think or we might know from reading a book or whatever that you can't always trust appearance this is kind of a cliche we can't control ourselves so it makes us extremely vulnerable to Charming people to charlatans to con artists to politicians who say one thing who do another to relationships terrible relationships where we fall in love with exactly the wrong person to the worst kind of hires you know I do a lot of Consulting work I've been doing it for over 20 years now the number one problem I deal with is I hired the worst person in the world and they're making my life hell right and why did you hire the wrong person because you judge them on their Charming Smiles their appearance their their smooth talk their resume which you can conceal a lot with your resume you didn't look behind the facade and look at what's underneath the character so this is kind of ingrained in our nature it goes back thousands and thousands of years it's extremely difficult to overcome right and I have the problem too I deal with it all the time and and I have to go through a process where I I step back and I say I don't want to be paranoid but this person is so nice and pleasant is there something else going on behind behind the curtain that's there you know and then sometimes I tell myself no I have ways of judging that they're that they're consistent consistency between the face and the reality but oftentimes there is not and I've become very good at that kind of detect detection which I've been doing my whole life how do you get good at that a lot of human communication I estimated 95 it's just a number is non-verbal right so we don't pay much attention to that because we're so word oriented right we're so embedded in language that we think everything in terms of what people say but unconsciously without even realizing it we're continually judging people on their non-verbal Behavior right so there's their eyes their smile are different from what they actually say but we're not really so in kind of a pre a natural intuitive way we understand that we don't trust those kind of judgments right so we we rely more on what they say than what the signals that we pick up foreign in the course of a conversation if you if you keep it kind of open and flowing people's eyes will light up when a certain topic is mentioned it could be their children it could be their work it could be their parent it could be something in their life that their whole body language changes they relax I know if you suddenly ask me about the Los Angeles Lakers I was excited I would be very excited because that's one of my deep passions in life is basketball and the Lakers yeah but people you got my hometown guy LeBron James oh you're from Cleveland I'm from Ohio wow from Ohio but I how do you feel about this I feel bittersweet because I wish he stayed in Cleveland OH you did I wanted to win one more there but you know I live in LA now so it's nice that he's here at least and then I can go to some games and watch him that's right because I didn't get to go watch games in Cleveland so that's right so I'm like you know if he's gonna go anywhere this is supposed to be that's right that's good yeah yeah I didn't used to like LeBron but now I love him but now you love him great player in the world yes for sure so you light up about that look at you you're getting excited talking you can see it if somebody inadvertently brought that up they could see that kind of oh wow man I could talk for hours about the Lakers you know but there everybody has a topic like that it could be something a little more intellectual more interesting than sports but look for you're not paying attention to people's body language is another thing so as an observer as a good listener you're not just hearing their words you're looking at their eyes the their facial expressions I have a chapter on that how to differentiate between the fake smile and the genuine smile wow and it's it's very real you know a real smile lights up the whole face it Alters how the eyes look you want to see when you've hit something like that or when you've done the opposite you get that kind of scowling micro expression you right but people aren't observant they're they're in their own shell they're not seeing people are constantly giving out signs of their likes their diversions you know their values and you're missing them because you're not paying attention take your your wife or your husband if you say to yourself I don't really understand them I think I do but a lot of the times when you think you understand them you're just simply projecting your onto them your own emotions step back and say today I'm going to observe her let's just say from my point of view in a different way than I normally do and I'm going to look at her non-verbal communication because I'm a big believer in non-verbals and today I'm going to glean one truth about my wife or spouse or partner that I had never noticed before and I'm going to try and see perhaps get to the point where I can begin to understand her perspective so if for instance there's an argument or a disagreement here's another instance where you step back and you go stop being so self-righteous and maybe try and take the step of understanding her point of view so you know so these are sort of baby steps that you take in in life you can use this in your office where you think you you know your colleagues but you don't know them and they might be having thoughts about you that aren't very pleasant that you don't want to confront step back and start observing them and I have many many examples in the book about how lessons on how you can start observing people observing their body language seeing the subtext behind their words you know seeing their patterns of behavior you know for instance you'll notice sometimes we all go through this that when we see our boss we get a kind of body language and a nervousness that's it's unusual but when we see somebody else like a friend suddenly our face lights up and we're much more relaxed and happy all people are like that so you want to see how somebody reacts to you when you meet them when you come up to them and how they react to other people and notice that there's a great difference when they see you and suddenly they're very nervous around you or they're very excited that will tell you a lot about yourself and about them you're not being observant you mentioned Milton Eric's before we were talking about how incredibly observant he was his what he was fascinated with was how incredibly unobservant people are let's go deeper into Milton Erickson well Milton Erickson is amazing figure he's the person who created basically hypnotherapy and was the main inspiration between behind NLP and when he was about 18 years old he suddenly got polio and as his polio spread his entire body was was paralyzed even the only thing that wasn't was his eyeballs he could move he could look at people he had some ability to see move his eyes a little bit and so imagine I can imagine myself I have a very active mind imagine you're paralyzed in bed you can't read you can't watch anything no television no entertainment people can read you stories basically but how incredibly bored you'll become and how frustrating and you can't do anything for yourself you know you'd go crazy so what Milton Erickson did as he was in that state and he was living in his house and people were visiting his him is he decided he would observe people on a much higher level now he couldn't say anything he couldn't communicate because his mouth was paralyzed as well so all he could do was Observe and observe people closer and closer and so he noticed that as that as he progressed in that there's a there's this second language that people speak and this language is non-verbal it is in gestures it is in tone of voice it isn't just your body posture and slowly over months and years of being paralyzed in this position he literally mastered this second language he could tell from the way his sister moved her hair like that or moved her head that she was feeling some resentment towards her other sister he noticed as you said that there were like five different forms of no that someone could say no I don't want that Apple when they were offered to it but they really meant yeah I really do want that apple and so he noticed that there were all these different variations of no depending on the tone of voice he could hear people in another room talking about him and through that the tone of their voice he could understand what they were really trying to say about him and the subtext behind the words that people have and so as people talk and they use words to conceal what they're thinking their bodies revealed what they're actually thinking behind the words through their nervousness their tone of voice their eyes the eyes and the mouth tell you incredible amounts of information Milton Erickson mastered this language and as he got older he used this in his therapy where he would have patience enter his room he became a psychoanalyst and he deliberately placed his desk at one end of the corner so they would have to walk into the room and he could understand from the way they walked and their gate whether they were nervous whether they were excited whether they wanted to change their lives or not he was so brilliant at it that people later in life people thought he was psychic he could literally read your thoughts it was unbelievable so the point of the story was that humans have this ability to unders to master this second language put yourself in the position of our earliest ancestors I mentioned this earlier they don't have language yet their survival depends on getting along with the group and knowing like you're hunting and where where is that leper what's going on but you can't say anything you don't have language yet so your ability to pick up fear in the eyes of a fellow group member or to pick up excitement your survival depended on it so I maintain it our ancestors were virtually psychic in their ability to attune themselves to the non-verbal communication that people are constantly admitting so the idea in this book is we humans are all constantly emitting information about our real emotions it comes out non-verbally and you're not picking up these signals you're so focused on people's words that you're missing this other reality which is so incredibly eloquent and I try and instruct you in the book about how you could become a superior Observer of this

Channel: Outliers Insight

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Keywords: psychology, outliers insight, outliers, insight, philosophy, Verbal Communication, Verbal And Non-Verbal Communication, Nonverbal Communication, Non Verbal Communication, Non-Verbal Communication Example, Non-Verbal Communication Skills, Body Language, Communication, Robert Greene On Non-Verbal Communication, How To Master Non-Verbal Communication, How To Become A Superior Observer, Laws Of Human Nature, Robert Greene Books, Robert Greene Quotes, Milton Erickson, Nlp, Hypnotherapy

Id: jI4xwd_8xbI

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022