I’m guessing that in blog writing school, they don’t teach aspiring blog writers to insult their readers. This title is not intended as an insult. In fact, I believe you will find this post both reassuring and helpful.
A savvy, high IQ executive coaching client of mine, let’s call him Sam, was upset with a co-worker in another department, let’s call her Mary.
At Mary’s request, Sam’s group was to provide a service to Mary’s department. Sam needed certain things from Mary before his department could do what they had been asked to do. Mary had promised that she would deliver.
She didn’t.
Sam was irate. He took Mary’s failure to deliver the needed information personally. In his head, he 
reviewed the conversations he had had with her, focusing on signals that he decided meant that she had it in for him. He complained to me: “Mary never meant to come through. She bargained in bad faith. She is sabotaging my department for her own gain.” Spoiler alert: I hear this kind of thinking from clients all the time. It is rarely accurate.
It is true that Mary didn’t deliver what was promised. Sam’s interpretation of her behavior was what was open to question. I encouraged Sam to talk with her. I also encouraged him to suspend his conclusions until he had at least heard what Mary had to say. As I told him, “There might be more to the story than you know.” He reluctantly agreed.
In our next coaching meeting, Sam told me, “You were right. Mary wasn’t trying to sabotage me after all. In fact, she really needs what I 
promised in order to succeed in her work.” I asked, “So what happened? How come she didn’t come through?” Sam replied, “Two things. It turns out that we had not communicated well with each other. She thought I was asking for something far more complex than I actually need. And then, while she was in the middle of trying to put that material together, her father died unexpectedly. I’m so relieved that I hadn’t gotten snarky with her.”
As I’ve said so often, “The capacity for people to misunderstand each other is infinite.”
You may be thinking, “Well, that’s Sam. But I read people really well.”
Maybe. But it’s harder than you may realize.
I’ve been studying people professionally every day for 50+ years. I’ve spent 60,000+ hours in deep professional conversations with people. In these conversations, people grant me the privilege of seeing them at their most vulnerable. I’m driven to understand people. And yet, my interpretations about what drives someone’s behavior, especially when I’m upset, are often wrong – until, that is, I get more information, just as Sam did from Mary.
What makes reading people so hard? Lots of things.
First, people are very complicated. We have different, sometimes contradictory motivations. Here’s just one example: We want to be 
individuals, and at the same time are driven to belong to groups. For a second example, each of us is influenced by different experiences that shape our thinking. For a third, we define success differently, and even differently at different times. And there are many more examples. You can probably think of some yourself. The list of human complexities is longer than this blog piece allows.
Because of the way our brains have evolved, we often imagine negative motivations in others based on skimpy data. The part of the brain called the amygdala is constantly on alert for danger. That’s its job. It evolved to identify physical threats which our ancestors faced when they were living in caves, when threats to survival were everywhere. You and I don’t face such constant physical threats. But the amygdala continues to scan the environment for them, because that’s what it does.
When it can’t find physical threats to worry about, it focuses on social threats. It does a terrible job assessing social threats, like the one Sam thought he faced with Mary. By its nature, the amygdala thinks that it is keeping us alive by seeing others’ motives as sinister. Of course, there are a few sinister people around, so we can’t just say, “Shut up amygdala.” But we can bring a healthy skepticism to its perceptions rather than simply accepting our first thoughts as if they are brilliant insights.
To make things worse, our amygdala’s misperceptions are often fueled by media, both professional and social. People claim to know, with 
absolute certainty, why so and so did such and such. It doesn’t matter that they have never been within a hundred miles of so and so, much less actually spoken with them. They have no real data to work with. Truth be told, their interpretations of others’ behavior are mostly self-delusion, bending the meaning of someone’s behavior to fit their own biases and purposes. Honest curiosity is too often absent.
We can do better. When Sam talked with Mary, he made use of the EQ skill of Reality Testing. In other 
words, he got more information that he could use to test his theory that she had it in for him. He approached her with genuine curiosity about what had happened, open to hearing her side of the story. It wasn’t easy, because, before he went to see her, he had to give himself permission to admit that he might be wrong. We hate to be wrong!!
But humbleness about our convictions is an asset. A central character in the movie Conclave, which tells the story of the Cardinals picking a new Pope, says this: “The people who are really dangerous are those who don’t doubt their faith at all.” This from a man who has devoted his entire life to his faith. Doubt strengthens us. Ask questions! Get the facts.
Consider the potential damage we can do when we don’t question our interpretations of others’ behavior. Sam could have destroyed a perfectly good and essential working relationship, one he needs in order to be successful. Lovers can destroy the love they feel for each 
other by not going to the trouble of doubting first thoughts about why their partner did what they did. Parents, eager to raise children to be moral, may mis-read a child’s behavior as ill-intended, when with a few questions, they might learn that the child was innocent. Perhaps you can think of a time when you responded rashly to someone you care about, hurting their feelings, maybe even driving them away.
The amygdala is hard to tame, but not impossible. Reality Testing is one key way for us to overcome the well-intended but trouble-making amygdala. Here’s how Sam did it. He went to Mary with an open mind, and said, “Hi Mary. I couldn’t help but notice that you missed the deadline we had agreed to. I have to confess that at first, I was a bit upset. But then I thought maybe there were things that I didn’t know about that got in your way. Can you help me understand what happened?” As he told me, he was so glad that he hadn’t gone to her in anger.
You can find exercises to help build Reality Testing skills at https://theeqpress.com
