There are several tools to recognize people’s feelings and thoughts without having to ask them about it. By studying this article, you can apply them in a variety of circumstances.

Learn to read yourself.
The first thing to start with if you want to learn to read people is learning to read yourself. You need to know yourself a lot better than most people know themselves. But the good news is that you need to get to know yourself from a certain point, namely, you need to understand at what moments you form an opinion about a person, and at what moments you change your mind about him.

There are about 7 billion people in the world, and it is clear that you have not formed an opinion about most of them. You do not know whether you trust them or not, love them or hate them, you simply have a neutral attitude towards them.

Defining an opinion of a partner
And so you meet with one of these strangers, come up to him, start a conversation and after five minutes of conversation you already have some opinion about him.

You can already say something to yourself like, “You know, I don’t trust him, there’s something repulsive about him” or “He’s great, I’d love to talk to him” or “I think he’s very smart, I’d like to work with him”.

In fact, it’s been a couple of minutes, you haven’t looked through it or your CV and you don’t know much about it, everything this man has told you may or may not be true. All you could see was a subtle hint. So if you get used to these hints, you can tell yourself what’s relevant.

How do you learn to read people

Step 1. Self-study.
You need to examine at what point you are forming an opinion about a person.

Step 2: Focus on the person you are talking to (see where the person’s attention is directed).
The first thing to do is to focus their attention. Attention is the easiest thing to identify. Many of us do something intuitively, but if you highlight some points, the first is visual contact. You understand that if a person listens to you or says something and looks around or at your watch, it means they want to leave.

You understand this intuitively. Another thing that’s hard for people to control is the position of the body. If you are tempted to leave, then your body changes direction itself: “Yes, yes, great, see you tomorrow!” and the person leaves. By the same principle, if you are in a room where there is a person with whom you want to communicate, but talk to another person, then your body will involuntarily start turning.

Where your hips, your legs, your torso are directed, in general, where different parts of your body are directed, are indicators of where your attention is directed. And the last thing that can be attributed to your attention is the person who is talking to you or to whom you are talking, and the way you are involved in the conversation, what questions you are asking.

The main tasks when contacting a stranger are:

to involve a person in a conversation;
to keep the person’s attention.
If you are not involved in the conversation, you will react to the conversation like: “Yes, yes, great”, “Yes, very interesting” – this is distraction. A person’s involvement in a conversation means questions on the subject – a supplement. In this case, there does not need to be a question. The action may simply be a comment, which refers to the topic of the conversation. It is an excellent indicator of whether you are interested in the person, which is the first step to forming a contact.

The second step is to understand whether you are holding this attention. Whether your interlocutors will be interested, or vice versa. And how do you know if the person is interested in what is happening in front of them? Here we will turn to emotions.

Pay attention to the emotions
What you need to know about emotions is that they are mostly focused on a person’s face. This is the most important place to look at emotions. Of course you can find them in other places, but more than 80% of emotions are focused on the face. And that’s where you have to put your voice. The intonation also says a lot. So, you have to start, of course, with the recognition of facial expressions.

How do you learn to read people

Microexpressions
Everyone knows what joy looks like, but it’s harder to recognize micro-expressions on your face. For example, if someone’s experiencing some emotion but is trying to hide it. Let’s say that you’re being interviewed for a job and you’ve been offered an offer that exceeds all your expectations, but you don’t want to show it, you don’t want your employer to know it.

They say: “We are ready to offer you a salary of so many rubles, well, an interesting offer. And we see that a person loses control over emotions for literally one moment. In this case, a smile slipped. And we understand what emotions a person experiences. But micro-expressions are not a basic skill for reading people.

To be able to recognize patterns of behavior
Back to the situation when, for example, you go through an interview and your employer says, “We have studied your resume, we will call you back” – this is a template, and you realize that they may never call you back. So, first of all, you need to learn how to predict them. It’ll really help you train your recognition skills.

To make guesses about how people behaveā€¦
For example, to make predictions about how the conversation will develop among the people around you, which you can follow for some time while in a bar or cafe. Does a girl like a guy and the like. Try to predict the next situation and then observe whether it will happen or not.

You notice these things, but if you do not apply them in life, and try to predict what will happen next, it will all be a waste of time. The interesting thing about putting it all into practice is what you prove to others, and above all to yourself whether you’re right or not.

Applying a variety of templates, whether it be loud talk (be sociable), be able to keep visual contact, try to understand the reaction of others, if they react negatively, it is not what suits you. If you learn to identify emotions, you can make assumptions about what is causing them.

If you start making predictions and watching other people, you can learn to identify how the conversation is going. You can also analyze the situation and ask yourself “What happened? By analyzing other people, you will not only learn to read them well, but also to understand what causes emotions in people, you will be able to better attract attention, become a more interesting person, to become what you would like to become. We are not born charismatic or uncharismatic, confident or insecure, it is just a set of your thoughts and actions.