Thanks for all the effort. It is much appreciated.

I think what happens is we “recognize” and “react” to a bunch of patterns, but don’t necessarily know why, so we dismiss them. Once we know what to look for, suddenly our patterns make a lot more sense. For example, I didn’t realize why I could somewhat tell when somebody was making up stuff vs. telling the truth from their eye movements. I then re-read some NLP eye movements which point out a very subtle point most people don’t know. When we visually remember something, we look up and to the left, when we visually construct something we look up and to the right. Granted there’s exceptions, but you can test it.

Another example happens during meetings with people, when the stakes are high. You get glimpses of initial reactions, but then those that have a good handle on emotional intelligence, rewrite the stories they tell themselves and reshape their reaction. It’s sublte, but if you slow down replays in your mind, you can see it.

Incongruence is another good example. It’s subtle, but when somebody’s intentions or thoughts aren’t consistent with their physiology, or voice, or expressions, we pick up on it.

An effective technique my manager uses is he asks, “what’s your gut say?” I use this with my teams in the scenario where I find us rationalizing something that just doesn’t feel quite right. Somehow we end up down a path of logic that, while technically true, is off base because we went inductive when we should have gone deductive or vice-versa, or we didn’t know exactly what to pay attention to. The gut check gets us back on track.