Become a better judge of character

I began this goal after I was on the receptive end of a bad friendship in which I was taken advantage of. It was under the guise of friendship and (I’d like to think) a gradual changing of each of our characters.

Sometimes it’s hard to see beneath the exterior. It makes me suspicious of politicians and overly charming/nice people. I’ve seen perhaps one too many turn out to be nothing but artificial fakes.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t read people wrong. I haven’t been trusting my gut. I’ve been discounting what it’s been telling me all along. I’ve been having a lot of deja vu lately. There were reasons to why I didn’t like certain people in the beginning, I just didn’t listen to myself. Now, I do. I’ve been paying more attention to why I don’t have a good feeling about people in the initial first encounter and I’ve learned that my internal compass has pretty good directionality. I look at this as being more observational than judgmental. I’m not jumping to conclusions or fabricating information, just noticing the signs that are already there.

I was rather sheltered growing up, so when I finally got out into the world I had to go to the school of hard knocks full time. And hard knocks I received aplenty. Mostly I’ve kept my head down and continued enjoying time by myself, but the things I want to do require human interaction. I can put it off no longer. I will be studying body language and relationship politics so that I can more accurately view other people. I’m not a great fan of judging people, but I think it’s inevitable. If it’s going to happen anyway, I might as well get it correct. The next step is to find information about this. I’ve studied a lot of psychology, so I think learning to read people will be the first order of business.

I think more people should do this. While so far I’ve never encountered a serious problem, sometimes misjudging a person’s character (either because the person’s a charmer or the judger is blinded in some way) can have serious consequences.

I thought I was really starting to have this down (so much so that I almost marked it as Done! last week). Then of course I learn that my friend’s husband (I always thought he was a great guy and have in general always been impressed by their relationship) has been cheating for who knows how long. How did I miss the signs that he was a douchebag? Sigh Back to square one.

Sometimes I’m good about this and I can totally peg people. Sometimes I’m totally off. It makes me curious about reading body language cues and how that can tell us about people.

Sometimes your first impression will be wrong. But one can always take it to be a learning experience for the next time.

I found parts of it especially relevant to this goal. Sometimes you only have a few moments or minutes to pass judgment on someone for whatever reason. How do you best use that time to read their body language, see between the lines of what they’re saying and other things?

...I would say it’s true that you can tell the character of a person not by how he treats his equals, but rather how he treats his inferiors.

...because I need it for my job, where I don’t really meet most of the people I work with face to face. I have their files on hand, but it’s not the same as actually talking to them. I’d like to think that so far I’ve made the correct judgments when assigning people and figuring out which ones are the trouble ones.