Reading a person to persuade a person

How can someone possibly know which point of a “persuasive message” isn’t working if the premise for their message is based on a person who they can’t read or understand? It’s a question which goes beyond profiling and takes us into the world of persuasion engineering. 

In this post we’re going to reveal how behavioral profilers train themselves to gain a clearer and more accurate read of the person they’re observing. Understanding how profilers train themselves to perceive others will then help you manage your own perception/ better position your message, and communicate more persuasively and influentially. 

Find four examples of the people reading traps which profilers must master:

As Profiler’s we become aware of and take ownership of our own:

1. Shameful experiences: Helping us observe rather than judge the shame we observe within others is essential. Why? Judgement forms a pretext which precludes our ability to accurately read and persuade the person/ Subject. 

As Profiler’s we become aware of and take ownership of our own:

1. Aggressive impulses: Helping us utilise any aggressive reaction to others as a means of understanding what we aggressively reject within ourselves. Why? “We know others as we know ourselves” and “what we reject reflects”.

As Profiler’s we become aware of and take ownership of our own:

1. Shameful experiences: Shame is a result of repressed guilt - if we haven’t owned our experience and by implication, ourselves. We won’t be able to spot and stop future occurences of the state which led to the undesirable behavior. If we’re unconscious to the nature of our own experience, we will likely miss the opportunity to empathise with the experience of the Subject. (Missing the opportunity to adapt our communication to fit their presenting state. 

As Profiler’s we become aware of and take ownership of our own:

1. Immoral urges: If we’re unable to truly know ourselves as human beings. Example: for light to be present there must also be a shadow, this is the nature of life - pretending otherwise is to blind and therefore hamper one’s efforts to becoming a genuinely self accepting human being. Why is this important? What we reject in ourselves we will likely reject in and blame others for...

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Summary: 

“The better the profiler, the smaller the sense of separation which exists between themselves and their Subject”. Profilers work to master their understanding of the human condition by accounting for their own predisposition to fall into the exact same human behavioral traps which they train to accurately observe. 

Next: 

We’ll review four pitfalls which profilers must avoid/ be accountable for: 

Profiling requires taking yourself out of the context:

“Projection” describes the tendency of human beings to attribute their own darkness to someone else. Unconsciously rejecting themselves, they scapegoat another through projecting and labelling their own weakness as #notmine, “owned by the other''. 

• So an accurate profile requires we learn to remove ourselves from “the read”. 

Underlying mechanism: Right v’s Wrong

“As long as I’m in the right I’m okay, because I can be the strongest, fittest and intelligent version of myself when I’m in the right. I find it hard to be intelligent, significant and strong when I’m embarrassed, feeling guilt or shame. In fact I reject myself when I feel bad and social rejection from an evolutionary perspective can mean death, so it feels dangerous for me to do to myself what others may do if I admit to being wrong.” (Most human beings). 

• So being wrong is a gift which takes you closer to the truth?

Underlying issue

The inability to accept personal responsibility reduces the sensory acuity we have within and towards ourselves. Emotional and cognitive self manipulation is the enemy of reality, hence the expression, “it’s better to have a bitter truth than a sweet lie”. Why? The sweet lie which we tell or sell ourselves actually contributes to the unconscious distortion of what we’re observing inside ourselves and the person/ Subject we’re observing. 

We’re all ostriches

I remember as a child learning how an ostrich will bury its head in the sand as a response to threat. It seemed ridiculous to me at the time, yet as a profiler with an apparently advanced set of skills, I can still do this myself. For example: If I identify a weakness within myself, I almost never take out the weakness as soon as I recognise it, rather there’s a process of denial, self-rationalisation, projection, frustration, self-acceptance and then change. The point? If you’re not aware when you bury your head in the sand, or aware of the process which precedes taking your head out of the sand then your ability to read and manage your own behavior, let alone the behavior of another is limited at best. 

Summary:

What we’re presenting here are the personal basics - helping you to gain an effective read of yourself/ others. Quite literally, “opening your mind to yourself opens your eyes to others”.  

About you:

You’ve learnt over time that to be accepted into your social circle, there are certain behavioral traits which are required to gain and maintain social membership.

Yet:

At some point in your earlier life, you crossed the normative threshold of social acceptance and found yourself at the receiving end of condemnation, gossip or ridicule. This experience led you to adapt your behavior to either fit in, or check out of that social group altogether. 

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

— Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938)

So there’s a need to understand what we’re masking/ hiding behind, yet for the most part there’s a complete lack of awareness from top to bottom of most leadership structures - there is in fact a game of pretend being played by all of these people. Let’s cover this next:

What we’re observing as profilers: 

People in Leadership positions tend to wear the following masks: Significance, Strength, or Intelligence masks. Employees further down the value hierarchy tend to wear approval, acceptance or pity masks, (See: Chase Hughes, Ellipsis Manual). These masks represent social needs and weaknesses, for example: A person with the need to be seen as intelligent needs to feel seen as intelligent. See them as intelligent and they may relax enough to take off their mask and reveal themselves. Demonstrate intellectual superiority and they’ll become stuck behind their mask and unable to cooperate effectively with you.

So here’s the issue for a Profiler: 

The process of making the unconscious conscious requires that we become vulnerable enough to experience our own social needs and weaknesses, “we’re all suffering and we’re all wearing masks, yet we pretend we don’t”, (Chase Hughes). To witness/ experience the game of pretend others are playing, we first need to recognise and account for the game of pretend that we’ve been playing ourselves - to do this requires a considerable amount of discomfort...

For example, if as a profiler i’m feeling insignificant and I portray myself as significant, I’m lying to myself and failing to take accountability for my own mindset - this will result in a poor read of the person I’m profiling. Why? If I’m not present with myself, it’s not possible to accurately read the person I’m meeting. When I step outside of the read, I need to take ownership of the fact that I acted out on my need to be significant, and here’s the thing, when you own your story about yourself as a person/ profiler - you are set to succeed.

The solution:

Gain awareness of your impulses and desires. Begin to observe your behavior for what it is, good or bad, it’s feedback based on actual rather than wished for evidence of your state of mind and being. Choose to change/ improve one relatively small but important behavior at a time for each scenario where your presence is required. “Take care of the small things and let the big things take care of themselves” - with this in mind: 

At the bottom of the page you’ll find a practical set of steps which will enable you to begin making the behavioural improvements we’re recommending.

Article notes/ psychological insights: 

You don’t want to think of yourself as a bad person and neither do the people you observe, which is why we’ve recommended that you spot and stop your own self deception as the basis for spotting deception in others. If your Subject isn’t at the point where they can be honest with themselves, the fact that you don’t judge them may be all they need to get honest. 

There are no neat categories for human behavior and there are no absolute truths, we can only observe what’s there which is why we recommended you learn to take yourself out of the context. Like any human being you have the capacity for living well or badly. Present behavior is a major indicator of future performance, so owning the moment and bringing your presence to the present is the greatest gift you can give to both yourself and the Subject.

You’re only as strong as your weakest behavior, if you’re in the business of reading people, your greatest areas of growth will come from the area of your greatest resistance. Resistance is the source of strength, resistance builds muscle and destroys flabby ideas and behaviors. 

To lead and influence the Subject, your requirement as a profiler is to lead and influence yourself to take on one area of weakness at a time. In this respect, patience is the greatest weapon and humility is your greatest defence. Why? If you’re not humble you will be humiliated on this journey, set backs, pain and suffering is all parr for the course of mastering your own behavior, knowing yourself at a level where knowing others becomes second nature will be the outcome. 

Something I’ve seen over the course of my career:

A major part of truly knowing yourself requires that you begin healing your psychological wounds from early childhood. Your need to protect yourself and the mask you’re wearing will likely be rooted in your early hurt. For the most part, I’ve seen successful people turn their personal pain into their greatest area of strength, and I’ve seen the world and the lives of those around those peope transformed. These people had no choice but to confront the pain or be consumed by the pain. These same people are some of the most natural people readers you’ll ever meet. They’ll spot your pain a mile off, they’ll be compassionate and they’ll be low in judgement.

You may not be responsible for the pain and trauma you’ve suffered in your earlier life, but you are responsible for this present moment - again and again, I’ve seen people who take personal responsibility for themselves develop excellent people reading skills and I’ve seen their lives transform the lives of those they work with as a result of becoming fully formed human beings. 

As Jung noted, “we can’t correct undesirable behaviors until we deal with them head on”. The shadow self acts out like a disobedient teenager until all aspects of your experience are acknowledged and integrated. Jung insists that, “the true aim is not to defeat the shadow self, but to incorporate it with the rest of the personality. It is only through this merging that true wholeness can be attained”. 

What I’ve provided and presented you with is a road less travelled, it’s the road of behavioral profiler’s around the world who understand that the journey to knowing others begins and ends with themselves.

Exercise & Steps for developing behavioral awareness:

Physiology

How’s your posture: Upright, relaxed and broad or something else? 

Where’s your breathing: Abdomen middle or upper chest? 

Where are your hands and legs: Closing or opening the space in front of you? 

Social hygiene: Well fed, watered, rested with a good personal presentation? 

Movement: Slow, smooth and balanced? 

As we go through the process of gaining behavioral awareness, we gain an insight into the unconscious thoughts, feelings and impulses which have been driving our social behavior. It’s at this point we have a choice, “to be or not to be” - real or fake. This is an essential step for the profiler because it’s at the point where the “road narrows”, (Chase Hughes) coming to realise that the journey we’ve taken has never truly been about reading other people as much as it has been mastering ourselves and by implication our interactions with others. 

Next:

Having developed basic physiological awareness, what are the situations which trigger your:

1. Best self? 
2. Least confident self? 

Next:

1. What beliefs do you have about the people, places, things, activities or information which trigger the best version of yourself?
2. What beliefs do you have about the people, places, things, activities or information which trigger the least confident version of yourself?

Next:

1. Get curious about how you came to create the positive belief/ story you tell yourself in your best moments? (Tip: You’ve given yourself permission to succeed in this area for a reason, so it’s interesting to find how you can trigger that permission elsewhere).
2. Get curious about how you came to create the negative belief/ story you tell yourself in your worst moments? (Tip: You’ve given yourself no permission to succeed in this area for a reason, so it’s interesting to find how you can begin to:

• Observe how you speak to yourself prior to, during and after that situation
• Observe the direct effects that this communication has on your ability to be present
• Observe how you start to suffer when you’re not present and stuck in a story
• Notice how the suffering you experience manifests itself physically and emotionally, (and affects both the Subject and those around you). 

Next: 

1. Choose a behavior which you wish to keep - give yourself permission to transfer your beliefs and behavior into the easiest area of your life to change.
2. Choose a small behavior which you wish to adjust - give yourself permission to do away with one belief and behavior in the easiest area of your life to change.

Having successfully made these two simple choices:

1. Who and how are you differently? (Start with a reasonable hypothesis)

Insurance: 

To ensure you succeed: make sure that you take the decision to allow yourself to experience failure as feedback, immediately deciding on one small behavioral change which you’re determined to initiate at any point where you fall short. 

Final thought:

If you want to go fast, learn to go slow by training your mind via this nine minute meditation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw7XBKhZJh4 

... and if you like this article, your friends and network will likely like, share or comment too, that's good for them, me and you.

Warm regards and good luck,

Robert.