Building Your Fitness with Mind-Reads

Mind-reading affects all of our lives to a certain degree, and at times the consequences can be tragic. It’s not uncommon for Mind-reads to ruin friendships, end marriages, and create miserable work environments, as well as leading to a lot of bad decisions. If an inaccurate Mind-read never gets questioned, it may endure for years. We may live our entire lives with false, and sometimes painful beliefs about what the people around us think or feel. Consider the impact of believing “My father still hasn’t forgiven me for selling the family business,” “The tenured faculty have always looked down on me,” or “My wife regrets marrying me rather than the man she was engaged to when I met her.”

While we can’t completely eliminate Mind-reads—we’re bound to make some assumptions about other people, and others are bound to make some assumptions about us—we can go a long way in limiting their negative effects. In this and subsequent posts, you’ll learn not only how to counteract your own Mind-reads, but also how to become less of a target for other people’s Mind-reads and how to coach others to challenge their assumptions.

Transformation Skill: Trading Mind-Reads for Reality
In our experience, the communication behavior we discussed in the previous set of posts—Yes-But—is relatively well known. When people enter our trainings, they usually have some familiarity with Yes-Buts, even if they can’t always identify them in conversation. In contrast, the concept of Mind-reading often comes as a new revelation. One reason for this is that Mind-reads tend to keep a low profile. Many of them are never spoken out loud, so they influence our communication in more subtle ways. Another contributing factor is an issue we mentioned earlier—our Mind-reads often seem like facts to us. We may even view them as evidence of our keen perception or intuition about other people.

As a result, the odds are good that you’ve never before considered Mind-reads to be a problem for you. Before you heard about them in this blog, you may never have heard the term “Mind-read” or had any occasion to seriously question the assumptions you make about other people. If you do have a strong tendency to Mind-read, it’s important to realize that. For you, the strategies in this section may hold the key for bringing positive change to many aspects of your life.

Step 1: Self-awareness
When it comes to Mind-reads, a little self-awareness can make a big difference. Simply by seeing a Mind-read for what it is—your own assumption rather than reality—you instantly begin to diffuse its power. The first step is to start noticing the beliefs you have about other people’s thoughts and feelings, and then ask yourself where those beliefs are coming from. Are they are grounded firmly in reality, or are they based on gossip, hearsay, or your own worries or speculations? If you believe your boss is disappointed with you, is it because he said that in your performance evaluation, or because of the expression on his face the last time you talked? If you’re sure your son doesn’t want to come home for the holidays, did you hear that directly from him? Did someone else in the family tell you? Or did you jump to that conclusion because he hasn’t bought his plane ticket yet?

After you’ve recognized that your belief about someone is a Mind-read, the next step is to acknowledge what that means: you might be wrong. This may not be easy. It’s difficult for any of us to let go of long-held beliefs about the people in our lives—whether they’re about a business rival’s true intentions, a colleague’s hidden agenda, a child’s unspoken feelings, or a parent’s silent regrets. Challenge yourself to admit the possibility that your assumptions could be inaccurate.

There’s one final step in building your awareness. You haven’t fully understood a Mind-read until you’ve examined the effects it has on you. What is the impact of having that particular Mind-read, without knowing for certain whether it’s true or false? You might consider how it affects your view of the other person, your relationship with that person, your view of yourself, your future actions, and so on. Then ask yourself about the impact of testing your Mind-read against reality. What would it be like to learn that the assumption you’ve been making is true? What would it be like to learn that it’s false?

As you consider the impact of different Mind-reads, you’ll likely discover that some don’t affect you very strongly. For instance, you might believe that your colleague is a little bored with her boyfriend, that your real estate agent would rather be a gardener, or that your neighbor doesn’t really like your dog. You’re not losing any sleep over these issues. In cases like this, where discovering the truth wouldn’t make much difference to you, you might just want to notice that your assumptions may or may not be true.

Other Mind-reads have far more serious implications. You might worry that your new boss thinks you’re not qualified for your job, that your spouse is considering leaving you, or that your friend is feeling suicidal and too ashamed to tell you. In these situations, you have compelling reasons to discover the truth—to potentially save your job, your marriage, or your friend, as well as to recover your own peace of mind. To do this, you need to move on to Step 2: reality checking. Stay tuned!