Bill Gallagher recounts a workshop moment where he misread a participant's closed posture as disengagement. He argues you need to check in directly rather than trust your first impression of someone's state, and that empathy requires validating your read before acting on it.
So I remember a woman that was in a workshop with me and extended a long form workshop. And I saw her with her arms crossed and her body kind of hunched over, slumped down in her chair. And she looked upset. She looked upset the whole time. And I was really concerned about her stress, her well, being, that kind of thing, interpreting her body language. And I just really felt like it was almost a distraction to me. And so at the next break opportunity, when I had a chance to go check in first, I did. I asked the other people supporting me in the room, hey, what do you notice about that gal? Like, what is there? I was almost afraid to confront her about it, but they said, oh, they'd noticed a little bit too. So I went to her and I said, hey, how you doing? What's going on? Well, she just opened up. Now that I was speaking to her directly. She, like, really opened up and talked about how inspiring this was and how connected she was and how my stories and examples were resonating with her and how I'm like, wow, you look really, like. I hate to say this, but you look tired. And she said, oh, yeah, I am really, really tired. And I'm not all asleep, my back's hurting me and all that. Here's the thing I noticed. We get a lot invested in our ability to read and interpret people. And sometimes we're just plain wrong. Sometimes people say the wrong things. We misread it. Sometimes people even lie. Sometimes there's other things going on. Maybe they've got some indigestion, maybe they didn't sleep a lot last night. Who knows what. But if you overweight your judgments, assessments, opinions of things, you'll end up buying into and misreading clues that in some other situation. So got to go confirm and check things. Don't read people at a surface level. Don't assume you know what's going on. Actually check in and connect.
