| The first step was learning to make eye contact. If you're not looking at people, you're not even getting the chance to read them. I just didn't look much at people for the first 21-22 years of my life. I remember reading a bunch of articles about "how to make eye contact". I was on sites aimed at people with aspergers, as they're a niche most likely to actually need that kind of advice. Then you practice. And occasionally get feedback from people. Everything will be awkward as first, but do something long enough and it becomes a habit. The feedback is important, so your new habit is actually a good one. Then I read some books on body language, and I got this DVD by Paul Ekman about microexpressions. I've since read some stuff suggesting that may be bunk, but the DVD was still valuable because it showed me what a bunch of different expressions represented, and gave me feedback if I was correctly classifying them. (There's a big book of facial expression coding that lists expressions standard across cultures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System) Then I combined the two. Talking to people, looking at them, and noticing their expressions. A bit one was looking for laugh lines by eyes. If someone is genuinely amused, their eyes will smile in a way that they won't if they're just mouthing a smile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Duchenne_smile After that, it was just practice. Talk with people, pay attention, see if the results match what you thought. (For instance, if you thought someone enjoyed themselves, and then they want to hang out again, then you were probably right) Over time, by paying attention, and using feedback to assess my judgments, I was able to build an intuition for reading people, one that I believe is quite accurate. People often are surprised that I know what they're thinking or when they're upset by something. Most of the small annoyances of life melted away. A lot of interpersonal grief just evaporates if you can read the people you're dealing with, and respond appropriately. For instance, I have zero complaints about store personnel, in person. They're all wonderful! Over the phone, I can't see them, and stuff can still get frustrating. It turns out that people usually aren't jerks. We just react in predictable ways to other people. So if you do something irritating, or ignore someone's discomfort, they'll get irritable. And then you'll get irritable. But if you can spot the small signs, you can make adjustments, and everything goes smoothly. (To be clear, I'm talking about smoothing minor friction, not being a doormat. But minor frictions cause 80% of social grief!) So: 1. Theory
2. Trial and error
3. Feedback
4. Revision, repeat #2
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