What is hidden behind certain actions of people?
How to understand the reasons for their behavior?
Each of us met with a situation of misunderstanding of another person. We may not understand why he behaves this way and not otherwise, his feelings or way of thinking. It is difficult to understand a person of the opposite sex. In a love relationship, the issue of not understanding the other becomes especially relevant. Why isn't he or she answering SMS? Why doesn't he pay attention? Why does it do something that is clearly not necessary to do? We ask these and other questions, rack our brains in search of answers, and often we do not find them….
We do not understand others, first of all, because we look at a person from our "bell tower", using our life experience and stereotypes of behavior. We unwittingly try to adjust the manifestations of the other to our expectations, but they do not coincide. And here begins what people call misunderstanding. He has to do one thing, but for some reason he does another.
To understand another person, I suggest using the following algorithm:
1. The first and most important stage is this: separate the behavior of the other person in a certain situation (in which you want to understand him) from your expectations and stereotypes.
For example, you do not understand your boss, who is sometimes too kind, sometimes rude and exerts pressure. We divide the situation into your expectations and its manifestations. Your expectation is that he will behave consistently, correctly, fairly and kindly towards you. Its manifestations are inconsistency and tactlessness.
2. After completing the first point, the objective behavior of the other person remains, which you do not yet understand, namely: why does the boss behave inconsistently and incorrectly? To get an answer to this question, you need to understand that any behavior allows a person to achieve some useful psychological goal for him.
3. Let us ask ourselves the question, what does a person get by behaving in this way?
In our example with the boss, the question would be: "What goals does the boss achieve by showing courtesy and then applying pressure?" Obviously, by communicating kindly, he demonstrates positive emotions and enjoys it, brings a constructive wave to working relationships, shows his liberality, etc. And he exerts pressure in order to show and confirm his leadership position and achieve the implementation of a specific order. A person's behavior can be inconsistent if they achieve different goals. You just need to identify them.
So, from an objective point of view, everything becomes more clear if we move away from our attitude and consider the behavior of a person as having some kind of useful psychological goal (or goals) for him.
I suggest using this algorithm when you want to understand another person. Wish you luck!
