Learning to observe, rather than imagine, can become the most powerful thing you ever learn in your life.

You might think you can already do this until you read further.

A classroom full of students see the teacher walk in. He’s clearly angry. One of the students raises her hand and asks, “Sir, what’s wrong with you today? You look very angry. Did we do something wrong?”

The teacher suddenly looks surprised. He responds, “Angry? What are you talking about?”

That’s a good question. What are we talking about?

We do not realize it, but hundreds of times per day we go through life using our imaginations as our primary sense of other people’s actions. The young student imagined the teacher was angry. Obviously she observed something that led her to that conclusion, however, judging from his response, she was incorrect and only imagined he was angry.

This sort of thing happens between people all day long every day.

A man receives an email which reads, “What are you going to do about that? ;-)” In his head, he can hear the sender’s voice, see her face. She’s smirking wickedly and looking at him with a condescending expression. He begins to feel very angry and writes back to her, “I’m not going to do anything about it. It’s your problem!!!”

She reads his message and becomes confused. She walks to his desk and asks, “You do realize I was joking, right?” He looks at her, and she sees he is angry. Apparently he did not get the joke.

Throughout these examples, human beings were observing other human beings, summarizing their observations, and imagining the other person’s motivation and emotional state. It is a very effective ability for people to have. When in great danger, it is a valuable skill to be able to intuitively predict when one’s life is threatened so that you can run away or get ready to fight if necessary. It is how we avoid being surprised.

Animals are very good at this.

Some deer were grazing in my back yard two days ago. I watched them from my screen porch, looking up from my laptop to see what they were doing, watching them carefully listen in the air for noises, graze a little, and then listen again. I decided to see how close I could get to them. My intention was to approach closely, and if possible, pet one of them gently on the head. I intended to do no harm to them.

When I stood up, and walked toward them, they observed me do it. They saw me staring at them, moving slowly and quietly toward them. They immediately leaped into the woods and ran away, quickly getting out of my range, leaving me standing only six feet away from my porch chair before they were gone.

The deer observed my behavior, and then they imagined that I had harmful intent.

Here’s the important part: They were wrong.

Observations Are Usually Right, Imagination is Often Wrong

Likewise, we humans are often, if not almost always wrong when we imagine the intentions and motivations of other people. If we are truly in danger, this very inaccurate skill can alert us and help to move quickly to safety or prepare ourselves for battle. But we are almost never in danger from one another, so what would be a very useful instinct in the wild turns into our worst enemy in an advanced civilization.

There is a distinct difference between what we observe about other people and what we imagine. Let’s look at some examples.

• I imagine you are angry. Observations: your eyebrows are furrowed, your forehead is wrinkled, your eyes are squinting, your mouth is frowning, and your face is red. Your fists are tightly clenched. You are standing with your feet apart.
• I imagine you must have had a terrible childhood. Observations: You say you do not enjoy loud dance music, that you believe dancing is wrong, and that you wish other people did not engage in dancing.

These two examples, one reasonable and the other absurd, are almost identical to each other in that the observer has imagined something about the other person based on what they see or what they hear. Their observations are the other person’s behavior: the things they say, the things they do, and the facial expressions and body language they use. Their imagination does the rest of the work.

In the first example, our observer seems to have drawn a reasonable conclusion. However, note that he is still imagining the other person to be angry. The other person could be joking, or they could be thinking about something else - simply deep in thought - and have a strange body language about them.

In the second example, our observer has drawn a ridiculous conclusion. They have heard the speaker say something negative about a practice that they personally find to be quite natural, and they have therefore jumped to the conclusion that the speaker must somehow be defective or damaged, otherwise how could they possibly be so different from one another?

The observations were correct, but the people passing judgment did not pay any attention to their own observations. Instead, they only paid attention to their imaginary conclusions about what the observations they have made must add up to mean.

The Search for Meaning For the Purpose of Self-Destruction

We all have an instinctual drive which compels us to find meaning in things we observe. It is a survival instinct that allows us to outsmart our enemies and stay out of danger. Unfortunately, it does not always serve us well. We see lightning, and we imagine that Zeus is hurling bolts down at us for sport. We see a volcano erupt, and we assume the Vol the God of the Earth is angry with us and is causing the ground to shake and the skies to darken.

Often in human history, our observations have sometimes led us to some rather self-destructive practices: sacrificing virgins to die in the volcano to appease angry gods, for example.

We engage in the same sort of destructive behaviors on a much smaller scale with other people on a regular basis.

However, if we learn to focus on our observations instead of what we imagine, we can learn to excel at communication, expand our network of friends, and deliver ourselves from a holocaust of interpersonal damage done to us every day by the dumb things we say to and about each other based solely on what we imagine.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

• When you wish to complain about anything, only speak of what you actually saw or quote what you heard someone say.
• Never guess why someone would write, say, or do something. You don’t know why. You will never know why. They probably don’t know why. Focus on what they do and what they say, not your imaginary reasons for them doing or saying it.
• Holding other people accountable for our reactions to what we observe is foolish. Offense is taken, not given. People who get offended usually are imagining a far more negative motivation for what they observed than is really there.
• Feeling certain about the accuracy of your imaginings is a sign of low intelligence. The more certain you are as to what another person is thinking or feeling, the less likely it is that you are correct.
• Assume everything you imagine about another person’s emotions, intentions, or motivations is wrong, and you will be right 99% of the time.

What if people were able to overcome the animal-like tendency to focus on their imaginations and instead were nearly entirely reliant upon their observations and objective use of those observations?

Some examples:

The teacher comes into the room. The students see that his eyebrows are furrowed, his forehead is wrinkled, and his face is red. One of them raises her hand and asks, “Teacher, your eyebrows are furrowed and your face is red. Are you OK?” The teacher lets out a breath of air suddenly and inhales deeply. He answers, “I was seeing how long I can hold my breath!”

One person is talking to another about dancing and how much they love it. The other person says that they do not dance, do not believe in dancing, and that you believe dancing is wrong. The first person asks, “Why do you feel that way about dancing?” The other answers, “In my country, dancing is forbidden except between a man and a woman in their most private moments.”

It turns out that no one was angry and that no one had a troubled childhood that drove them to grow up to be a negative, nasty-spirited, bitter person who was permanently damaged by their past. We imagine these things about other people because our instincts call out for us to do so. We can resist and overcome those instincts, but it is not easy. Often, we will want to imagine something about another person’s motivations because all other possibilities lead to the inescapable conclusion that we are the ones who are somehow different, unintelligent, unwise, or ignorant. We are not just fighting instinct, we are fighting our own fears, and that requires a very powerful will indeed.

The Consequences of Increased Knowledge and Wisdom

Once you become comfortable distinguishing between your observations and your imagination, you will begin to perhaps feel frustrated with the fact that other people’s insistence on imagining what you are thinking or feeling. Even more frustrating is having another person tell you what your motivations for your actions are when you yourself could not possibly know why you do what you do. You might find the wisdom of observing rather than imagining to be a Pandora’s Box of frustration and annoyance with other people’s self-indulgent insistence on letting instinct steer their mind’s ship.

Or is that just your imagination at work? What did they do or say that led you to that conclusion? What did you observe? Hmmmm. This could be more difficult than perhaps you first imagined.

Recommended Reading and Listening

The Fifth Discipline is the book that contains the original discussion on focusing on observed behaviors in others rather than our own imaginary conclusions about that behavior.

Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne are the men who introduced me to the concept of differentiating between observed behavior and imaginary conclusions that we draw in our minds. Their web site is called Manager Tools and has the best business podcast podcast for managers.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is your shortcut to Machiavellian political strategy and tactics. Want to know why people do what they do? Then you aren’t ever going to succeed, because the reasons they do things are irrelevant. The important thing is to focus on what exactly that will do in response to certain stimulus and to give them the right stimulus to get what you want.