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 question of not understanding the other becomes especially relevant. Why doesn't he or she answer SMS? Why is not showing attention? Why is doing something that obviously does not need to be done? We ask these and other questions, rack our brains for answers, and often we don’t find them.
.We do not understand others, first of all, because we are looking at a person from our “bell tower”, using our life experience and stereotypes of behavior. We involuntarily try to adjust the manifestations of another to our expectations, but they do not coincide. And here begins what people call misunderstanding. He must do one thing, but for some reason 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 another person in a certain situation (in which you want to understand him) from your expectations and stereotypes.
For example, you don’t understand your boss, who is either too amiable or sometimes rude and pressures. We divide the situation into your expectations and its manifestations. Your expectations are that in relation to you he behaves consistently, correctly, fairly and benevolently. Its manifestations are inconsistency and tactlessness.
2. After completing the first paragraph, the objective behavior of another person remains, which you still do not understand, namely: why does the boss behave inconsistently and incorrectly? To get the answer to this question, you need to understand that any behavior allows a person to achieve any psychological goal that is useful to him.
3. We ask ourselves, what does a person get by behaving in this way?
In our example with the boss, the question will be: "What goals does the boss achieve by showing courtesy and then exerting pressure"? Obviously, communicating kindly, he demonstrates positive emotions and enjoys it, brings a constructive wave to working relations, shows his liberality, etc. And it exerts pressure to show and approve its leadership position and achieve the implementation of a specific order. A person’s behavior can be inconsistent if he achieves different goals. You just need to identify them.
So, from an objective point of view, everything becomes more clear if we step aside from our attitude and consider the behavior of a person as having some psychological goal (or goals) useful to him.
I suggest using this algorithm when you want to understand another person. I wish you success!