Reading the Room
Why Understanding People Is the Most Underrated Professional Skill
There is a moment most of us have experienced. You have prepared thoroughly. You know your material cold. You walk into the room confident, and yet somehow it doesn't land. The other person is unreachable, the conversation goes flat and the deal stalls. You leave wondering what happened.
What happened, in most cases, is not that your content was wrong. It's that you didn't read the room. You didn't read the person.
This blog series is about changing that.
I'm a psychologist, and over the course of my career I've worked across domains that most people keep separate: I bring the clinical to business and security. What I've found, again and again, is that the single most powerful skill across all of these fields is the same: the ability to understand people deeply, accurately, and quickly.Working effectively with people means to truly understand how they see the world. To work well with people you need to understand what drives them, what triggers them, and how to communicate with them in a way that actually reaches them.
The person across the table from you is not a generic human being. They are a specific, particular individual, with a personality, a history, a set of beliefs, and a way of seeing the world that is entirely their own. That is likely rational through their eyes and that, most importantly, the view as rational. The more you understand that, the more effective you will be.
This series will take you through the psychology of reading people, from the science of personality and motivation, through the art of influence and negotiation, and into some of the most complex and high-stakes situations where these skills matter most: custody battles, corporate negotiations, cybercrime, insider threats, and cross-cultural deal-making.
What This Series Covers
We'll move through the following territory:
Understanding personality: the Big Five, extreme types, the dark triad, and what they actually mean in practice
Applying personality to real situations: work, negotiation, litigation, and relationship dynamics
Narratives and self-beliefs: the stories people tell about themselves and how those stories drive their behavior
Remote profiling: what you can learn about a person without ever meeting them
Influence and persuasion: how it works, who's vulnerable, and how to protect yourself
Cognitive biases: the systematic errors we all make, and how to use them wisely
Culture and negotiation: including a deep dive into cross-cultural deal-making
Cybercrime, insider threats, and company culture: where psychology meets organizational risk
Know Thyself
Before we go anywhere else, I want to make one thing clear: the most important person to understand in any interaction is you. This is your absolutely most important first step. All information that you know about others is filtered through who you are. If you don’t know what your own filter is, you have no way to be sure you are properly filtering the information about the people around you. You are your own reference point. Every person you meet, you are automatically comparing to yourself, often without realizing it. The traits you admire, the behaviors that irritate you, the people you instinctively trust or distrust, all of these reactions are filtered through your own personality, your own history, your own sensitivities.If you are naturally flexible, you are likely to experience someone less so as rigid and uncompromising. We see and judge people in relation to who we are. And so it is critical to know who we are.
If you don't know that lens, you'll mistake your reaction for objective truth. You'll assume that the way you see something is simply the way it is. And that is one of the most costly mistakes you can make, in business, in relationships, in negotiations, in life.
So before you start profiling other people, profile yourself. Throughout this series, I'll point you toward tools and frameworks to do exactly that. I highly recommend starting with a proper personality assessment before reading further. It will give you a vivid, concrete starting point for understanding everything we will be talking about throughout this series.
A short version of the test can be found here: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/
Though I strongly recommend taking the full version if you truly want to get a strong sense of this model: https://psytests.org/big5/ineoAen.html
YOUR PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS
Before your next important meeting or negotiation, ask yourself: what do I know about this person's personality, and what do I know about my own?
Take a Big Five personality assessment. Notice where you land. Pay particular attention to any trait where you score at an extreme, whether high or low.
To begin getting into the mindset of seeing the world through other people’s eyes, start observing people around you through a new lens: not 'why are they being difficult?' but 'what is their personality telling me?' Start to be curious about their reactions, particularly the ones that irritate you.
COMING UP NEXT
In the next post, we go into the science. Where did the Big Five come from? Why does it hold up when so many other frameworks don't? And what do the five traits actually mean — not in abstract, but in the real texture of how people live and work?
Some sources that I have used to build this series:
Broek, P. van den. (1994). The role and structure of personal narratives. In R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study (pp. 1–18). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in (3rd ed.). Penguin Books.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1990). Personality in adulthood: A five-factor theory perspective. Guilford Press.
Shapiro, D. (2016). Negotiating the nonnegotiable: How to resolve your most emotionally charged conflicts. Viking.
Susskind, L. (2014). Good for you, great for me: Finding the trading zone and winning at win-win negotiation. PublicAffairs.
Taylor, J., Furnham, A., & Breeze, J. (2014). Revealed: Using remote personality profiling to influence, negotiate and motivate. Palgrave Macmillan.
