Jess lanai

I got a bit lecturey in my last post on reading body language. So I should probably explain how one reads body language.

I should also probably point out that I have no authority beyond my own experience and observation.

And lastly I should point out that this blog is an aid in thinking.

So everything I post on here is in its rough draft form. Nothing written has been fully developed. But sometimes the developing of something has more useable information than something that’s been thought about too much and is considered fully developed.

Anyway.

How do you read body language? Or how do I do it and maybe it will help you do it?

The good news is you already know how to do it instinctively. It’s an aspect of humanity. We are very in tune with each other whether we realize it on a conscious level or not.

We are emotional creatures and emotion is information.

It’s just that calibrating the information to the right things can be tricky.

Things such as under confidence or over confidence or being too emotional or being anxious for the future or depressed over the past can it hard to tell where information is really coming from.

Reading body language properly is about helping my natural instincts be more present instead of being tangled up in the past or the future or on my own self.

I need them focused on what’s really happening in the moment. I need to be getting real information.

And how you bring your own natural instincts into the present is simply the pain of trial and error.

I have to feel something and then test it for accuracy instead of making assumptions.

It’s very simple but very hard to do.

I’m going to use a few of my real life examples to hopefully demonstrate how excruciatingly difficult this can be and how much easier it gets over time.

I’ll start about six years back, to the second time I got fired, when I started to be like ‘hmm, maybe I’m a bitch.’

So, I’m a bitch.

That’s basically what one of my bosses told me. He used nicer words like, ‘you’re difficult to approach.’ ‘You’re intimidating to people’ or ‘you can be too blunt’

At that point I was like okay, enough people have said that to me that I maybe, perhaps, am bitch. And maybe I could be less of a bitch.

So I started trying to not be a bitch.

But the problem with not being a bitch is that more people who are very annoying will feel comfortable talking to you. Which is very hard to tolerate so being a bitch is easier.

What do I mean by annoying?

Because being an annoying person is not someone’s personal judgement.

There are real tangible ingredients that make a person annoying.

A person that’s lacking boundaries is annoying. A person that has ego issues is annoying. A person that’s trying too hard to please because they want something from you is annoying.

It’s a natural reaction to swat them down a bit if they are crossing boundaries, or using you to ego trip themselves or manipulatively trying to get their way rather than risking vulnerability and directly asking for what they need.

Those are all little things that naturally ignite a bit of aggression.

I personally was way overreacting to those little spikes of aggression because it was an emotion I was afraid of.

I was afraid of the emotion because I had no ability to tolerate it.

I wanted to instantly get rid of the person causing me to feel that kind of aggression. Which meant I was super mean to them so they would go away.

When I initially tried to stop being a bitch I thought that meant being less outwardly rude.

So I basically tried being a bitch in a different way. I tried going for aloofness.

Aloofness was better than telling people to fuck off. But when someone was annoying enough to get beneath my aloofness and set me off, they really set me off.

So I had less outbursts but they became more intense.

Eventually I got my head out of the clouds and decided I needed to accept some reality.

The reality that I had no business having any outbursts at all. Because I’d made a bit of a mess of my life and I needed to get it together and stop having temper tantrums like a little brat.

Because I will be clear, part of the reason I was such a bitch was also because I was such a brat.

I was not use to environments where I had to indulge the rules of the hierarchy. And the hierarchy was simply that it didn’t matter if a person was stupid, or manipulative or had a malfunctioning ego. I needed a stable job. I could not keep fighting with all the dumb people.

So that’s what I started practicing.

I started practicing not being a brat. Just sucking it up and tolerating whatever I needed to tolerate.

At one of my jobs we had this one regular that would come in five minutes before we closed and try to stay two full hours afterwards.

He did it for the power trip. Which a lot of people do in restaurants.

I started to use him for practice. Instead of being a bitch I started trying to be polite.

Imagine how excruciating that is.

It stayed excruciating for quite some time.

And I didn’t actually last. I managed to be polite a few times but eventually I took his head off.

Luckily for me, everyone hated him. I got fired for being a bitch to an annoying coworker instead.

But even when I got fired again I just kept trying. I didn’t let myself get discouraged. I tried to stay with the emotion. Every time I felt really angry I tried to be calm and polite while also feeling my rage.

Eventually my tolerance for my anger went up. Which meant I had more room to investigate.

Here’s a great analogy. It’s summer so I’ve been hiking a lot. There’s one place I go that’s very steep. The first few times I tried to hike it I could barely breathe the whole time.

But on this last time I noticed my tolerance had gone way up because not only could I breathe, I noticed that we have lizards here.

I had no idea we had lizards here. I wasn’t able to notice them when I was gasping for air up the mountain because they stay pretty well hidden.

But now that I’m in better shape and not all my focus is on how steep the incline is I have the energy to I look more at the surrounding scenery and saw the lizards.

It was the same with my temper. The more of a tolerance I built up with feeling the emotion the more I could see things.

Lots of the people that hit my aggression buttons weren’t jerks.

They were just slightly anxious or uncomfortable or agitated and because my tolerance for my anger was low I was far too sensitive to all those little things.

I became less sensitive to those little things which meant I could differentiate the agitation and nervousness that my body picks up from the people that had actual malintent.

Even more than that with a higher tolerance for my anger I could also get a better understanding on how to properly diffuse people that were intentionally trying to cross boundaries and it’s actually incredibly easy and it doesn’t get me fired.

I think I’m just going to do a part two to this and just make one simple point before I close out.

Trying to get present with reality can be excruciatingly difficult and not always possible. But if you find something you have the ability to face just face it.