The Ultimate Body Language Book

Can this shyster ever be trusted?
Intuition includes the processing of information that we’ve obtained by observing people. When
someone says they have a “bad” feeling about someone or they feel “uneasy” or the salesman was
“slimy” they are using their intuition. Sometimes though, our intuition becomes clouded by
preconceived notions and new information is tainted or distorted. This is when reading people can
backfire to hurt us and others. When reading people it is important to clean the slate continuously and
read each cue separately. While the rule of fours says we need to add cues together to discover the true
meaning, using proper intuition without distortion, means we need to read each cue on their own. It
means we need to avoid looking for hints we can use to support our conclusion, they are either there or
aren’t there. In fact, the conclusion needs not play into the equation at all when reading but rather be a
formulated after we have analyzed all the available information.
Many optical illusions or visual tricks rely on the fact that our brains are constructed to find
information we think should be there, rather than looking at information that is actually there.
It’s easy to silence our intuition and ignore it since that little voice inside our heads is always trying to
speak out and it’s only right some of the time. Let’s take poker again as an example. We found that
baselining an individual can help in many ways most notably to help us reference behaviour, however,
it would be disastrous to continue to call or raise someone who normally bluffs just because we have a
strong hand, say a full house. In this situation, we are ignoring the current behaviour of the individual
in favour of preconceived notions about them. As the hand plays out, we find that this bluffer continues
to call even on our strongest bets, we find that sometimes they even raise or re-raise pushing the stakes
even higher. Naturally, they’ve caught a rare hand, four of a kind, and easily crushing our full house.
We’ve missed all the signals. The clues given all along were consistent with a strong position but we
failed to read it correctly because we ignored all the rules. The information coming told use to read his
moves at face value instead of modifying it to suite our needs, but at every step we ignored this. Our
filters are important in simplifying information since it’s impossible to analyze everything going on
around us, but we shouldn’t throw aside good information.
Having a good intuition is often not enough though. A “funny feeling” or “having a sense” or being
“uneasy” about someone or something has merit, but if you can’t support your intuition with support