Key to understanding people

The first, and last step to understanding people is

ACCEPTANCE

Only when you accept the way people are can you begin the journey to understanding them.

That acceptance is neither synonymous with approval nor with being buddy/buddy with them, but the acceptance is staying away from judging them according to what you perceive how they should be.

Each of us is shaped by our genes, upbringing, people who influenced out thinking like teachers, mentors, parents, friends, the environment we grew up in, the way we handles our wins and loses, the way we recovered from failures and misfortunes, and even things that we had no control over, like ''the pecking order'' among our siblings. We're shaped by every significant event in our life, either good or bad, by the way we interpreted those events to ourselves, the books we read, even the social media we choose to participate in. All of that creates such a unique mixture of who we are in our heads, that it can not, and should not ever be the baseline on what it means to be the ideal human being. And therefore it should never become the ''measuring stick on how to judge others.

Each of us is a complex being, and among the 8+ billion people on Earth, there's no one else that had the exact same experiences like you did, There's a possibility that someone had similar experiences to yours, but the way they reacted and interpreted them due to their environment at the time it happened, makes those people remotely different from your own psychological make up. All those things combined makes any attempt of judging them, a completely unjust, subjective, and unfair task.

In other words, take each person at face value in order to understand them. You don't know their life story, you don't know what they went through, you don't know what they had to endure to make it to the 'now', so by trying to judge them, you're showing more of who you are, than of who they are. Abstain from that temptation, give up on that shot of self-righteousness, to avoid making a mistake that may shape your own perception in a hurtful way.

The next step is to dial down the value you put on the words they say, and dial up the focus on their actions.

There is an important reason for it, because people say things that they want you to believe, but their actions don’t have that ability, unless the actions are exaggerated and hence easily seen as fake.

Once you gained understanding from observing actions, bring their words back on, and watch for congruence, or lack of it.

That will tell you almost everything you need to know.

I have a friend who says that she disdains social media, and her life is so busy, that she hardly ever gets on social media. In the meantime she posts everything from what she eats for breakfast, to her dog’s length of walk, to her neighbors’ planting new flowers in their garden, to any other unimportant, uninteresting thing that happens in her surroundings throughout each day. Also, she has taken ~80 selfies, and that’s in this week alone.

Trust the actions to see the truth, because in this case the words will deceive you.

Lastly, after you gained understanding, acceptance follows. People are who they are, they are filtered through their egos, life experiences, upbringing, fears, views, desires to belong or stand out, their need to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and the likes and dislikes of every person they ever encountered.