The most important thing you need to do to become more aware of other people is simply this:

PAY ATTENTION!

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But ask yourself these questions first:

1) Have you ever found yourself drifting off into your own imagination as the other person was talking?

2) Have you ever thought more about what you were going to say than what the other person just said?

3) Ever pretended you were listening when you weren’t?

Hmm?

One of the pre-suppositions of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is that you cannot not communicate. We communicate consciously or unconsciously all the time, the people you interact with are telling you a lot more than they think they are (you are, too). But the question is, can you see, hear or even feel these signals coming at you?

When I say to pay attention, I mean really pay attention. Now, the next obvious question is, pay attention to what?

Again in NLP, we look for patterns. Why? If someone mentions something like “I’d love a diamond ring for a Christmas gift” once, you’re more likely to just file it away into a remote corner of your mind. But if she repeats it over and over again, you know she really wants that ring, and you better start paying attention, don’t you?

It’s the same with unconscious communication.

We’re going to start slow here. There are lots of things you can immediately start paying attention to, but the key to mastery is to start off with the most digestable chunks first and build our way up.

If you’re game to start becoming more aware of other people’s communication (both conscious and unconscious) so you can know more about them, how they feel, what they like, what they don’t like, what’s important to them, I’ll be going through with you in the rest of the series what to pay attention to specifically and how.

(Gee, and I wonder what all that info would be good for? Like, sales, maybe? Building rapport quickly? Or increasing understanding in a relationship?)

The whole subject of picking up on subtle communication can take volumes, but I’ll do my best to distill the essence of it and give you usable tools you can put to practice immediately in the posts to come.