Yeah. We don’t need no stinkin CIA to tell us how.
LOL...I get that completely. On the other hand, who better to learn about deception and lying from than the people who do it as naturally as breathing!
I have long had an interesting dilemma. I have two diametrically opposed paths of discourse-
In the first, I tend to fall into the trap of assuming that if I am straightforward and honest with someone, that will be reciprocated, which as I have gone through life, seems laughable to me, but there it is. Because I found that there are people who will not only not reciprocate, but will leverage that disadvantage I have placed myself in to use to their advantage.
In the second...I occasionally get extremely negative gut feelings from encounters with people I don’t know and have never met that I find hard to ignore. I find them very disconcerting, and...they don’t always pan out. As a matter of fact, I doubt if it is better than 50-50 accuracy. I just had this on a conference call within the last few weeks.
There were a lot of people on the call, it was pretty high level, and I got very negative gut feelings from one person I had never met. It was one of their top salesperson, and my initial gut feelings were that this person could in no way be trusted, and I developed a rapid superficial dislike for this person.
Afterwards, in discussing this with my team, nobody else felt or saw it that way, and I thought a lot about it. I don’t get those feelings often, but when I do, I think about them. I don’t know what triggers it. Sometimes it is verbal. Sometimes it is visual. Sometimes both.
It is a puzzle to me, and I have always hoped there would be some way for me to run these things down and put them to bed.
If I had a better than 50-50 accuracy, I would likely view it as a tool. Instead, it seems to be something that can fog my vision and impair my decision making.