In a workshop about mind-reading with SAVI Communications, I discovered something about myself. Like most human meaning-making creatures, I have been interpreting behaviors and assigning them meaning as if they are the truth. This is a form of mind-reading. Peter Senge’s Ladder of Inference is a great tool to show how Adding Meaning is a few rungs up a ladder from the actual data (e.g. evidence, reality) that leads directly to behavior. None of this was necessarily new to me – and maybe not to you either. What is new is that I had unknowingly put value on this habit. I had been thinking that being able to interpret behavior was a skill, a worthy skill, up there next to empathizing. Except that I had collapsed interpretation with feeling/showing empathy and completely left out the habit of checking out my mind-reads. Thus, I discovered, several of my relationships – husband, sister-in-law, mother – were being lived inside of fantasy. I relate to these people, and a few others, with their interpreted selves, not their real selves. How could I if I don’t actually ask if they are thinking/feeling the way I think they are?

Not only that, I discovered that this skill I had developed over time made me smart and better than others who did not do it as well as I did. I had become a master of deep listening, to my inner voices and to the body language and words of others, and hence, this made me a master at interpretation of their reality. As a master, I was better.

As a coach, I see this as a pitfall. My training is in being as aware as possible of the trends, habits, potentials, possibilities of my client’s humanity and the opportunities inherent in human development. In my collapse of interpretation with empathy and deep seeing, I have failed to actually see reality and to use another skill, strategies to undo mind-reads, to do the work of getting into reality and helping my clients do so as well.