What do you call this gift?

[Anonymous]

When a person is very good at grasping people’s desires and motivations?

Someone who can very well analyze and understand the relationships and predict behavior of characters in movies like Challengers?

For example, Larla wants to be with Joe, but Joe is focused on professional interests, while Jack has mentioned that and this may indicate his interest in Larla. But on a deep level.

[Anonymous]

Empathy

[Anonymous]

I’m not following, your example seems to have nothing to do with the first part of the post.

[Anonymous]

Intuition

[Anonymous]

Insightful

[Anonymous]

High emotional IQ (aka EQ)

[Anonymous]

I have this. It is a lifetime starting out as a shy, not self-confident kid trying to navigate highly emotional people in life. You start to recognize the signs, read body language, tones of voice, A leads to B, but more importantly when X leads to A. All in an attempt to avoid problematic situations. Like any "skill" learned over a lifetime, it becomes second nature.

I have business associates who regularly ask me for a read on a situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have this. It is a lifetime starting out as a shy, not self-confident kid trying to navigate highly emotional people in life. You start to recognize the signs, read body language, tones of voice, A leads to B, but more importantly when X leads to A. All in an attempt to avoid problematic situations. Like any "skill" learned over a lifetime, it becomes second nature.

I have business associates who regularly ask me for a read on a situation.

My experience is similar. I can instantly get a read on people and I always predict when shh will hit the fan. I have only a 5% or so failure rate lol

I moved a lot as a child and just, like you said, figured out quickly which people were genuine, how A led to be, and when X would lead to A.

[Anonymous]

I have this. Like I know if Larla has unrecognized daddy issues and will continue to pine away for someone like Joe who de-prioritizes her. Will Jack lacks confidence to ever take action on his feelings for Larla stemming from being a very late bloomer and he hasn't been with many girls. None of it needs to be spelled out for me.

[Anonymous]

It's someone who is highly observant. It's often called intuition but it's more that they've learned to pay close attention to situations and people and see patterns and similarities in behaviors. After a lifetime of it, they tend to be able to read people quickly.

[Anonymous]

Social intelligence.

[Anonymous]

It sounds like the gift of discernment but agree with the pp that your example is confusing.

[Anonymous]

At worst, there is some shared space with sociopathy in the Venn diagram for what you are describing. But it really is just watching/observing and being astute. Agree that people think it's intuition but it's obvious to anyone who has an interest in people or a motivation to have an interest in people.

[Anonymous]

OP here. What profession can this be an asset for?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have this. It is a lifetime starting out as a shy, not self-confident kid trying to navigate highly emotional people in life. You start to recognize the signs, read body language, tones of voice, A leads to B, but more importantly when X leads to A. All in an attempt to avoid problematic situations. Like any "skill" learned over a lifetime, it becomes second nature.

I have business associates who regularly ask me for a read on a situation.

My experience is similar. I can instantly get a read on people and I always predict when shh will hit the fan. I have only a 5% or so failure rate lol

I moved a lot as a child and just, like you said, figured out quickly which people were genuine, how A led to be, and when X would lead to A.

I can also do this (my last boss used to drag me to all his stressful meetings so he could get my read on people’s motivations) but I had a very stable family life and stayed in the same place preschool through high school. I was a very weird misfit kid though and was bullied in elementary/middle school so maybe that’s where I picked it up? Also reading a LOT so I was always trying to mentally guess at the novel behind all social interactions. I feel like I maybe didn’t come with a normal sense of human interaction and had to learn it from scratch and as a result went way overboard on studying and came out weirdly good at guessing why people do what they do.