Into people's minds and souls
The more obvious, the less noticed.
The five essential paths into people minds and souls I am about to reveal to you are an excellent illustration of this statement. Once revealed, they become obvious, but they remain mostly unnoticed. They are easy to understand, yet difficult to use naturally and consistently.
Before I detail the five paths into people minds and souls, it is important to note that people will always appreciate and welcome a person who brings them laughter and therefore joy. Possessing the talent of bringing joy to people, even if it is short lived and temporary, can significantly enhance our capacity to open a locked door. However, making people laugh is not enough to enter into their secret gardens. To make people laugh often, one needs to transcend their own worries and therefore one has no room for the worries of others. As a consequence, funny people are neither designed nor willing to explore or walk seriously the five essential paths to people’s minds and souls.
These paths are anchored in human interactions. They make people want to be with you and share with you their worries, their secrets, their intimate stories and their lives. People become addicted to you! So before going further in the reading, make sure this is what you want from your relationships with your friends. It is quite a burden and it is not given for everyone to carry it over the long haul. If you take the five paths into people minds and souls, there is no going back in your behavior and attitude towards them. If you retract even a little bit, they will blame you for not being yourself, for not being as present as before. Since their addiction to you takes its sources in their egocentricity, they want you constantly on these five paths regardless of how you feel about it and without bothering to know whether you like doing it all the time or not. Now that you are warned, you can carry on, knowingly, for the revelation of the powerful obvious!
The first path is a self-conditioning reflection and preparation that will enable you to walk the four other paths, especially the second and third paths and to a large extent the fourth one.
First and foremost, you have to forget that you exist as a human with a life, with a story to tell, wisdom to shed, or adventures to share. It is not about you, it is about the other person and only them. You need to give them a sense of serenity with your mental and physical attitude: sitting in a relaxed position, with a compassionate smile and your eyes wide open, full of understanding, always connected to theirs. If they feel intimidated with your stare they will look away and come back very quickly searching for your attention, so don’t lose sight of their eyes. Also, it is critical that you understand in which state of mind the other person is in order to adapt yours and create a comforting complicity with them and an affinity with the subject at hand. As you will see later in the other paths, you should be involved emotionally in their story, but not too much; just enough without losing your composure or calm. Avoid at all costs statements like: “yes, and I remember a similar thing happened to me, …”. Don’t put yourself in their shoes; you most probably don’t wear the same size. Don’t believe that sharing your own experience will enthrall them, quite the opposite; it will belittle their own experience. Don’t feel that you need to fill any silence gaps with some story about you or someone you know. It is not about you, it is about them and only them!
To engage on this first path is to commit to becoming, during your next conversation with the other person, a listening and recording machine that can utter few words or sounds: “really, no, ahan”. You can add to these: “very interesting”, “Oh, tell me more”, or “please carry on”. Don’t give intelligent answers, smart advices, or anything that makes them feel like they really screwed up this or that or their entire life! You need to make sure the flow of their story carries on by interjecting every now and then: really, no, ahan, … “Yes” is not very recommended, “no!” is largely preferred. Also “really!” or “wow!” to add intensity to your astonishment”, are excellent. “Yes” could be interpreted as segue into: “I remember something similar that happened to me”. Whereas “no!”, “really!” or “wow!” do not hold that threat. They suggest to the talker to continue, because they indicate that all what is being said is new to the listener. As you do all this, always make the other person feel that you have nothing else more important or interesting to do at this moment, except listening to them and most importantly, never show any judgmental attitude towards anything your hear, you are not here to judge anything or anybody, you are here to listen. If by a miracle they stop and tell you: am I talking too much? Am I boring you? Then with a look of surprise and a bit of indignation, you reply back: “what? Absolutely not, please carry on…”
When you are mentally ready to adhere to the rules and constraints of the first path then you engage in the second path. This second path is critical as it represents the first real interaction you will have with the other person. The first few questions you ask will determine the level of trust the other is willing to put in you and therefore how much they will let you in their mind and soul. Fairly quickly, you need to find the pertinent question that will touch their intellect or their heart. Usually, it is not the first question you ask, but by your third or maximum fourth question you need to get closer to what matters.
If by some sort of a miracle they start by asking you or someone in the group a question, then they make, unknowingly, your second path easier to initiate. You simply start the conversation by asking them back the same question they asked.
Typically, and most frequently, they wouldn’t ask you any question. If you were in a group where a conversation was already engaged, then listen carefully to what they are saying and try to draw an intelligent question from that context. If no intelligent question can be drawn from what they were saying, or if they weren’t talking at all, then, depending on the type of person you are about to engage with, intellectual or emotional person, you would ask them, at first, different kinds of questions, but only at first! Deeper into the conversation, the questions will depend on the content of their answers and which of the three other paths you decide to follow. Back to the initial question, in the intellectual case, you would ask them for their opinion on some important societal topic, like child-mother/father relations, euthanasia, the role of technology in society, immigration, etc., or something you read that day on internet or, better still, in some intellectual newspaper (the economist or the likes). In the emotional case, you would ask them about their most fundamental emotions: “what makes them happy (or sad)?” or: “is there anything bothering them?” or simply “how are they, today?” (You need to add “today”, it makes the “how are you” more concrete and therefore really wanting an answer). You might get lucky and your first question turns out to be THE question they were expecting, in this case immediately switch into listening and recording mode… Often, you won’t have such luck, you need to immediately gauge the interest of the other person in your initial question, and fairly quickly move on to a second question, and a third, until you hit THE key question. You will know from their body language when you eventually ask the question that touches them. Obviously, you need to keep watching their facial expressions and their body movements in order to notice the difference. At this point, they will start their first wave of “sharing”; it is then the time to switch into listening and recording mode…
After you give the person the time and space to go through their first wave of uninterrupted speech, they usually stop to prepare for the next wave. This is the ideal time to use the third path, based on the most powerful of the seven capital sins: vanity. This path is the most difficult to follow naturally, as you need to have listened carefully enough to their first flow of words to get something meaningful out of it. Then you need to turn this meaningful information into a causal deduction, dosed with enough flattery but never exceeding the “genuine” level, and tell it to them in the most sincere way. Here’s an example of a comment that can be applied in almost all cases: “I have rarely met people who, under the circumstances, could still keep a positive perspective on things. How do you do that?” You might wonder why this statement assumes that the other person has necessarily been talking about some bad or difficult stuff that happened to them? Well because 99 out 100 times that is exactly what you will hear, stories of sorrow and hardship. People enjoy good stuff on their own; they rarely share them with other people; and if they do, it is not to share the joy, but to share their story of joy, regardless of its impact on you. It is still about them and not about you. With this well placed “how do you do that?” you beautifully open the flow of another round of uninterrupted speech. By doing this, not only you touch their vanity in a positive way, but you also give them, the permission to carry on talking about the most important thing in their lives: them!
Vanity is definitely a bitch! Vanity feeds from almost any positive sentiment or behavior it receives: gratitude, obedience, agreement, deference, reverence, submission, dependence, esteem, etcetera … But the most critical of all sentiments to touch someone’s vanity is admiration. Vanity gets drunk with admiration, and once it is drunk, vanity asks for more, it asks for adoration, glorification and veneration. Vanity shares with affection (more on affection in the fourth and fifth paths) the top spot in terms of weakness points of the human psychic, sex and money being in the top spots in the physical and material world.
Once you mastered how to walk these three paths, every human, male or female, will feel joy in your company and void in your absence, and will permanently miss and often claim your presence. You will conquer their minds and you will be knocking on the door of their soul, where you will find them standing, eagerly and impatiently waiting to open for you.
A heart-felt empathy expressed with authentic affection will fling that door open, and then you can march in, with a lot of humility, a conqueror of the deepest corners of their minds and souls. In this fourth path, you need to show the other person that you completely understand and appreciate the situation they are in and that you deeply respect the choices they have made, thus putting their mind at ease and taking away any thoughts of regret about letting you in. You can add, exceptionally*, that yourself wouldn’t have had the courage and the strength to deal with a similar situation the way they did, or that by sharing with you their story they are really helping you see clearer in your own life. *Exceptionally, you can talk about yourself, because you are not putting yourself at equal standing with them, but rather below them (vanity strikes again, it is definitely a bitch!), and this makes them feel better about you!
Once the mind is relaxed and calm then the soul needs to be comforted. The soul needs gentleness and softness and the most tender and the softest of feelings is without a doubt the feeling of affection. Affection is about making the other person feel that you really care, that you are happy when they are, and that you are saddened by their sorrows. Affection is irresistible; it brings people back to their childhood; that defining period, which shapes every adult human being. Either they got a lot of affection during that time and therefore they are nostalgic for it, or they didn’t get enough of it and they are in desperate need for it. Either way affection is irresistible. If vanity helps them feel better about their personality and their identity, affection makes them feel better about their being and their existence! Affectionate empathy goes a very long way in establishing a long-lasting stronghold in the minds and souls of people.
Finally, if you are attracted sexually to the other person, and if there is a certain level of physical compatibility between the two of you, then you show some chivalry mixed with an adequate dose of vulnerability, and with that they surrender to you, and they become entirely yours. Yours, to take care of with love, respect and kindness. This is the fifth path.
By chivalry I mean simple things like opening a door, pulling a chair, paying a bill, making a smart compliment about them, etc. Or more difficult things like courageous stances in face of danger, humility and a small touch of confidence (never arrogance), forgiveness, tolerance, … caring about other people, older people, and more importantly about animals and nature, giving from yourself for the benefits of others, etc.
On the vulnerability side, I insist on the ADEQUATE dose of vulnerability. Knowing how much is enough comes with repeated practice based on your ability to read people and understand their personality. To be more precise, you need to probe people’s desire for protection, fatherhood towards a woman and motherhood towards a man. This probing needs to happen during the second path: ask the right questions and listen carefully.
Some people have a big need to express the protective side of their personality, and with those, the dose of vulnerability can be big, without running the risk of looking weak. You can even create for them a real addiction on your vulnerability. This dependency becomes an excellent gage of loyalty. Other people don’t have this trait well developed in their personality, and with them the dose of vulnerability has to be small, and furtive. If not, you run the risk of becoming a burden they are not equipped to carry and this will eventually lead to repulsion and separation (remember this last thought very well; in some cases, it could be very useful!)
Now that the obvious has been revealed, it is up to you! Beware though, as not every actor is an artist, nor every human is worth exploring…