I did it to practice Slovak and to test her personality more. A student in her late 50s. One of the students with whom I have what most closely resembles classic language teaching. Am a chameleon. I adapt to the person sitting across from me and this person craves fairly classic language tuition. After the class we sometimes talk for a few minutes. It’s not talking though. I produce words with my voice and she produces words. You could mistake it for a conversation. Since I have an exam of Slovak coming up I talk a lot more than I normally do to get in some practice time. Again, this is AFTER giving her the time am paid for.

She asks why my family doesn’t visit Slovakia. I explain how bad off everyone in my family is, health wise. She asks about my father. I don’t feel like lying. Sometimes I tell a person he’s doing great. Apparently I respect her enough to not do that. I tell her he commited suicide. As did my grandfather.

Now seriously, I don’t actually care much about how she reacts to that. I don’t need her sympathy, empathy, curiosity or anything. I stress I run experiments with people. It’s something I do cause language teaching by itself is ok, but it’s not very stimulating. Call me a narcissist, but it’s like asking an engineer to spend his time building small mud huts. So I run experiments.

If I were her I would want to know everything about that father who ended his own life. EVERYTHING.

Her reaction is telling. She only says: ‘And your mum was left on her own.’

I find that interesting.

A man commits suicide. Must have been in a severe downwards spiral, but her mind goes to the wife that’s left. Am not saying it’s wrong. But it’s as if she can only see this situation by picturing if it happened to her. She doesn’t care about my mum. I suspect she simply pictures herself in my mum’s position. A dead husband principally means: she, my student, would be left alone. This then makes me think she sees a husband more as a function than as a person.

She didn’t ask one detail about my father.

You could say that she was born in Czechoslovakia where people walk around privacy as if privacy is a gigantic minefield you need to circumvent at all times.

That’s maybe part of it.

But what I am almost 100 percent sure of is that something else is going on.

She’s not interested in psychology. Or she has concluded long ago that she knows all she cares to know about human psychology.

That’s not me.

I spend most of my days trying to figure out humans and humanity in general and the mystery very much continues.

A human soul is something I can’t stop poking around in.

I get that there is no direct money in, unless someone is paying you for psychotherapy or you are trying to scam them. Or based on what I hear other psychotherapists do, you can combine the two. Psychotherapy that keeps the client coming for more, without transformation, is a scam too.

What am trying to say is that as someone who for the last 12 years has made his money primarily by having conversations with people, and if I expand it to communication, it’s almost 20 years:

people SUCK at conversations.

I am naturally looking for some kind of fusion state.

I try to feel what the person sitting across from me is feeling.

This is why I tend to be better with one person than with a group, because also in a group I try to feel what every individual is feeling. I map them. I pick up on what they are really trying to say. I remember. I register what they tell me about their childhoods. Most people are clueless about how their childhoods shaped them, but they will often give you hints without knowing it of what hurt them and keeps hurting them.

I notice that I rarely get good follow up questions.

I also notice that I rarely see them register that I do ask excellent follow up questions. I ask questions to give them space to explore what they are really trying to say.

Most people I talk to always pivot back to something about them.

I test them. I tell them stuff I have no real need to tell them, because I know they are unable to listen or absorb.

So I will seemingly casually tell them something like:

I really loved the cat I grew up with. It hit me surprisingly hard when he died when I was 13.

This is true, but I have never actually told a client or student this. It’s just an example.

I know from experience most people will start talking about something personal in response.

In this case they might say: ‘I always play with my aunt’s dog. He is 11 and I already dread the day he will die. I wish I could spend more time with the dog. But at work we are now…’

And then they go on about work.

1. They don’t ask details about me and the cat, why I liked the cat, if I have cats now, what I like about cats, if I ever had a dog, if I want to get a pet for my son. That’s where I would start. They don’t.

2. They don’t care about their aunt’s dog either. The part about work is a convenient excuse to explain why they don’t actually spend time with the dog.

  1. What is really going on is that they are preoccupied by work. That’s what they really care about. Usually not the job itself, but the money involved, or fear they could be accused of not doing a good job, or a promotion they want, or some fear of losing face or status. It took them less than 30 seconds from me sharing something personal to them getting to talk about what is causing them stress.

I have tested this literally thousands of times.

People don’t care about what they say they care about, people care about what they talk about the most.

It’s a trainable skill to go a step further and find out what the layers are UNDERNEATH the thing they talk about.

Someone could overhear a session between a client and me and might conclude: ah, this client talked about an upcoming wedding.

And I will say: no, the client talked about status wars inside her family and dominance games inside a family where she has allies and enemies. Or at least that’s how she experiences them, as allies and enemies.

Where it gets REALLY interesting is that some people just have the skill to be great at conversation without ever picking up a psychology book, or ANY book for that matter, they just do it.

Right now I have only ONE such client.

She has NOTHING to do with psychotherapy. Probably can’t even tell you what psychotherapy is beyond some cynical interpretation of it.

But she is naturally gifted at making someone understand themselves better and understand herself better in the process.

That to me is a REAL conversation.

Nothing in her history explains why she is like that.
Imagine my fascination!

A gifted conversationalist with no education whatsoever that could have prepared her for that.

She seems to have an innate ability to be radically honest, which does add enormously to the quality of a conversation. She has the courage or the bluntless to say what she really thinks without any intention to cause harm.

That’s like having a surgeon at the operation table that is conversation.

When two people are talking there is all kinds of hurt lurking under the surface and if at least one of the two is good at bringing ignition and direction to the conversation some of that hurt can be excised.

So this is what I really felt the need to share:

Most people throw words in my direction. Without knowing it they reveal their deepest wounds like that. They also a masterful job at not seeing me and at not even fully comprehending that am always steering them to a more authentic, deeper understanding of who they are. This often makes them drink up conversations with me like a man or woman dying of thirst, but even that they don’t seem to be aware of. If you’d ask them what we do I bet they just say: William improves my German. Or William helps me understand my job better. Or William is a good listener. They can’t explain what is really happening.

By the way, about one in a thousand people I meet do suspect I am digging around rather deeply inside them and block it off. That’s a whole other category of people and very rare. They might be capable of great conversations but are too defensive, sometimes even a little paranoid, to do it. Sometimes they genuinely don’t need it.

You might conclude that I have this gigantic need for great conversations, but that’s also not true. I am genuinely fascinated by how little humans understand about their own daily behaviour.

One of the things I am baffled by most is the alarming lack of curiosity in people.

Maybe I associate curiosity with understanding and understanding with compassion.

A wrong leap because you can of course be very curious and a horrible sadist at the same time.

I even suspect that I possibly care less about people’s well-being than I care about seeing what makes them tick.

By the way, why do I write so openly online? Why do I share so much?

Because nothing is safer.

Only people who care about something more than quick dopamine shots are still able to sit down long enough to read a ‘long’ text like this.

Whoever reads my long form posts I automatically consider to be good company.

There is the same accusation in that statement as in all of the above:

Most human beings have very little curiosity.

Life to them is not something to be understood or to be questioned and examined, it’s to be filled optimizing for quick dopamine hits.

Understanding comes at a cost.

Status and comfort come at cost.

There is only one of those two costs most humans are willing to pay, even when the reward never really arrives.

These are my Notes From the Mountain Fortress for today.

Surprise me.

Ask me a question that is NOT a judgement in disguise, but an invitation to make me understand my own message better.

If you do – which you won’t – I will learn and you will learn and this mysterious gray mass in my head and that mysterious gray mass in your head will kinda make love and produce some thoughts that never ever existed in that form before. They will be just the thoughts of our combined minds.

That’s one of the big things I seem to live for.

It’s not a solitary pursuit – I talk to people every day -, but it can feel like a pursuit that makes me feel excluded since most humans care about entirely different things than me.

Am only just starting to accept that.

Accepting lets me observe with a fresher look.

Talk to you later.