It only takes a look.
A twitch of the eye.
A minuscule curl of the lip.
A slight change in posture.
It speaks volumes.
In that instant, you know whether you’re in the good books or the bad.
But sometimes it’s not as simple as that.
Words are said.
Comments are made.
And yet you know that what’s being communicated is not actually what they want to communicate … and better yet, you know exactly what’s being said, even though it isn’t being verbalised.
It’s the ability to translate the unspoken words and mannerisms that allows you to be a good husband. Or at least a husband that doesn’t get a swift kick in the balls every night for doing something wrong that they didn’t even know they’d done because women have an ability to remember – and recall – at a whim, every fault you’ve ever made for the last 60 years.
Seriously, marriage is better for keeping your brain on it’s toes than Sudoku.
But I digress.
You see the thing I can’t work out is if husbands know the best way to understand their wife is to see and hear what is trying to be said – even though they’re not saying it – why do so many planners want their audience to literally ‘spoon feed’ them the insights they want to use in their communication.
I’ve met more than a few planners who have a total inability to read subtext … believing that only if someone conveys their feelings and opinions is it a valid feeling or opinion.
Who teaches them that way of thinking?
I can only assume their bosses were robots because few people do that.
Not – as Henry Ford suggested, because they don’t know – but because they either cannot articulate or convey their thoughts/feelings/opinions in a way that is clear and concise or they actually want to hide it for reasons best known to themselves.
So if you know a planner who thinks insights are something that are openly shared and spouted by the respondent, the best advice I can tell you to give them is to ‘get hitched’, because where marriage is concerned, survival isn’t – as Darwin suggested – of the fittest, it’s actually being able to read what isn’t being said.