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Chances are, you’ve been there. You walk into a conference room, dinner party, or group of playground parents and make a comment that immediately shifts the ballast of the conversation. Eyes dart at you. Their message is clear: Dude read the room. But you’ve already said or done something out of sync with what’s appropriate in the moment.
It happens. But it’s avoidable. When you’re told to — or sense that you should — “read the room,” it means that you need to slow down and pick up on the social cues around you. Is someone upset? Having a serious conversation? What is the overall tone? Learning how to read the room is an important skill, one that can be honed by pausing to observe a few key details.
While the impulse may be rooted in shyness or social anxiety, people who fail to read the room rarely suffer from passivity. They don’t enter as much as barge in. Subtle and restrained are not calling cards.
“They gotta make a splash,” says Laura Dudley, associate clinical professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University.
Confidence isn’t the problem. The issue is the inability to adjust. Think about if you’re home alone. You know that you can act a certain way, i.e., wear no pants. If company is there, you know enough to put on clothes. It’s about understanding context, and with a party, event, meeting or playground conversation, it means seeing and hearing what’s spoken and unspoken.
Properly reading a room requires a willingness to watch and bend to the situation, all of which can feel initially foreign. But it all falls into the possible-to-do category.
Reading a room begins with raising your awareness. If you were recently at a barbecue and reviewing the events, and think, That conversation went sideways fast. Was it me? — that’s enough self-reflection to lead to change. But if you cling to the attitude of, I am how I am: Deal — you’ll never be able to read the room because every interaction is about you, when it’s pretty much the opposite.
“Every relationship is a negotiation,” says Darrin J. Griffin, associate professor, chair of the communication studies department at University of Alabama, and co-author of Lying and Deception. “It needs concession. To win, it’s gotta be a win-win.”
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