Getting to know people and making assumptions Most of us encounter lots of other people all the time in our everyday life. We pass them in the street. We sit in the same cinema, or work in the same building. And some among them, we actually start to acknowledge and get to know. We begin to recognise their faces, the shapes of their bodies and how they move. We start to make assumptions about them, usually based on our very first encounter with them. In fact most of us make up our minds in the first few seconds of the encounter. Based on the clothes they are wearing on that particular day and the expression of their face, we decide. Is this someone I am likely to trust and want to know better? And we act on what we think are the answers to those questions, based on our assumptions. What we are doing, of course, is taking a few stray facts and fitting them into our own patterns of belief. We base those beliefs; on what we were told by our parents and others when we are
Your Happiness Factor: celebrating happiness, prosperity, hearth and home with coaching and writing from Wendy Mason Smith