“My dad has an uncanny ability to read my mind like a book, especially when I am trying to get away with a bluff. How is he doing this? Is there anything I can do to escape detection?”
— a teenager.
One critical talent that separates men from boys is the ability to see things clearly as they are, and not as they appear. That’s a major difference between you and your father. It’s a talent that comes to some people as they grow older, but it’s also something you can acquire with effort even as a teenager.
It’s like this. When someone says something to you, they are doing four things simultaneously.
1. They are saying what they intend to say, which is what you hear, which is the words they speak.
2. They are concealing things they are not saying — so whenever anyone says something, there is always some stuff they want to hide — which you can find out if you hear and see clearly.
3. They are saying things which they didn’t have an intention of saying, which can reveal how uncontrolled their mind is at that moment.
4. The way they speak, the way they gesticulate, their whole demeanour reveals another story by itself.
The ability to see, hear, observe and infer correctly is a rare gift for a teenager. But you can acquire it with persistent effort. Start by playing a game of bluff in secret — making short films of yourself trying to lie or hide a fact when you are with friends — and replay them again and again in the privacy of your room.
Observe your gestures, the way you distort your face when you bluff, the way you twist your body when you are hiding a fact, the way your voice pitch rises and falls. Observe how quickly tiny distortions can appear on your face and disappear in less than a fraction of a second.
Pause your cell phone player at those precise points and see how you are actually revealing in your expression things you have been trying to conceal. A seasoned player will be able to catch that fleeting expression immediately, while it would not be noticeable to your teen friends.
As you grow older you become naturally more aware of the subliminal self that exists inside all of us. Your father is obviously very sharp at ferreting out lies from truth, and even if you keep silent about anything, he would observe what you don’t say, and how you don’t say what you don’t say. In professional life one remains ahead only by understanding the underlying truth of any given situation. So if you come home late at night and bluff that you were doing group study when you actually went to a party he would guess the truth in half a second.
Moral of the story: There is nothing like telling the truth. So give the truth a try next time.