Leaders’ words often shine like polished scripts, but bodies leak truth. After 20 years studying empathy, I treat gut feelings as hypotheses—five practical steps to debug authenticity at work.
The story
When a leader says yes, my cortex runs checks,
I watch the hands, the breath, the jaw angle.
Words can be polished like a shiny HR script,
But the body leaks data in a nervous tangle.
Intuition is not wizard dust. It is pattern recognition, earned the unglamorous way: paying attention to behavioral cues like micro-expressions, voice tone shifts, and mismatched body language.
After 20 years studying, teaching, and writing about empathy, plus building EmpathyBot.net as a working example of AI delivering empathetic responses, I still treat “gut feelings” like a hypothesis, not a verdict.
🟢 Data-Driven Insight: how I “debug” authenticity at work
1] *Baseline first*: What is their normal? Then note deviations.
2] Separate observation from judgment: facts first, story second.
3] Use Practical Empathy Practice, guess feelings and needs from the facts.
4] Run “Street Empathy”: reflect, then verify. “You seem frustrated because… am I close?”
5] Journal hits and misses, so your intuition gets refactored, not romanticized.
Example: If a colleague says “All good,” while crossing arms and dodging eye contact, my intuition flags inconsistency. PEP keeps me curious enough to ask a clean question instead of prosecuting.
If you want the full toolkit for enhancing intuition and detecting authenticity, Chapter 14 of *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind* on Amazon goes deep on this. Can you imagine how much bandwidth you’d get back if “trust” stopped being a guessing game?
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