Mike Lehr's Blog

Although sensitive people often don’t see their sensitivity as a gift, it is. They are more in tune with their world and those around them. However, because what they feel is often only operating on a subconscious level with the rest of us, they often hold a minority view. Thus, expressing this gift as a talent is challenging.

Sensitive people are often the best ones to ask about the overall emotional state of their organizations. In fact, I have often asked them this question:

Do you find that when you walk into a strange organization you can feel what the morale is like fairly quickly?

Usually this occurs for them within the first fifteen to sixty minutes. We could be talking about a company of fifty or a corporation of thousands. In fact, many of them could walk into a room filled with people and assess what’s going without ever talking to anyone. Moreover, their assessment would be more accurate than an average person who had talked to everyone.

While this might seem fantastic, it’s very real when you consider there are already trained professionals who can assess the potential success of married couples and sales people through observation only, no audio. Moreover there are researchers exploring the predictive aspect of subtle facial movements that only our unconscious captures. Such research is also being applied to people and technology in the recognition of security threats at airports.

Still, since many of the rest of us usually don’t get these feelings, it’s easy to talk sensitive people out of their minority, often solitary, views. That’s why for many sensitive people with whom I have worked, many of their worst decisions have come as a result of others changing their minds rather than following what they know is correct.

Other posts in this series:

• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self Defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage