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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-Byr idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Heidi Grant Halverson, psychologist, Associate Director of Columbia

Business School's Motivation Science Center

and author of no one understands you and what to do about it.

Heidi, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you, Sarah.

So I think probably most of us have at some point wondered how other people see us and it's often

kind of an uncomfortable feeling. I'm just wondering do other people see us as we really are?

Do they see us as we see ourselves? Is that even the same thing?

So that's a really good question and the short answer is no, they don't see us as we see ourselves

and really that comes down to a couple of basic reasons why that's

true.

The first is that we are a lot harder to read than we imagine we are.

If you think about all the things that you have

access to when you're kind of understanding your own behavior, right? You know what

you're thinking, what you're feeling, what your intentions are. Other people

don't have access to any of those things, right?

So what they have at best is kind of looking at your behavior, listening to what you're saying,

...