Have you ever been the recipient
of some weird neurotypical social cues?
And you're like, what does that mean?
And what am I supposed to do with it?
Like the other day at the gym,
this girl kept looking at me,
like giving me like half a second of eye contact
and then just ignoring me the rest of the time,
not actually coming to talk to me.
Like what does that even mean?
It turns out from my EQ training,
we know exactly what that means.
Hi everyone.
Paul Micallef here from Autism From The Inside.
I make weekly videos sharing the human side of autism.
So make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content.
So how can I say I know exactly
what that weird little sideways glance,
making half a second of eye contact means
from across the room?
Well, I will admit that the first time it happened,
I wasn't a hundred percent sure.
I was a hundred percent sure it happened
and I am very sensitive and I noticed these things.
Firstly, no one looks at me.
It's very obvious if anyone is willing
to engage with me at all, it's very obvious.
So that's something that I always notice.
So when it happened the first time,
I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting.
I wonder what that means.
And I was a little bit confused.
When it happened the second time,
I had a little bit of time to process
and I was much more sure of exactly what it meant
and my options of what I could do in response to that
if I wanted to.
So the first question I had in my head is,
was it accidental or was it deliberate?
Because if it was deliberate,
then it's a little bit confusing.
Why would someone keep looking at me,
but not actually say hello?
Like she could have easily said hello if she wanted to,
but then if it's accidental,
that's even more confusing.
What does it mean if someone keeps
accidentally looking at me?
So before we get onto what we definitely do know
about this situation, let's do a quick reality check
of what we don't know and what we can't know.
So for example, it might be tempting to think,
oh, I wish I knew whether she was doing it on purpose or not
like, is there any intention behind it or not?
Or I might want to know,
I wonder what's going through her head at the moment.
What is she thinking?
What is she intending with this subtle,
weird form of communication?
My first thought was, is she flirting with me?
Is that what's going on here?
How do I know if that's the case or not?
There are four facts of this situation
that are really important to bear in mind.
Fact number one,
I do not know the answer to any of those questions
that I just posed.
I don't know if it's deliberate.
I don't know what she's thinking or feeling.
I have absolutely no idea
if it means she's flirting with me or not.
Fact number two,
there is no way for me to know a definite answer
to any of those questions.
It's not like I don't know at the moment,
but I should follow these steps and find out.
There are no steps that I can follow to find out,
which means I have to make a choice as to how to respond
without getting a clear answer to those questions.
Fact number three,
a lot of what goes on in our brains and in our bodies
with emotions and our thoughts and feelings
and all of that is completely unconscious.
What that means is we might be aware of some of the things
that we're thinking and feeling,
but we are not aware of all of the things
that we are thinking and feeling,
which means that if I asked her,
did you look at me on purpose?
There is absolutely no way
to honestly answer that question accurately
because she may think, no, it was an accident,
but actually it wasn't an accident.
It was an unconscious communication.
So all of that is to say,
not only do I not know and can't know the answer
to these questions,
but she doesn't know and can't know for certain
all of the answers to these questions.
So let me give you an example of how we can think,
we can honestly think we believe something
that's not actually true.
So when I was studying engineering, for example,
I was thinking I would like to be an engineer.
That is something I really want.
And so I spent five years of my life studying that.
And then I put a lot of effort into job interviews
and finding a good company that I wanted to work for
and all of that kind of stuff
to get what I thought I wanted at the time.
However, it would have been more accurate to say
that what I wanted was stability.
I wanted a nice, stable, reasonably well-paying job
that would help me have a family
and support my wife and kids.
I wanted recognition of my skills.
I wanted to work on solving important problems.
And so becoming an engineer sounded like what I wanted,
whereas actually it was really just the means
to get the deeper things that I wanted.
So sometimes we can honestly believe
that we think a certain thing or want a certain thing,
but actually our unconscious has a deeper motive
that we're not aware of.
So fact number four,
and we've already kind of alluded to this already,
is that it actually doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter if it was on purpose.
It doesn't matter what she was thinking at the time.
It doesn't matter if she's actually flirting with me or not.
None of those things are actually relevant
for me deciding how to respond to this situation.
So that's what we don't know and what we can't know,
but there is one thing that I can know about this situation
with near absolute certainty,
the very simple meaning of this very subtle,
neurotypical social cue.
She was essentially saying,
I'm open and interested to interact with you
in some way, shape, or form that has yet to be decided yet.
And if you weren't familiar
with common neurotypical ways of communicating,
you might think something like,
well, if she wanted to communicate and interact with me,
why didn't she just say hello?
She could have just said hello.
Why these weird little sideways glances?
And the answer is because the weird little sideways glance
is sending me a message.
It is actually an invitation,
and I can either pick up that invitation or not.
And if I choose not to, then she'll go away thinking,
oh, well, he just wasn't interested in talking to me,
which is extremely frustrating if you didn't pick up
on that message that was sent so subtly.
So now we've realized two additional,
more useful facts in this situation.
Fact number one,
she's interested to interact with me in some way.
Fact number two, if I don't initiate it,
nothing's gonna happen.
So what did I do?
I used the location occasion trick
of how to initiate an interaction,
and I made a relevant relatable comment
about something we were both experiencing in the situation.
And as you may have predicted by this stage,
the response on her side was extremely positive.
We already knew with almost certainty
that she was interested to interact.
I responded positively to that invitation
by initiating some kind of interaction.
Therefore, she also responded very positively
to my comment.
In fact, for the rest of our time there,
we shared a couple of positive back and forth little things.
We had a polite goodbye,
and that was basically the end of that interaction.
Fantastic, a successful, positive, genuine,
interesting little interaction
that happened reasonably organically
without too much effort on either of our parts.
But it all came down to number one,
did I notice the weird, subtle NT social cue?
And did I know what to do next
to respond positively to that invitation?
And you'll notice we still don't have an answer
to any of those unanswerable questions that we had earlier.
We still don't know if the little glances
were intentional on her part or not.
We still have no idea what she was thinking,
if anything, during that time.
And we still have absolutely no idea
if she was open or interested for that little spark
to be the start of an ongoing kind of relationship.
But again, it helps to know what we don't know.
So let's look at a different hypothetical example
of if I was interested
in starting a relationship with her.
I still have no idea what she wants at this stage,
so the only way is to test and see
what she responds positively to.
So for example, if I wanted to try and stay in contact
and arrange to see her again,
I could have done things like ask her name
or ask if she comes here very often
or ask when she's likely to be in here next
or say when I'm likely to be in here next
and suggest that maybe we can bump into each other again
at a similar situation.
And if the response to all those is quite positive,
then we might even make a time, say, great,
well, I will see you here next weekend then.
Maybe I can even suggest to exchange numbers.
And you can see with all of those questions
that I outlined before,
you can see it's slowly testing a little bit more,
a little bit more, a little bit more,
a little bit more, a little bit more until we get to,
we have each other's numbers
and we've kind of arranged to meet each other
at the same time next weekend.
And in that hypothetical scenario, what do we now know?
The only thing we know is that she's interested
and willing to stay in contact
and see each other again next weekend.
Anything more than that is pure speculation.
So anyway, the main element of the strategy
that I've outlined here is to clearly distinguish
between what we do know and what we don't know.
What we do know is based on some direct evidence
that we've observed.
And what we don't know is either,
probably not that important for right now,
or is an opportunity to step up the relationship
by a tiny little step to test
if the other person is open and positive
with this next level.
You'll also notice that none of this involves masking.
None of this involves a script
of this is what I should say or shouldn't say.
Instead, it's based on an authentic understanding
of the social dynamic that's happening
so that it empowers me with a choice of,
do I want to make a tiny little step
to increase this relationship?
Or like actually happened, I was just saying,
yeah, this has been nice, polite goodbye,
and we may or may not ever see each other again.
Also fine.
So authentic social skills combined with a practiced
awareness through emotional intelligence training
suddenly open up any number of opportunities,
like the example we've just been discussing.
So I really hope that has made sense
and has been valuable to you
as a bit of an interesting example and anecdote.
I'll be interested to hear if this resonated for you
or if there are other weird social cues that you've noticed
that you figured out what they actually mean
and how to respond to them.
So thanks for watching.
I hope you've enjoyed this week's video
and I will see you again next week.
Bye.