3. Blagging, or genuine? How to know?

 Being calm and composed could be just a front: some people can be very convincing about being calm and composed; they may have no idea how to deal with their inner struggles, but they are well practised at appearing in control. This is not entirely a bad thing, and you would do well to learn about that.

We all have inner dilemmas and emotions brewing up in us, all the time, and it a sign of maturity to be able to sit on those things when the situation calls for it. Whether we are on show to others, or on show to ourselves, how we behave is the result of some kind of appraisal of what we would like to be, and then some kind of choice as to how to show it.

Here's a simple concept of how people are. It's called the Johari window.  

 We are complex people who don't know ourselves entirely, and we constantly have to keep attending to our self awareness as time goes by: we evolve different view about ourselves and other people as we grow older, we show different parts of ourselves in different situations, and we change our beliefs and attitudes to things as we go through life.

Only by being genuinely attentive to yourself do you gain a proper understanding of these sides of you, and by doing so, you can move around between them more fluidly.

Understanding yourself, and being mindful of the way in which we guide our thinking and emotions towards our ideals, is a readily learnable thing.  

If someone is blagging, the main way we tell is if there is a big distance between their private self and their public persona. It takes a lot of conscious effort to keep a persona going if it is not true to our natural state. Ask actors and teenagers. Sometimes the most innocent questions can discern this difference. Policemen use the most innocent questions to get a person to unravel in front of them: unless they are very well practised at the lie, people are unable to live out their blag because it is a very effortful process to keep in mind a set of made up impressions you want to convey, and then to generate new 'facts' to back up that impression when a bunch of normal questions are asked. 

I will also talk a little bit about transference in another post: the black magickery which lets psychiatrists and therapists peer into your emotional workings, revealing truths about your emotions and drives that even you may not realise. This is a clue as to how we learn about our unconscious selves. More on that later through. 

In telling if someone else is being factually truthful just by looking at them while they make a single statement and nothing else, it is very difficult, if not impossible. Research seems to show that the only people who are able to tell a lie from the truth when someone says it to them, are people with clinical depression. Not even policemen, judges, or intelligence professionals (spies) can do it as well as someone with clinical depression. This is a complex and fascinating area, but not the point of these scribblings here. Onward!