You work with someone for years. You sit in meetings with them, watch how they make decisions, and see how they respond under pressure. You think you know them.
And then you discover you’ve been reading them completely wrong.
That happened during a recent speech I gave on Personality Poker. I paired people up and asked them to do something that sounded simple: Figure out the other person’s personality style without looking at their cards.
Some of these people had worked together for years. After the exercise, I asked how they did, and one person immediately shouted, “Awful.”
That got a laugh, but it also exposed something important. Knowing someone is not the same as understanding them. We make assumptions based on the role they play, the work they do, and the version of themselves we happen to see.
And often, we get it wrong.
The Cards Are Usually Hidden
Personality Poker uses four suits to represent different ways people think and work. Spades are drawn to facts, data, and evidence. Clubs focus on plans, action, and results. Hearts pay attention to people and relationships. Diamonds are energized by ideas, possibilities, and what’s new.
When someone has five Personality Poker cards in front of them, understanding their preferences is relatively easy. But most of life doesn’t work that way.
Your customer doesn’t walk into a meeting holding five cards. Neither does the person you’re interviewing, your boss, or the employee you’re struggling to motivate. So how do you know what they need?
You read the tells.
In poker, a tell is a clue that gives you information about the hand another player might be holding. People have tells too, and they reveal them through the questions they ask, the words they use, what excites them, and what they pay attention to.
You might not see their cards. But if you know what to look for, you can often see their hand.
We’re Constantly Speaking Different Languages
Before introducing the tells, I gave the audience another challenge. I asked whether anyone spoke a language other than English as their first language, and one woman said Spanish.
I asked her to imagine that the rest of us were potential buyers and she needed to sell us something. There was only one condition: she had to make the entire sales pitch in Spanish.
She did. She was animated, enthusiastic, and persuasive. When she finished, I asked the audience how many were ready to buy.
People laughed. A few joked that they might buy because they liked her energy, but most of us had no idea what she had actually sold.
That was the point.
When someone doesn’t understand us, our instinct is often to explain it again. We add detail, speak more slowly, and sometimes practically shout. But speaking louder doesn’t help if you’re speaking the wrong language.
The same thing happens when we communicate with people who think differently from us.
Listen to the Questions
The strongest tells are often verbal. Pay attention to the questions people ask because those questions can reveal what matters to them.
A Spade tends to ask for evidence: “What’s the evidence?” “How do we know?” “What does the data show?”
A Club is more likely to focus on action and results: “What’s the plan?” “When will this be finished?” “How are we going to implement it?”
A Heart brings the conversation back to people: “Who needs to be involved?” “How will this affect the team?” “What does the customer think?”
And a Diamond starts exploring possibilities: “What if we tried this?” “Has anyone done this before?” “What else could we do?”
People rarely hide their style. They announce it. Repeatedly.
There can be physical clues too. Spades may become contained and analytical. Think of Rodin’s The Thinker. A skeptical Spade might sit with arms crossed while quietly evaluating everything being said.
Diamonds often have more movement and energy. They gesture, jump between ideas, and come alive when the conversation moves toward something new.
Clubs often show a focused intensity. One of my favorite Club tells is the karate chop: “We’re going to do this, then this, then this.”
Hearts tend to create connection. Some do it quietly through listening and steady attention, while others become highly animated when talking about people and relationships.
But this is where reading tells can become dangerous if we oversimplify it. Someone crossing their arms does not automatically make them a Spade. Maybe they’re cold.
A tell isn’t proof. It’s a clue. Look for patterns, especially in the language people use and the questions they repeatedly ask.
The Audience Made the Same Mistake We All Make
During that first exercise, people were trying to identify the suit of someone they knew, and the results were surprisingly poor. One reason quickly became obvious: we tend to confuse someone’s job with who they are.
A person may have learned how to behave in a certain role because the job requires it. That doesn’t necessarily mean the behavior is natural, and being good at something doesn’t mean you enjoy it.
I once worked with someone who was extremely good with spreadsheets. Everyone knew it, so whenever a new spreadsheet needed to be created, guess who got the assignment?
She did. Again and again.
The problem was that she hated spreadsheets. She could do the work, but it drained her. What energized her was creative work.
Her colleagues were reading her résumé rather than reading her.
That distinction matters. Capability isn’t preference. Just because you can play a card doesn’t mean you want it in your hand.
One Question Changed the Conversation
During the debrief, one participant mentioned a question his partner had asked: “What do you do when you’re not working?”
I loved that question because outside of work, some of our learned behaviors disappear. We aren’t performing a job, trying to satisfy a boss, or playing the role the organization expects us to play. Our natural preferences can become much easier to see.
Sometimes the person you know at work is only one version of that person.
Then we moved into the second round of the exercise. This time, instead of relying mainly on what they thought they already knew, participants became more curious.
They asked questions like, “What kind of projects do you most enjoy?” “What are you most proud of?” “When you start something new, what do you want to know first?” And, of course, “What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?”
The second round went much better.
That may have been the biggest insight of the exercise. Reading tells is not about becoming better at labeling people. It is about becoming better at understanding them.
Why This Matters When You’re Trying to Persuade Someone
Once you start recognizing tells, communication changes. Imagine you’re selling an idea to a Spade. They may need evidence before they are willing to move forward.
A Club may want to know exactly how it will be implemented. A Heart may want to understand how people will be affected. A Diamond may become excited by what is new or possible.
Same idea. Four very different conversations.
I’m a Diamond. If you spend twenty minutes showing me spreadsheets, technical specifications, and statistical models, I might understand your argument perfectly well, but you probably haven’t captured my interest. Odds are, I will have fallen asleep halfway through.
Instead, tell me, “This is new. No one has tried this before. You could be one of the first.” Now I’m listening.
That isn’t manipulation. It is simply recognizing that effective communication is not about saying what you want to say. It is about saying it in a way the other person can hear.
The Real Skill Isn’t Reading People
The difference between the first and second rounds reinforced one of the most important lessons of the exercise. The real skill isn’t simply learning to recognize Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds. It’s curiosity and learning to stop making assumptions.
Pay attention to the questions someone asks. Listen for the words they repeat and notice where their energy increases. Notice what they care about when nobody is telling them what they’re supposed to care about.
Then test your assumption. Because the biggest danger isn’t that we don’t understand other people. It’s that we’re convinced we already do.
In poker, you rarely get to see the other person’s cards. You watch, listen, look for patterns, and read the tells.
Maybe we should do the same with people.