When ‘I’m Fine’ Means ‘Please Ask Again’

Empathy, culture, and the quiet art of reading people

On a weekday that is morning for some and late afternoon for others, five tiny rectangles of light open across the world. Frank joins from Cleebourg in France, hunched over a laptop in a café where, as he explains, you can’t even get the Wi-Fi password without a legal risk assessment. Bruce appears from London, dry wit ready. Rosie is in São Paulo, Brazil, sliding this call in before work. Nathalie is in Seoul, South Korea, battling sound and subtitles. And holding the centre of this digital table is Janita in South Africa, host, guide, and gentle trouble-maker.

The topic for the month is people. Today’s slice of that is: understanding people—their emotions, their cultures, their maddening habits like never screwing the cap back onto a water bottle.

You’re not just reading an article; you’re dropping into a global lunch conversation about what it really takes to communicate in a world where “Yes, dear” can mean “I love you,” “I surrender,” or “I’m trying not to start a war.”

The moment you realise “I’m fine” is a code

Janita sets the tone quickly:

“Understanding people means that we notice their emotions, their needs and their communication style… together, understanding each other builds trust, empathy and stronger communication.”

It sounds simple, almost obvious—until she points out how often we ignore the clues we’re given: a tightened jaw, a quiet “I’m fine,” a lid left half-closed on a bottle for the hundredth time.

She asks the group: are you good at reading people?

Nathalie, speaking from Seoul, pauses. Yes… sometimes. She can often feel what’s behind a smile or a silence, she explains, but some people are “very closed,” like locked doors whose key is patience. There’s something almost mystical in how she describes it—emotions felt “energetically” through eyes and posture more than words.

Already, the conversation has moved beyond textbook communication skills. This isn’t about scripts; it’s about attunement.

Listening, feedback, and the comedy of misunderstanding

When Janita turns to Bruce in London, his answer is almost minimalist.

“The simple answer is listening,” he says. “Asking questions and trying hard not to respond emotionally in the same way.”

Listening. Questions. Emotional regulation. It’s the communication holy trinity—and yet how often do we default to doing the exact opposite?

Frank, in Cleebourg, smiles the smile of someone who has been on both sides of that mistake. When Janita asks if he prefers people to tell him their feelings directly, he doesn’t hesitate:

“If it’s positive, yes. If it’s negative, no,” he laughs. “But actually, yes. I like to know where I stand. I’m a… for feedback, positive or negative, because then I know if I need to change course.”

He reaches for an image: lighthouses in the fog. Without feedback, he says, he feels like he’s moving through a “thick bank of fog,” not sure whether to keep going or turn sharply before hitting something hard.

That metaphor lands. In a sense, every relationship needs its lighthouses: small flashes of honest communication that prevent slow-motion collisions.

Rosie, in São Paulo, brings in the everyday comedy of miscommunication. When Janita asks if she’s ever misunderstood someone, Rosie’s instinctive answer is pure practicality:

If she doesn’t understand, she asks again. “Please, I don’t understand. Can you explain?” “Can you speak slowly?” “Can you say it again?”

It’s such a simple habit—and yet one that many people avoid because they don’t want to appear slow, ignorant, or difficult. Instead, we nod, pretend, and only discover later that we were meant to water the flowers, not the carpet.

Conflict, empathy, and a BMW in bureaucratic limbo

When Janita asks Bruce why empathy is important in everyday life, he offers a line that could be printed on a postcard:

“It avoids unnecessary conflict,” he says. “And helps you move to a more enjoyable place to live.”

Frank, ever the provocateur, gently pushes back: should we always avoid conflict?

He tells a story from that very morning. He owns a BMW, registered in Germany, which he’s trying to re-register in France. To do this, he needs a “certificate of conformity”—a single piece of paper issued by BMW in Munich.

The local dealership in France promised it would arrive in “three to four days” back in October. It is now very much not October. The previous owner is still paying tax and insurance in Germany. Another customer has been waiting since June. No one can get through to the mysterious office in Munich that issues the certificate. There is no phone number. Emails vanish into the ether.

Frank describes standing in the dealership that morning, telling the staff member, “I know it’s not your fault. I understand you’re in a predicament.” Empathy first. Shared frustration second. And then, only then, the desire for conflict—not against the man in front of him, but with him.

“I’m really looking for the conflict,” Frank admits. Not to vent, but to change a system that is “totally chaotic and inefficient.”

Here, empathy and conflict are not opposites. They are partners. Being kind to the human in front of you can coexist with being uncompromising about the broken process behind them.

The invisible script underneath every sentence

At one point, Janita throws a crucial question at Frank: How can culture affect communication?

His answer is a tour through decades of experience.

As a young man working at a luxury hotel in London, he used what he calls a “very German approach”: he told people what to do. Directly. Efficiently. It worked—sort of. Tasks got done, but not with much enthusiasm. Eventually someone took him aside and taught him the British way of asking:

“Can you go on a lunch break now?” becomes an order.
“Would you like to go on your lunch break now?”—with the right intonation—becomes a polite but firm invitation.

The words might be similar; the impact is not. Culture often lives in those tiny particles of language: “would you mind…,” “how about…,” “if you have a moment…”

Later, Frank talks about intercultural training on Japanese customs during his Hilton days: the importance of using both hands when giving a business card, or the subtle choreography of politeness in Asian contexts. Deals can fall apart, he says, when people underestimate how deeply these invisible scripts run.

Even within Europe and South Africa, he notes, he’s had to adjust to different communication styles. He mentions a South African living in London whose emails are “brutally direct” and can easily offend someone unfamiliar with that tone—even when no offence is intended.

Culture is not just flags and food; it’s the temperature of our language, the way “yes” can mean “no,” and “no” can be impossible to say directly.

The small things: Lids, emojis, and laughing at teachers

The most revealing moments, though, are often small and funny.

Janita confesses to a habit that “drives her husband up the wall”: she never screws lids back on properly. Water bottles, body wash, anything with a cap—open, precarious, and one clumsy movement away from disaster. Her husband spills, sighs, and fumes. She understands his irritation, she says… but she also tells him, quite calmly, that she’s not going to change. His new survival skill is checking each container before picking it up.

Is this stubbornness, or radical honesty about who we really are at home?

It’s here that Janita makes a core point: understanding people doesn’t mean judging them; it means reading their patterns—their tone of voice, their silences, their tiny rituals—and deciding whether to respond with irritation or curiosity.

The conversation then tumbles playfully into emojis. If humans came with emoji faces instead of real ones, which would help you read them fastest?

Nathalie picks a simple yellow smile—not exaggerated, just open and receptive. Rosie adds the thumbs-up emoji, clear in almost every language. Bruce, ever the data-minded one, notes that there are about 200 emojis and he’s only used three, and muses that an “emoji directory” might actually be useful.

Later, when Janita asks whose thoughts they’d read if they could read one person’s mind per day, Rosie mentions a Brazilian comedian who used to be a teacher. He now records daily videos about the real life of teachers in the staff room—the breakfast breaks, the chaos, the whispered jokes. Teachers pack his shows because he gets it exactly right. They laugh because they feel seen.

Sometimes understanding people is as simple as that: recognising yourself in their story.

Why we work so hard to understand each other

As the call moves toward its end, Janita gently gathers the threads:

We try to understand people because we want to feel safe.
We want to feel valued.
We want others to be more open with us.
We want better communication for everyone.

Understanding people, she says, is noticing when “I’m fine” really means “I’m hurt,” when a quiet voice hides anger, when a shut camera hides tears, or when a clumsy joke is actually a peace offering.

It’s also about choice: do we step into the conflict or step away? Do we say, like Rosie, “I don’t understand, can you explain again?” Do we listen like Bruce, feel “energy” like Nathalie, or push systems like Frank?

You can almost feel the silent nods across time zones as she speaks. Seoul, London, São Paulo, Cleebourg, South Africa—each square on the screen holding someone trying, in their own way, to read the room.

Creating your own season of understanding

As the batteries die—literally, in Frank’s case as his power bank gives up—and people dash off to jobs and dinners, farewells ripple through the call.

“Nice to see you.”
“Take care.”
“Same time, same place.”

It’s ordinary and tender at once.

Imagine, for a moment, that your life has “seasons” of communication. There are winters of misunderstanding, where every message feels cold or misread. There are springs where you start to notice new cues, new languages, new cultural nuances. There are summers when empathy is easy and connection feels warm and effortless.

Here’s the quiet truth emerging from this global conversation: we don’t just wait for those summers to arrive. We help create them.

Every time you ask for clarification instead of pretending, you move closer to summer.
Every time you choose empathy and necessary conflict, you move closer to summer.
Every time you notice the lid-leaver, the emoji user, the bureaucratic victim, the direct emailer—and resist the urge to judge—you move closer to summer.

So as you leave this article and go back into your own web of messages, meetings, and misunderstood “I’m fine”s, ask yourself:

What season of life am I in, communication-wise? And what is one small act of empathy I can use today to gently turn up the temperature?