Reading the room isn’t about guessing. It’s about looking up long enough to see it.

What gets called intuition about people is mostly just data nobody else bothered to collect. The information is on everybody’s faces and in how they are standing, and the reason most people miss it is not that they lack a gift but that their eyes were down or their next sentence was already written. Looking for three seconds beats guessing for ten minutes.

Make it a habit before you speak in a group. Look around once and take in who is talking, who has gone quiet, who keeps checking the time. Then say what fits the room rather than what you had ready.