> A pitfall of this mentality, at least in my experience, is that people I hurt are usually much better judges of whether I hurt them than I am.

It would be easier if people just talked more about their feelings even if they don't understand me. If I hurt someone and they just say something like "look I feel weird because of this and this that happened between us", then I can process and understand what went wrong. I spent some years running teams and doing management and I used 1v1s for this to really good results.

I do that and a lot of my closest friends also do that. I think people that expect you to read their feelings are the ones that are going to get hurt if they spend time around because they have unrealistic expectations. I can only feel my feelings, or get empathetic with people that have opened up to me before. I can't be apologizing all the time just in case, that's also ridiculous and even though a lot of people do it in, specially in California, I think it comes down as condescending and sometimes even egotistical.