PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS To Be More Charismatic & Confident TODAY! | Vanessa Van Edwards

0:00 this is the biggest mistake i think facing really really smart people i think really really smart people and this is most of my students they're like off the charts smart creative brilliant they make the mistake of thinking i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome is it better to smile without teeth or with teeth in order to enroll people in you as a human being to get anything you want in your life what research found is that a real smile whether it shows teeth or not the only the biggest difference is it has to reach up here the eyes the the upper cheek muscles actually so those eye crinkles yeah i do that a lot though i feel like i squint a lot yeah yeah you got a little smizing right so that's actually the only cure we're looking for so it actually does not matter so if you have

0:45 a profile picture a dating profile picture a linkedin profile picture i either want you neutral or with eye crinkles the worst is sort of that in between now i don't mind like a soft up mouth right so you and i both have this on our book covers a soft up mouth but it has to engage those upper cheek muscles what dr barbara wilde found is that when they showed pictures of people with the fake smile and a real smile the real smile was contagious so when people looked at the real smile they themselves felt happier when they looked at the fake smile they felt no mood change interesting so the reason why that's important is i think that we think about like oh i want to show up i want to be really my most confident self but what we don't realize is that our cues are contagious yes that if you show authentic happiness you are more likely

1:30 to infect happiness actually there's one more face cue i want to talk about so um this is the cue that sort of started me on this crazy journey and it got me i'm a recovering awkward person as you know so this gave me a lot of really very introvert awkward person social anxiety all the good things so so this story gave me so much relief what they found was if you are in a room and someone gives you a cue of social rejection what does that look like okay so social rejection i roll us a sigh looking away looking right looking away distancing behavior when we pull our head back and like uh when i angle my head back you know i've just disengaged from you crossing arms and crossing arms uh sudden sudden non-verbal rejection is this turning feet also turning yes we oh we can talk about females okay we can talk

2:16 about feet hands and feet so interesting i look at the hands and feet all the time i can't remember if i got this from you years ago like looking at the hands and seeing are they in the pocket are they out of pocket yes uh but go ahead before we get back okay so social rejection cues and you know this if you're in a business meeting and you suddenly feel like am i disliked ah he's not he doesn't like this she doesn't like this when we see a cue of social rejection our field of vision increases we see wider we literally see whiter our pupils dilate so we see more the reason why that study was like a light bulb for me was our cues are affecting others physiology our physiology can change in a room in an instant if we walk into a meeting we feel not liked if we feel rejected if we feel like

3:02 we're being judged our own physiology responds so if we're in a room and we're not feeling confident under control and someone sends us a cue of rejection one you want to know what those are because it makes your feel the vision bigger so you can see who else is sending me a cue what's my escape route that's literally what your body's trying to do yeah ups your adrenaline ups your cortisol and no one can think well adrenaline cortisol that's why in a meeting it can go downhill so quickly yeah you're in a presentation you've prepared all week and then you're like oh he just rolled his eyes oh she just turned away oh the i just saw a weird foot movement uh-huh and then you lose your spot you blank out and the rest of the presentation goes badly the good news is is what matthew lieberman found this is from ucla once you label a cue so if you say

3:48 that was an eye roll that was a scoff of exasperation that was a contempt smirk the moment you label it your amygdala calms down they've proven that if they when people are in fmri machines and they show them a fearful face so if your face is when we widen the whites of our eyes and we raise our eyebrows up if you're laying an fmri machine and you see fear you will begin to feel afraid your amygdala begins to activate and your body goes well if he's afraid i better be afraid but the moment you say in the fmri that's just fear your amygdala stops responding interesting so i think i've had a really hard time finding confidence it's been a long lifetime journey the way that i've sort of backdoored into confidence is control if i can control the cues that are being

4:35 sent to me if i can control the cues i'm sending to others it's a secret backdoor into confidence how do you control someone else's cues you label them and respond appropriately so so you can't control how they act towards you but you can control how you react to it how you interpret it how you transition afterwards yes like you can first by labeling it you just controlled your own physiology so if someone sends you a contempt an eye roll you just took control you took control back of nope i see it i spot it i'm disengaging it you know in the vulnerability world when you you know label the shame when you speak about the shame and you bring it to the light it becomes less scary it doesn't stay stuck inside of you so even just acknowledging it is a helpful tool to process shame or

5:20 i guess social rejection social rejection it's the same actually so for vulnerability yes you're afraid you acknowledge it it makes it less scary it's the same thing in social settings dates professional situations negotiate to interviews the moment you say okay i just heard an exasperated tone of voice or i just saw a lid flex that's the one i want to talk about now what floor i know i know a lid flex a lid flat is that an eyelid yes like like a like a like a twitch or what okay so here you asked how do we control oh yeah that's it you just did it okay so you know zoolander yes you know the blue steel of course okay that is actually a lid flex right so that's a right it's like it's if you if you're listening around hard in your lower lids then like your lips that's what blue steel is the funny thing about this q it's ridiculous i know you're like where are you going with this video it makes

6:06 sense to me because it's like prove me you're like someone's doubting you oh you just got it okay so what's funny is in fear our eyes widen so if you widen your eyes as wide as possible so you can see the whites you just i can take in way more of my environment when we're afraid we want to see as much as possible when we are trying to see details universally across cultures we have to lessen the light coming into our eyes so we squint the focus we focus so if you like if you were to try to see that dot over there on the wall you harden your lower lids and that is because scientifically proven when we harden our lower lids it reduces the amount of light and we can see more details without you i can see the details on that camera better when i lower lid flat yeah this is why if you open people magazine's sexiest man alive

6:53 on almost every page along with a flexed bicep are flexed lids and that is because women find a flex lid oh so when they when it's so attractive so an open lid is not sexy is it sexy like slit yes because why women and men both want partners who are deeply scrutinizing who are deeply looking at them so if i'm sitting when talking to you and i go oh really i just showed you wow that was super interesting in fact when we flex our lids we're going from just listening to thinking deeply interesting we're literally trying to see something better so if you're in a negotiation on a date or with a friend and they go really and they harden their lower lids you are

7:38 like ooh ding ding i just hit something good and so the other way that we control cues is okay let's say that you're and this actually happened to me so this is a story i share in the book i was in a meeting with a very high-powered exec team and if the presentation went well they were going to invite me back for more presentations so the stakes were very high and it was a small group and i was in a particular part of my presentation talking about chemicals and i noticed an executive across the room fluxed his lower lids at me kind of flexed his lower lids he's looking at the slide and i was like okay what's happening he just went from listening to scrutinizing and so i paused the small group and i said all good any questions and i literally looked right at him and i opened up my palms and i said any questions so this is the universal signal for openness it literally means i want to receive i'll share anything you are yes

8:24 it's literally like let me receive let me be open to you he went yeah you know i do have a question and at the time i was teaching about oxytocin oxytocin i know you talk about it a lot on the show the chemical of connection and bonding he goes i don't understand something isn't oxytocin what they give women to induce labor and i'm like you are right sir they do give oxytocin and that's because it's so powerful that it can induce labor interesting but in our position it's for social bonding it was such a good teaching moment because he immediately felt heard and i know that if i hadn't addressed that concern right then and there i would have lost him he would have been like what he would have been stuck on that one slide and afterwards he said to me you know i really feel like you were teaching to us

9:09 literally teaching to him and so i think the other way that we can control the cues is we spot it and then we say how can i honor it like that's the gift that we can give people is i can be sitting with someone and say i want to listen to you so deeply i want to listen to your words i want to watch your facial expressions i want to listen to your number but i want to even listen to your voice tone i mean we haven't even talked about vocal power which here is incredibly important and not only do i want to spot that i want to respond in the way that you make you feel the most heard by me so it's spotting and honoring by doing that if you're in a presentation whether you actually acknowledge the person or not are you just saying that it'll bring you back to a more centered place so you can continue on a presentation exactly it makes you feel in control of the narrative it makes you

9:54 feel in control of and like even for introverts right like introverts it's much harder for us to share a lot of verbal content so for us i want to give you more control over the non-verbal so that when you do speak it's more powerful right so if you're an introvert and you want to make sure you are reading the room really quickly so you know exactly when to say your point so it's most heard and most valued that gives you confidence because you're not guessing yes i don't like the guesswork no i don't either i know you see a lot of these videos online talking about how charismatic someone is based on the way they smile their eyes they even the tilt of the chin are all these different things is it important to be charismatic let's talk about that first yes is it valuable and more important to be charismatic versus less charismatic mm-hmm less to the point yeah yeah

10:41 credible to the point or neutral energy i mean what's more valuable in society in accomplishing goals and getting what you want very charismatic or neutral neutral okay so this is the biggest mistake i think facing really really smart people i think really really smart people and this is most of my students they're like off the charts smart creative brilliant they make the mistake of thinking if i have enough book smarts if i have enough technology smarts i don't need the people smarts now here's what research from princeton university found that i'm so excited about this yeah okay because already you know what's going to say that since yeah okay so this study completely changed my work and changed my life it was done by dr susan fisk in 2002 and since then they've been able to replicate it and build on it and build on it so this is very solid research which she found

11:29 very highly charismatic people have to have the perfect blend of two traits and this is where it's really this is why highly charismatic people are so unique is why we love them so much to be highly charismatic to be compelling to be captivating you must have a perfect blend of warmth and competence we talked about this the very very first time we met but since then so much more has come out about it very very smart people make the mistake of showing up as all-competent they try to blow you away with their numbers and their facts and their stats and their data but they're seen as cold yeah they're seen as intimidating on the other side you have people who are highly warm they have confidence but there's not a balance they show up as highly likeable highly friendly but

12:14 they're interrupted they're told that they're not being taken seriously they're not credible right people forget having met them before and so i think that most people problems i'm going to say all people problems all people problems stem from an imbalance between your warmth and competence and so not only do i think that charisma is essential for being successful i actually think it's the only way that people will be open to your competence so you could be all the book smarts in the world you could have the highest iq and remember everything on any test or you could be an encyclopedia of wisdom and information but what i'm hearing you say if you don't have charisma at least some of it then people won't take you seriously or they won't care as much or they won't be as engaged it's not just engaged there's two

13:00 questions that humans ask themselves about the person they're with and this happens immediately in every interaction by the way video two we forget that this is not just in person this is happening the moment you pop on video it's happening the moment someone opens your linkedin profile i did a whole bunch of research on linkedin profiles specifically because that's where a lot of our first impressions happen okay when people see your linkedin profile when people see you on video on zoom the first question they ask themselves and it is chronological the first question they ask is can i trust you basic instinct are you gonna be my ally or my enemy can i trust you the very second question they ask is can i rely on you so when you're in a meeting on a date in a call in a pitch in negotiation on linkedin the two signals that you want to cue people with

13:47 as quickly as possible is yes you can trust me and yes you can rely on me the problem is is that most professionals right now are going mute so i don't know if you've noticed this but it feels like in the last five or ten years we've gone towards ambivalence you know we've gone towards i'm not going to show anything i'm going to be as professional and sterile as possible and so we've taken out cues from all these assets and then people have a really hard time trusting us they have a really hard time listening to us we wonder why people are slow to reply to our emails it's because we're not queuing enough we have to have hundreds of cues to feel to answer those two questions interesting so how do we create more trust and reliability instantly yes okay so here let's talk about trust first because it is chronological we have to trust someone

14:33 to rely on them that's why starting with your competence doesn't always work so trust so the very first thing is the weird one it's a really weird one that i'm gonna talk about first you don't have to be competent to be trusted to be charismatic you have to be competent and trustworthy okay right so we want that perfect balance right you're trying to smart enough and you're warm and yes likable okay okay so like let's look at this cover so really really successful book covers just like really successful linkedin profile pictures very quickly signal both trust and competence right they both single both these same time okay so um let's talk about the first one which is space space zones okay so sorry i'll give it back to you i took it away space zone zone we're gonna talk about space we're gonna talk about the distance between people so the distance between my nose and the camera lens you

15:20 can't see it but in this photo shoot i made sure that the distance between my space and the camera lens was a certain space how far so i wanted to be in what's called the social zone okay so this is not made up by me this is actually uh research is based there's four zones for people the intimate zone the personal zone the social zone the public zone remember that um seinfeld episode if you ever saw of close talking you ever had this where someone walks up like right into your face and like yes talks into your mouth okay so that's called close talking and that is the first big rule intimate zone intimate zone you don't want to be there you don't want to be there unless you're about to get intimate or unless you like your friends or you know each other and you're like that's what you do do you talk six inches away from you that's too close no no no no that's like your

16:06 yeah so here's what happens this is six got you girlfriend inches zero to 18 inches apart is intimate zone okay so here's what happens this is the biggest mistake i'm seeing right now is we're all on video call all the time you're taking photos like yes selfie like yes what does that do when you're projecting a video or a photo of that close it is literally saying i want to get close really really fast and so if you have someone who's super high warmth they're like yes vulnerability intimacy and you're going to track those kind of people but if you have someone who's like whoa whoa whoa take a minute they are they are turned off so what's happening is on video calls you hop on facetime you hop on video on zoom and people are like right up in their camera yeah but their their nose and their camera are are 10 inches apart and so someone's like whoa it's too close yeah

16:52 it's too close okay so that's the first one is you want to respect the space zones the sweet spot is a foot and a half to three or four feet away that's that's that social zone that's where we're making eye contact if i wanted to reach out and high five you i could we're still respecting each other's space so for those one is when you're on video in your photos that if you want to have that balance you want to be 18 inches to about three or four feet away okay social zone is eighteen to three feet yeah and the personal zone by the way is still good but that's a little bit farther away right so that's uh you're just starting to get to know each other when you see someone across the room or a boardroom or a networking event they're usually about um four to seven feet away which is the next zone which is the personal zone and then you have the public zone which is obviously from

17:38 far away what we like in human behavior is we like someone to come towards us slowly that's one of the reasons i think we're so burnt out on video you know we we have these back to back to back video calls and we wonder why are we so tired i'm not even in person the reason is because it's cueing us in ways that are not natural in person i walk into a room right like i walked into the office today and you were waiting i was like hi and we and we hugged that was the per that's the way humans like right it's like this from public it's not like you open the door and i'm right there standing in your face that would have been a lot i was a few feet back it was perfect so like that that's natural but on video it's like we're here and that's why we can get so fatigued is because the cues are unnatural which actually leads me to the second kind of trust cue that's important yes is when we can't see

18:25 someone's hands our brain has a really hard time trusting someone it's so funny i think ever since that interview i'm always keeping my hands out yeah i don't think i was keeping my hands in before but i think i'm just more aware of it when i'm walking by someone who might be a stranger i just have my hands out and relaxed and loose by my you know i'm not like tight or tense and i'm not like hiding them or anything it's just yeah just walking normal say hey how's it going you know i'll even do a little wave yeah just to show that's super charismatic hey good to see you that's it that's it so when we so i love shark tank do you know that show okay i know you had i love it friday nights oh shark tank shark tank so i wanted to know watching shark tank was there patterns between the least successful pitches interesting and the most successful pitches this is cool okay so my team i love my team thank you to my team not not on just

19:10 based on like what people said but how they said everything everything so we analyzed 495 sharks come on yeah what were the main things you you solved the most successful and those not okay so thank you to jose pina for this research 495 shark tank pitches literally hundreds of hours of shark tank coding every variable we could think of entrance first impression verbal eye contact smiling interactivity math deal i mean we were looking at everything holy cow okay one of the biggest differences between the least successful pitches and the most successful pitches was what you just did hands right so when you walk down that shark tank hallway that is beautiful right that's exactly we're talking about space right public to personal to social to intimate so it's a nice warm-up the best pitchers when they were all the way in the public zone

19:56 signaled hey sharks no way and they'd walk into the room they'd take their place in their carpet they'd go good morning sharks or hey kevin mark we'd love to have a deal with you they would greet with some kind of hand gesture the least successful pitchers walked in with i think they thought they were being humble but it actually reduced trust they hid their hands either in fists behind their backs in their pockets or holding a prop sometimes accidentally they hid their hands and they didn't hand greet that makes it really hard for someone to say i can trust you and that is a primitive part of our brain that when we can't see someone's hands like if i were to you know do this entire interview with my hands behind my back what's she doing what's she doing yeah what are her hands doing and what's interesting is um susan

20:42 goldman meadow researches gesture she's on her entire academic career researching gesture and she found that gestures carry more weight than words so if a pitcher a shark tank pitcher were to go on and say today i have a really big idea it's really big and i hold my hands up like it's really big it's really small you're like no way it looks small vanessa looks so small it's not big at all but if i were to say i have three three big ideas and hold up five you're actually more likely to believe my fingers so the reason why this is important is because gestures help lower cognitive load interesting when i use gesture i'm more fluent i'm able to be more competent i'm able to underline my words and able to say this is a really important point can i give it to you hand gestures body gestures facial

21:28 gestures hair gestures hand gestures hand gestures specifically they are like our body language highlighter that's how i want to think about them what happens if we don't let's ah i'm just kind of socially awkward i like keeping my hands down the whole time when i'm communicating what happens if we don't use our hand gestures at all in a conversation on a pitch whatever now two things one is it's harder for you to process they've literally speaking it's harder to process it's going to be harder for you to get your confidence because gestures are a way that we underline or highlight our words and so if you are inhibiting your own gestures you will have a hard time explaining things they actually did a study where they had people explain two versions of a story notice two two versions of the story one they could use

22:15 their hands and one they couldn't the one where they could use their hands they had less pauses they spoke more quickly they used bigger words the one where they just couldn't just their hands were just underneath their legs you know what's interesting i was just reading some intros for the podcast right before you came in i had another interview this morning and i did podcast intros and ads and i use my hands in order to do it because i feel like it's coming across as like i'm really engaging yes yes and i remember when i was reading my first audiobook yeah the school of greatness i tried to read it like just kind of like with my hands down for a while and i was like i can't read like i read forgotten how to read my own words being like dyslexic growing up anyways is i'm a little slower when i read in general but when i started be like okay i just need to get in this with my body

23:00 my hands i felt more confident i felt like i could flow i wasn't messing up as much i wasn't having to stop and restart as much it was powerful yes okay that's an incredible story about gesture because if you watch the best uh like cartoon voice over folks they are using animated right yes they are using their whole bodies in a room by themselves like recording on a mic right but they're like yeah yeah yeah we just did the same thing yes yeah that's what they're doing that's not how i probably are doing it yeah but like susan goldwyn meadows research is called hearing gesture and that is because i am using my hands right now not only people watching but also for my folks who are listening because i know that the more i use my gestures the more charisma i have vocally and i would love to talk about vocal charisma interesting so that helps me but it also helps you so anyone who's

23:46 watching you're getting so much information they say 12.5 times more information from our gestures come on yes even when you can't see it uh no you have to be able to see it you can hear charisma but if someone can see our gestures it adds more weight to what i'm saying so when i say weight i'm like it's heavy look how heavy that is right but if i were to be like heavy it's so heavy and i i kind of show it away you're like no it's not heavy you feel you can feel the emphasis of the words yes so it's like a highlighter now i have to have a caveat here because i've created a problem in the past yes i love a gesture but i don't like jazz hands right so gestures are great not credible or trustworthy you're like

24:33 this is some weirdo over here i created a problem where i had people who were like entering their zoo meetings and they were like hello vanessa and i was like oh no don't do that oh no no so it's like a highlighter right you wouldn't want to highlight the whole page you just want to highlight the concepts that matter so let's go back to hands for a second because you said there were four hundred videos i think you guys researched on shark tank 495 pitches and one of the main factors was waving as you were walking in or as you were getting planting planting yes not all the way back like waving some of them did but also once you sat there and said hey hey morning sharks yes hey sharks good morning happy to be here even this happy to be here like an open palm gesture okay what are a few other things that you notice okay yes okay so we love gestures and by the way this is super

25:19 easy on a video call in person hey nice to see you good morning the biggest mistake we make someone walks in and we go hey we give them a nod right give them a hand that you like them enough to give them a hand right so that's really easy it's like every youtube video i'm like hey friends that's literally how i start every video okay that's the first thing so the second thing is where things get more interesting so remember that these sharks were in pitch after pitch after pitch they're tired they're like they are so tired i've been on set there i've seen like the whole day it's just like it's a lot it's a grind okay so the most successful pitches the next thing we found this was very very clear is that the more that the pitchers could spark dopamine the more likely they were to get a deal now dopamine is a very complicated chemical so just for

26:05 our purposes eating something no giving them like oh try my yes yes i was like food like taste testing like try like opening try it taste it smell it lick it touch it feel it wear it play it any of any of those senses we love so when we are doing something that's different that's tactile so yeah touch smell taste where play do try that was going to wake the sharks up dopamine is a little bit it's a very complicated chemical but i want to talk about a little differently it does feel good right so if they were to say that sharks sharks today i have a gift for you the brain goes ooh a gift gift a gift again oh give me a gift gift gift gift right dopamine is like that feeling of i want it i want it i want it it's

26:50 it's a excitement but it's also motivation so what they've found is that when people have a lot of dopamine they are more motivated to do things they are more motivated to figure out a deal they are more motivated to ask questions so when a pitcher went in and not only had some kind of interactivity some kind of a surprise for them and some of it sometimes it was a surprise and they would literally say and guess what sharks why what right dopamine dopamine don't mean so it doesn't have to be like you don't have to walk in every meeting and hand out and like throw throw out snickers bars right love a snickers bar and that will work really well it'll work it will work every time but it's also verbal surprise so it's also saying

27:35 today has something really special to share right anticipation anticipation it doesn't even have to be something major it can be throwing in those little elements of surprise that people can look forward to and here's the biggest one so this is research that blew my mind it changed the way that i write emails so if you write a lot of emails this study is for you so i'm gonna break it down it's kind of a complicated study so here's what they did so researchers had participants come into their lab and do like a little quiz like a little math test one group of participants read a set of directions that was very simple please take the following quiz take your time use a pencil tell us when you're done very simple set of directions the other participants got the same set of directions but they sprinkled in a couple of

28:21 achievement-oriented words so achievement-oriented words are words like win succeed master greatness okay those are achievement oriented words there's a reason why this is so so powerful in the directions they would say something like please master all these questions uh take as much as much time as you can to win the right answer right so they just sprinkled in a couple of these words two or three of these words they found the participants who had the achievement-oriented words performed better they actually got more answers correct interesting now this is incredible if you're a manager or a boss or you're working with people and you want them to perform at their best just a couple of word swaps can help set them up for success the second thing they found is that it also

29:06 doubled doubled participants desire to keep working now they could win succeed achieve they were like they worked on it longer they worked on harder and they enjoyed it more and the last one is that reading achievement-oriented words can change our own dopamine and testosterone that's fascinating you know it's interesting because for years in high school and college i had all there was this story called succession something was called i don't know if you remember this it was like a motivational inspirational story that had like a poster of like an ego soaring with a quote right or like this in my office like something was just like it was like ted lasso you know store yeah just like believe in yourself with like this where is this store i want it okay i think it's called successions i can't i can't remember the

29:52 name of it i don't know if it's around anymore but my dad bought me a lot of stuff and i had all this sports type of inspirational quotes and you know you know rocky posters and all these things of just people achieving and it and i would stare in this like these walls and i should be like i want to be that let me go take the actions every morning to work a little bit harder to reach the goals and i was just consumed in a success you know word you were literally yeah you were literally priming yourself with those cues another study i promise i won't do too many more they put a picture of an athlete winning a race on top of telemarketers scripts the people who had the picture of the athlete winning earned more money on yes right just in front of them

30:37 literally a printed picture on their script oh wow so why i share this is because we do not realize that we are cueing people incorrectly or we are missing opportunities in every single email that we send so if you send an email out to your team on monday morning hey everyone today is going to be a busy day we have a lot of challenges let's make sure we're not late research has found that when people read words like busy challenge or late it literally primes them to be busier and later and more challenged you are literally making it harder for them to help you so if instead you think about and this is a challenge i would love to if you're brave enough to take it open up your email sent folder

31:24 and pull up five emails you've sent to important people boss partner colleague whatever client i want you to print those emails and i want you to count the number of priming words you use good or bad yeah and even more are they warm or are they competent so this is where the next level happens who would give it to me highly charismatic people prime others with warmth and competence this is what i was going to say is one of the spark dopamine a simple compliment or acknowledgement sparks dopamine from from my experience just by seeing someone acknowledging something you appreciate about them or you like about them or great shoes or whatever it is i'm sure you've got a great smile today you've got good energy today that sparse dopamine right oh 100

32:10 actually this leaves me my next my next third point my shark tank point we also noticed that when pitchers specifically acknowledged things from the sharks and specific sharks they were more likely to get a deal from that shark i really liked this thing about you you did lori i've been so looking forward to working with you robert i love all your deals with all those athletes mark i've been a huge fan of yours for years or this is this was the winning phrase in a pitch if we heard this phrase it was a high likelihood that someone was going to get a deal which is you remind me of myself that could have been one of the sharks that could have worn the entrepreneurs but the biggest compliment we can give someone is you remind me of me you're my role model i put you in so this is what we're talking about is kind of the next level here is i think that

32:57 yes i want you to be your most charismatic self i want everyone hopefully who's listening to be inspired to be their warmest most competent self but what a bigger gift what a better way to be great to gift other people to be their warmest and most competent self so that when you're sending an email and you say hey i'm introducing sarah or we have sarah on the call or here's that quick email intro i promised to sarah no priming words what if instead you thought what's the warmest and most competent thing about both sarah and the person i'm introducing to and you say hey i'd love you to meet sarah she's been leading our marketing team for 10 years we are so lucky to have her she's a gem lucky gem leader that is the perfect balance of warmth

33:43 and competence and you are gifting that to both sarah the person you're showing to and yourself and so i think i think our words are gifts and this doesn't have to be every email but in your most important emails that you the that audit that you send count how many warm words are you using so warm words are words that uh trigger connection trust words that make you feel warm and fuzzies they're very oxytocin words count the number of competent words efficient productive brainstorm leverage lead streamline those are all great competence words uh note a funny note here is um emojis are they good or bad highly warm right not good you can have likability connection high high warmth right so emojis and exclamation points count as one warm

34:30 word so if you have someone and this happens a lot where people send a highly warm email to an important person hi friend friend warm word exclamation point two warm words i love talking to you yesterday three warm words it was so exciting to catch up exciting catch up five warm words heart emoji heart smiley face now we're at seven warm words or one sentence in right they wonder why they're not taken seriously they're one they wonder why they didn't get a follow-up interview they wonder why that person takes four days to reply it's because it's too much warmth you have to balance out with the competence so i want you to count and see what kind of signals are you sending to the people who matter to you that's interesting do you want to you know you're bringing up

35:17 something i used to do years ago when no one knew who i was i was just getting started 2007 2008 i used linkedin as a tool to create connection with people that were you know successful business leaders and people that have done things that i wanted to do in the future right and for a while none of them would reply to me because i started off saying like hey i'm just getting started i'm brand new and i'm looking for some advice can you help me those types of warm warm warm warm water languages right yeah all those words you just said are all warm yeah and i started switching it and getting a reply almost every time from anyone like anyone i'd reach out to i was like they're gonna reply to this and i started doing uh a few things in the first sentence i was just trying to find you know spark dopamine essentially

36:03 is what i was doing i was looking for a mutual connection we had and i'd speak about the mutual connection mutual connection is highly competent it's saying you know this person i know them too i'm in the know trust and one warmth and confidence this person likes me if you like them yeah perfect balance yeah i don't even know that and i was just doing it right and it was working i was like okay let me keep doing this let me find someone that we know in common and i would always try to have a conversation to get some intel on them because you tell me something about so and so and i would speak about that information and i would speak into them i would also look for a couple other areas of interest that we have in common and i would try to have three different things in common in the first sentence or two wow you know something that they did that i'd experienced before or a place they're they're from or whatever some some mutual interest mm-hmm uh within

36:49 competence maybe that's competence maybe or it's both yeah it's beautifully both yeah so i would do that and then i would just add and then i would say something like i'm really inspired by what you created i'd love to learn your story of success say it again i'm really inspired by what you've created i'd love to learn your story of success oh man that just gave me the chill that's essentially what i did almost every email that sentence we just like to talk about so that sentence is the perfect blend of warmth and competence right you have love you have learned you have success and so that didn't take a lot of words it's not like you were writing them a six paragraph email but it's so much better than let me know if you have any questions right oh yeah or can i pick your brain for coffee exactly you know yeah so i think what we have to do is there are hidden

37:36 opportunities waiting for you in your texts in your emails and your profiles if you choose to take them yeah and all it takes is a couple of word swaps like i'm not talking about 15 in that direction sheet they sprinkled in like two or three words win even reading the word win makes the other person think more like a winner yeah what a gift to give that's cool the quote that i heard in high school from roosevelt is people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care it saves my life literally that's one of the competence right there because i didn't feel competent in my entire school life right in school i was at the bottom of my class i just graded poorly which confirmed like i'm not smart enough like i'll never be able to be as intelligent

38:21 as my classmates or anyone in the world so why would anyone like me or trust me because i didn't feel competent then when i heard that quote i go i have a chance like i can build confidence in another area of life i can be emotionally intelligent and i can show people how much i care and by doing that that's been pretty much my whole life everyone who's listening i hope what this shows you is that caring about someone there's multiple ways to do that yes it's emotionally intelligent but it's also honoring someone's cues or gifting them the right cues yes when you make someone feel more like a winner what a gift you just gave them you're putting confidence into them you're speaking joy confidence into that person yes you're literally gifting them the

39:07 chemical dopamine so they themselves have more motivation yes and don't we all need more motivation absolutely yeah um can i since you shared a vulnerability can i share a vulnerability and a compliment sure okay okay okay so i've been so excited to tell you this so your book school greatness um i love the cover i just thought it was so inspiring and when i was taking my cover shoot for captivate uh this is six years ago now it was not going well i was super awkward my my photographer amazing uh maggie kirkland was like listen like this isn't working you're really awkward i need you to relax i can't relax right the worst thing you can do to someone who's anxious to tell them to relax so we weren't getting the shot we weren't getting the pictures and she's like okay just think about your role models who's your role model i was like lewis howes so she pulls up your book

39:52 and she goes okay she said look at lewis channel him and so in the shoot i channeled you and i i did your pose of my hands over my stomach with your face and crazily enough that is the captivate i'm going to send you the i'm going to sell how many copies you get a lot i better i better send you some royalties so anyway i channeled you because that even that cue there was something about it so i i thank you for even the cues that you send out because that gifted me confidence you didn't even know about it there you go i appreciate it i'm glad i'm glad it worked what's another thing yeah in the shark tank talking about sparking dopamine what else okay so we talked about reading we talked about dopamine we

40:38 talked about interactivity we talked about um complementing in a way that allows someone to see themselves in you or pulling out a similarity right so like you know like you laurie we really value mr wonderful we love mr wonderful products right like that really helped i mean it sounds like sucking up but actually it really works it really worked the other thing that we noticed about the interactivity is what they would do is they would cross space zones so they would have something to give the sharks and they would go from the carpet to the chairs that worked usually worked because they were going into intimate zone very quickly so this is called a nonverbal bridge it's kind of an advanced technique do you want to talk about it yes okay so a non-verbal bridge is a way that we cross into someone's

41:23 intimate space but safely so what happens is when we're with someone we want to connect with them we want more oxytocin we want to bond with them but sometimes it can be hard to break that boundary a non-verbal bridge is a way that we can create oxytocin with permission so that could be handing someone something that could be giving a high five that could be touching their elbow and that is exactly what successful pitchers did they would have a reason or an excuse to hey lauren let me guide you up here hey kevin let me zip on this suit for you hey um you want to try this amazing cinnamon roll and when they did that they created these small little bridges so what i would think about is like how can you create bridges to people where you're engaging them even physically right and that's harder on video but in person that was the thing that we found

42:08 in that tank how do you do it in a way that the person feels comfortable if you touch them on the elbow because someone may not feel comfortable so you have to be really intuitive to you know is this person going to be receptive to me are they already interested enough where i can get closer yes yes are they leaning in are they giving eye contact are they nodding oh i forgot another one that was really important so um vocal power so we haven't really talked about vocal power and this was a big one in the tank so we hear confidence we hear competence and the biggest way that we do this is with inflection so inflection is the biggest mistake that we make is the question and flexion so the question inflection is when we go up at the end of our sentences right it's also called up talk so if i were to don't do up talk don't do up talk we're going to talk about why so when we use the question reflection it

42:56 cues the other person's brain to know ah we're being asked a question the problem is is that when we accidentally use the question reflection it makes people question you right they really trustworthy right so what happened is in this study where they looked at doctors they found that the doctors who had uh so i'll break down the study so what they did is they asked doctors to record 10 second voice tone clips and they said like their name their specialty where they worked so it sounded like hi my name is dr edwards i work in oncology i specialize in children's medicine something like that they took the clips and they warbled the words so you couldn't understand the actual words being said so it sounded like right then they asked people to rate these clips on warmth and competence right

43:42 again this research has been repeated over and over again imagine this for a second you're asked to listen to a clip of gobbledygook yes to see if they're confident are they smart do you like them yeah and people do it what they found is the doctors who had the lowest warmth and competence ratings had the highest rate of malpractice lawsuits that implies that we don't just sue doctors based on their skills we sue doctors based on our perception of their skills and that happens in the first few seconds of hearing them so your communication is everything everything it's not just the words you're using are they warm and they competent it's even how you're saying the words so the very first story i break down in the book and this is in the intro so if you want to just look at

44:28 the sample chapter you could i analyzed jamie simenoff's pitch jamie simenov is the founder of ring that didn't get any money then it sold for a billion dollars thank you yes here is a brilliant guy right jamie simenov is brilliant he had a successful product right ring is a very successful product amazon acquired it for over a billion with a b dollars yet he goes into the pitch in a shark tank and he pitches and he doesn't get a deal why that pitch plagued me because i was like here is a smart guy with a great idea but his cues were the problem the i think that he lost his pitch this is a really big a really big statement and if you listen to it you'll hear it i think he lost the deal in the first 10 seconds of them hearing him

45:13 and the reason is he made the choice to close the doors to the tank so in his pitch he doesn't walk down the hallway you don't see that long first impression you don't get public to social to personal he closed the doors and what he did is he went he knocked on the door they're like hello and he goes it's jamie so he asked his own name and when you're a shark and you're trying to make a very quick first impression of someone without seeing them and you hear the question inflection supposed to be used on a statement you immediately begin to question i don't know and that is also because we know that liars are more likely to use the question reflection if you've ever played uh two truths and a lie ever played that game yeah okay so

46:01 two two's in a lie here's a little tip for everyone if you ever play that game people almost always ask the lie so they'll be like oh yeah two truths and lie um i uh have a goldfish i am a vegetarian and i love dogs they almost always go up on their lie and that's because when we're lying we don't know if you believe us so subconsciously we give it away so jamie starts his pitch and he doesn't have a first impression he doesn't do any greeting in the hallway he misses that whole walk-up the very first words out of his mouth doesn't even matter what he says is and then mark cuban says uh are you here to pitch and he says here to pitch again using the question reflection i think that what happened was is it gave away his competence and then the

46:47 doors open right and he explains this idea of ring it's a doorbell the problem is is his first impression was very low incompetence and so he had a lot of trouble having the sharks take him seriously he was a very competent individual building his business right he was very smart very intelligent knew the technology how to build product teams all these things get sales whatever it was but the warmth wasn't there as well it seems like right like the trustworthy charisma warmth confidence he under signaled every step of the way so he unders under signaled warmth he under signaled competence and then was trying to dial up and you hear in the rest of the pitch he's trying to build it back up he's like yes but we've done this and look we've got this technology and his money and then this and so he cannot get it back he couldn't get it back and so i think i

47:34 watched that pitch and i break it down in the book of what happened to this brilliant guy who had one bad day and i think that if he you know he scripted those answers he prepared for that pitch and he had really good verbal answers there was even a couple times where i think this thing happens for people who over rehearse so if you have an interview or a presentation what do you do you rehearse it right you practice the perfect answer that can get in your way though because if you practice the perfect answer this is exactly what happened to siminoff and very highly intelligent people do this he would hear a question from a shark usually a challenging question because they were like really pushing him on the deal and they didn't believe him no one believed him they all thought oh no it's too crowded over market it will never work they literally said that to him

48:19 okay i have a ring on my front door yeah and they literally said number he couldn't believe him because what would happen was they would ask him a question he would start to answer it organically and then he would switch into his rehearsed answer oh yeah so you would hear oh yeah yeah we do have market track our america attraction has been wonderful in fact the last five years we've done x numbers and you would be like who is this robot yeah just say what's on your heart yeah yeah just say it organically right and so i think um you can be the smartest person in the world you could have the best ideas but if you don't share them right you're not helping people help you and so that that's my it drives me crazy when smart people can't get their ideas heard and that pitch crushed me i felt so bad for him and he made it he's okay now he's doing really well when he was like a guest shark or whatever yeah okay

49:06 and what's amazing is when you watch him walk into the tank as a shark you can see the difference you can feel the difference the confidence oh mike you know he walks into the tent he walks down the hallway right he walks in the hallway he's smiling he gestures hey everyone good to see you he shakes hands he does all the things he didn't do in that original pitch and um you can see the difference and it hasn't he's the same person same person same ideas similar suits yeah he looks like a different person fascinating it's not about what you say it's how you say it um how you present yourself and your words uh and your words [Laughter] i'm curious about this there's a big topic out there right now i just did a recent interview with uh dr romini who

49:54 is a therapist psychologist talking about narcissism a lot today can you talk to me the difference between charisma and narcissism and how can you spot when someone is actually warm and caring and charismatic versus someone who uses the skills or the tools of charisma in their narcissistic approach towards manipulating controlling and getting what they want in life so this is my biggest fear with this book this is my this is my single biggest fear and it uh was an issue for me when i first started writing it is i'll be honest you can use this book for manipulation yeah of course and that scares me and when a smart person is narcissistic is going to study everything and then start using it it scares me so how can you tell the

50:41 difference the subtle cues these are very subtle now very subtle yeah so we're talking about big to subtle right there's like a range of them so first is it is my biggest fear with this book that people do not have the right intentions and my hope is that we can actually use these powers for good and not evil that is the number one thing is you you can if you want to here's a good news there are certain cues that we cannot control and if you have bad intentions they will leak so i call these danger zone cues so in the book i talk about there's four different types of cues there's highly warm non-verbal verbal and vocal so these are things that make you highly warm highly trustworthy highlightable there's highly competent cues verbal nonverbal and vocal and then there's charismatic the ones are just knocking out of the park like they're just great and the last one is danger zone queues danger zone queues are the cues that get

51:27 us into trouble they're the cues that liars use that the way that we leak guilt and shame actually shame is not a bad thing it's only when you have guilt that you've done something wrong so in the danger zone it is very hard to inhibit those cues so i teach them because i want people to be able to spot them okay what are those cues okay so there's a bunch and all let's talk about as many as we can so this might be someone who's very successful someone who's accomplished a lot potentially someone that seems very credible someone that could be in a power position owning a business or having influence online or something like that right yeah yeah extremely success they could be successful they could seem credible trustworthy yes but might be super narcissistic underneath yes so there's a couple danger zone cues that we can control which a manipulative

52:13 person could inhibit right so for example one that i found that i talk about in the book is lance armstrong so lance armstrong for those who don't know spoiler alert uh lance armstrong was doping so someone was like there was spoilers in the book and i was like you haven't heard it i also talk about britney spears in the book uh because there's some really interesting cues on her which i think why we're worried about her why her fans worry she's she shows a lot of danger zone cues so lance armstrong in one of his early interviews on larry king live he's asked about doping and he does what's called a lip purse so lip purses okay when we push our line our lips into a flat line we mash our lips together that is a universal withholding gesture so when we're literally trying to hold something in or hold something back or we don't like what's being said or heard

53:00 we go and so you'll notice that when someone has been asked something they don't like when someone had to lie a lot of the time so we did a massive experiment in our lab where we asked people to send in videos of themselves lying actually you play in the book it's called lie to me so i have you lie to me uh play this light in the game to diagnose your own towels it's very important to know your own towels because you should know what your danger zone cues are when you're licking them and one of them you should know those it's good to know those in the back of your pocket um do that with your partner right you don't want to you want them to know what those are too um so one thing that we notice is on lies that was one of the biggest indicators so in live any game we ask you to do two things we ask you to tell us an embarrassing story your most embarrassing story and then a fake embarrassing story and we want to

53:45 see if we can tell the difference if we cl if we cut the clips can we know which one is the fake one man that'd be interesting yes and it's amazing you see the same danger zone cues over and over again right before someone's about to lie and tell their fake embarrassing story they go okay and they lit purse right before they're gonna do it and that's because we don't like lying our body knows it's gonna get us into trouble so we're like stop it stop it stop it and we hold ourselves back you ask a woman how much do you weigh she'll go like literally close those lips because no woman wants to talk about how much she weighs so it's a withholding gesture and so that's the first thing is you want to look for some of the bigger cues withholding gestures lip purse is one a sudden distancing behavior so we also noticed that liars in our lab they wanted to like get away from the lie like as if it smelled so like when they were telling their most embarrassing story they'd be like

54:32 leaning in using gestures always so embarrassing remember embarrassing stories are negative right it's not like it's a positive memory it's like people are like and they do a shame touch the universal shame touch is when people uh touch their fingers to the side of their forehead what's happening oh gosh i'm so embarrassed so they usually tell the truth and they do like this yes because they're actually embarrassed right so these are all good like congruent right we're seeing embarrassment and shame gesture we're seeing negative nonverbal people shaking their head i can't believe that happened right like they oh they're so upset that happened we're seeing cringes we're seeing fear we're seeing sadness congruent right like that's all congruent emotion on the bad stories we often see people will lip purse and they try to get away from it so they'll say a statement and then uh

55:17 you know and then and they're literally like as far away i hope i'm not messing up my audio they're as far away from the lie as they can possibly get they're leaning back they'll sometimes literally lean their head back in the chair and that's because physically we want to distance ourselves from things we don't like so we're looking for lip purses sudden distancing and there's a lot of cues that we can't control right so blink rate is another one eye blocking behavior is um liars have higher blink rates they blink more yeah actually in britney spears she had a really interesting interview that i i actually break this on my youtube channel so you don't have to read the book if you want to see it where i break down the cues in this early interview this is right before the conservative ship started so very very full of cues because it's right before it happened and she gets asked

56:02 a very difficult question and she all of a sudden her blink rate goes from a normal rate to a high rate so she starts to to really quickly blink her eyes like this and that is because when we're really nervous we literally want to close out stimuli to not see what's happening so we can process what's happening so blink rate is something that a lot of manipulative people cannot control in fact when i share this people go oh i know a very narcissistic manipulative person who has a very high blink rate interesting because they're literally like trying to block out the lie or the manipulation and so they'll sound really good but they're like really like processing a lot and you and you're like why are they blinking so much and it's because they're trying to process oh my goodness so just knowing those cues are not all bad on their own but just it's important to know what those cues look like so you can spot them and i do think

56:49 i really think manipulative people will get caught eventually it is very hard to fake competence it is very hard to fake warmth it's hard to keep that yes and so for the long game

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