Body Language Expert: Stop Using This, It’s Making People Dislike You, So Are These Subtle Mistakes!

Your brain is 12.5 times more likely to believe my gesture over my words, and that's because it is very hard to lie with our gestures. For example, you want to do a little experiment with me? Sure! Okay, I want you to say "five" but hold up the number "three." Five! Hard, right? Yeah, I had to think about them separately. This is why liars use fewer gestures. But knowing cues like that is critical if you're trying to set yourself up for success, and we're going to go through all of them.

Oh yeah, Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral investigator whose science-backed research—from body language and micro-expressions to vocal tones and first impressions—has revolutionized the way we build confidence and create more authentic relationships in every social and professional interaction. I'm a recovering awkward person, and I thought that charisma was genetic. I didn't know how to have conversations; I didn't even know how to have friends. Then I discovered that highly successful people speak a hidden language, and that is the language of cues. This is directly from the research: they know that blueprints will talk to anyone. They know that if you sit within 25 feet of a high performer, your own performance improves by 15%, and that there's a direct correlation between confidence and anxiety and the distance between our shoulder and our ear.

So interesting! They also know that 82% of our impressions of people are based on warmth and competence. So if you worry that people don't take you seriously, you have trouble getting raises, or you feel anxious and overwhelmed, I have five power cues for competence. But if you have ever been told you're intimidating or hard to talk to, I want you to use these five warmth cues first.

What about how to get a partner in terms of cues and body language? Let's start with a study that blew my mind: it's impossible to be attracted to someone who... That's so crazy! Just such a small little thing. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show, so could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. My commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power—me and my team—to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much!

[Music] Much Vanessa Van Edwards! For someone that's just clicked on this conversation now and they're wondering why they should stay and listen to what we're going to talk about, what would you say to them? Very highly successful people speak a hidden language, and that is the language of cues. If you don't know how to read the cues people are sending to you, if you don't know how to control the cues you're sending to others, you are missing a crucial element of success.

How do you quantify that in a way that I know that it's true? Are there studies or stats that reinforce what you've just said? 82% of our impressions of people are based on warmth and competence. That means that if we can control our warmth cues and our competence cues, we know we are taking care of 82% of our impression, and that is critical to being more memorable, to being more confident, having clearer communication.

And taking that a bit further, what areas of my life will that impact? So if I'm warm and I'm competent—which you're telling me are things that I can control—what are the downstream consequences of that? I think my mission is to tackle a big lie, and that is that smart people will translate their book smarts into people smarts. But actually, no matter how smart you are, if you do not know how to communicate with people, you can't connect with people, you can't have good relationships, you can't have supportive friendships, you get looped into difficult people or toxic people, and you have trouble getting raises or promotions.

When you are able to control your communication, it helps you not be overlooked, not be misunderstood, and that affects your friendships, your partner, your career, and also helps you feel more confident walking into a room.

And what is your research based on? Are you a researcher? Have you done sort of first-party research yourself? Where are you drawing from? So I'm a recovering awkward person. I used to believe that you were either born with charisma or you weren't, that charisma was genetic. In 2002, I discovered a study that changed my life, which said that charisma can be learned. This is when I started to tackle to figure out, okay, if charisma can be learned, how do we learn it? How can we learn blueprints for conversation? How can we learn frameworks for how we connect and how we socialize? That's when I started doing my own research.

So I'm a behavioral researcher and a bestselling author on communication, and I specialize in helping very brilliant, very smart, awkward folks not be overlooked.

And give me some sort of depth as to the amount of research and the quantity of research that you've done. How many people have you studied? How many hours of footage, etc.? Yep, so I developed my first framework about 12 years ago, and we've helped 400,000 students learn that framework, master it, and conquer awkwardness or feel more confident. Some of those folks had very professional goals, like getting raises or promotions; other folks were so socially anxious and so awkward they couldn't make friends; other people were looking for their soulmate or their partner.

So 400,000 students have told me that this framework works. Nobody teaches us this stuff today, or actually, extroverts tend to teach it. So I read the quintessential "How to Win Friends and Influence People" back in the day, and that's a wonderful book, but it's a book written by an extrovert. If you are not naturally extroverted—I'm not naturally extroverted; I'm more ambiverted—it is very hard to learn how to communicate if you don't naturally gravitate towards people. I was like, there has to be a way to teach introverts and ambiverts to be able to feel confident without having to fake it till you make it, without having to pretend to be extroverted or outgoing to be taken seriously or to be charismatic.

What's an ambivert? So ambiverts get energy from the right people in the right places. For example, in this interview, I love one-on-one conversations; I feel myself. But if we were to go to a loud bar or a nightclub, I would completely shut down and want to be alone. Ambiverts can dial up extroversion to hit their goals. So if they know they have to be friendly and meet people for an interview or a position, they can do it, but they need lots of recharge time.

The reason why it's important to know if you're an ambivert is because you should know what are the people and places that drain you. There are certain people when you open your calendar and you look at it, and you're like, "Oh, I have to be with that person." That is someone that drains you; they do not bring out your extroversion or your natural love of people. There are also certain people who you feel you could talk to for hours; they give you social energy; they charge your social battery.

So the very first thing I have students do is sit and make a list: who are the people who give you energy, who charge you up, and who are the people who take from you? Those are people that we want to put boundaries around; we want to say no to; we want to limit as much as possible. And then also the places: where do you thrive? Is it conferences, one-on-one business, or is it friends socializing, parties? Knowing those places helps you optimize your social battery.

And when you say cues—which you said at the start of this conversation—people think of just body language. Is that the sort of full extent of areas that you focus on? Yes, so cues come into four different channels. There is body language—that's facial expressions, gestures, posture—but there's also vocal. So vocal cues are the tone of our voice, our pace, our volume, our cadence. There's also the words we use, obviously verbal cues; the types of words that I'm choosing to use are signaling my warmth and competence to you. And the last, the smallest channel, is our ornaments: the colors we wear, the jewelry we wear, the way we wear our hair, the way we wear our facial hair. Those are also signaling different things or cueing people to feel a certain way about you.

And what about what we say? Because I know you're writing a book about... I don't know if I can leak this, but here we go. Yeah, can you? You're writing a book about conversation. So what we say... I did not realize how powerful our words are, and here's a study that really changed the way I think about this. Very simple study: they brought people into the lab and they split them up into two different groups. In one group, they said, "Today you're going to play the community game," and they played kind of a prisoner's dilemma type of game. The second group, they came into the same room, the same researcher, and they said, "Good morning! Today you're going to play the Wall Street game." The trick was the games were exactly the same; there was no difference between the two games.

What they found was everyone who was told they were playing the Wall Street game shared an average of one-third of their profits. Everyone who was told they were playing the community game shared an average of two-thirds of their profits. This means that that one word—community—made people think and feel more about community and made them act more collaboratively. This means that the words we're using in our emails, our subjects, our texts, our LinkedIn profile headlines are cueing people for how they should treat us.

One really simple way to think about this is your calendar. I send out calendar invites multiple times a week to clients, to friends, when we have meetings, one-on-one calls, video interviews. I'm being cued for nothing; those words are so overused, they're sterile. If you add cues that prime people to feel or think a certain way, you're actually setting them up for success. So "2025 wins," "collaborative session," "strategy meeting," "goal meeting," "goal overview," "teamwork," "collab session"—those words are actually cueing that person's brain every single time they open their calendar. When we read a word like "collaborate," we are literally more likely to be collaborative.

So the words that we use—even one single word—can actually change the way people think. It's funny because our entire lives, people like the difference between me being a president, prime minister, superb salesperson, exceptional entrepreneur is probably just my understanding of other people and how I show up in my words and my cues. And so when you think about it like that, this could be for many people the most important subject for them to improve upon.

I would even go further and say if you don't have people skills, you cannot succeed. You cannot succeed in life; you cannot succeed in love; you cannot succeed in business. It doesn't matter how smart you are; you need people to have success. So this is, I think, the most fundamental skill that people can invest in.

And how many people did you say you've taught people skills to? 400,000 students. And is there a particular case study that stands out to you as being the most extreme in terms of case studying the fact that someone can go from zero to a wonderful place? Yes, and it's my very brilliant but stoic students. So I've noticed, especially over the last 10 years—I've been doing this for about 17 years—in the last 10 years especially, my most extreme students are the students who are very, very smart, very talented, and good at what they do, but they don't know what cues to send.

So they completely shut down; they try to become stoic, unreadable. They try to have no facial expressions; they literally try to poker face all the time. And as they try to make connections, make a partner, make friends, people don't like them; people don't trust them; they can't get buy-in to their ideas. And those are the students where I see the biggest transformation. They don't realize that muting your cues is a danger zone. If you try to be stoic and unreadable, people literally cannot get a read on you.

So my biggest transformations have happened when I can say, "You don't need to hide your true feelings; it's about amplifying them with the right cues." There's a famous example of this: Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring. So I don't know if you ever watched Shark Tank. Yeah, so in this episode, for those who haven't seen it, Jamie Siminoff entered the tank and pitched a billion-dollar idea—literally a billion-dollar idea—because it went on to raise funding from Sha and Richard Branson. But in the tank, he pitches the idea and he gets so much pushback and so much negotiation, and he walks out of the tank without a deal. In fact, the sharks did not like him.

What happened? He had the billion-dollar idea, but he did not know how to share it. This is the biggest transformation I see: people who have brilliant ideas, they're good people, they're hardworking people, and they cannot get buy-in; they cannot make friends; they cannot find partners.

How do they feel? So if you had to say words that make them feel seen right now, how are they feeling as they're listening to this? Overwhelmed, getting into interaction, just social overthinking, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to feel, underestimated—like people don't see you or the real potential that you have—a lack of confidence and fear, afraid that if you are your true self or you try any of the things we're talking about, people won't like you.

And I want to teach you that you can be yourself, and you can be liked, and you can find your people. And that doesn't mean everyone's going to like you, but it means if you signal the right things, cues tell others how to treat you. If you signal the right cues, you will find your people.

One of the things that I was sort of inferring from what you said is the importance of understanding your resting face. That's like the term we use in the UK: resting face, which is like when you're just listening or doing nothing. How does your face look? Yes, and you're telling me that's really, really important. It's real! So I call it resting bothered face—resting bothered face, RBF, same thing.

Okay, this is a real phenomenon, which is that all of us have different faces at rest. Now I want you to look at my face for a second. My face at rest—I'm going to rest it for a second—my mouth angles down and sort of an upside-down U, so it looks like this. You see how these are going down? Yeah. Are you laughing at my face? A little bit. Okay, so at rest, I look a little sad. Yeah, that is just my mouth at rest. Yours goes pretty straight across.

I just... You have a lot of hood—that's what that's called—a lot of hood. This is hood? Yes, yes! So that probably makes you... Do people think you're angry or tired? Both. Both? Okay. People never call me angry; they call me sad. You need to look in the mirror and figure out what is the default of your face. If your mouth angles down into a frown, people are going to think you're sad. You're going to have to be counteracting that with your cues.

If you have a lot of hood above your eyes or you have these two vertical lines that appear between your eyebrows—you actually don't have them, but if some people at rest even had those two lines—people are going to think you're angry or frustrated. If you have down eyes... So I don't know if you noticed, but I have cat makeup on my eyes. Ah, yes! Yes! That actually makes me look less sad because also my eyes slope a little bit down at the end, which makes me look sad.

Okay, so people often are like, "Are you okay? Are you tired?" I'm like, "No, that's just my face." So I have ways that I counteract it. One, I get to use makeup, which is a great thing. But second, I know that I need to make my face a little bit more upright. So when I am engaging with someone, when I'm on video, when I'm in an interview, I typically rest my face in an upward position. I've activated these muscles. So don't I look happier? You do! But have you got to consciously tell yourself to do that, or do you just always remember?

No, I have to consciously tell myself to do that. Now I only need to do that with people with a first impression or when I'm trying to make a good impression. My team knows that I'm not sad, right? Like my team, they see me all the time; they see me without makeup; they know that I'm not sad; they know that's just my face.

So here's what's critical: one, you should know what is your resting default. Are you looking sad, angry, or afraid? I didn't do so. If you have... You actually have some—I'm so sorry. Oh, you're... I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! You have these lines—some in the... One of my team just laughed in the back. So you have them just right here, these light lines here.

So when we're afraid, we go and we raise our eyebrows up, and you can't see it because I have Botox on my forehead, but if you... Yeah, there you go! There you go! That's... No, no! Open your eyes and go, "That's afraid!" So the more you have those lines and the whites of your eyes appear—like have you ever seen someone kind of walk around like a deer in the headlights? Yeah! They make you feel anxious. Like if I were to do my entire interview a little bit wide-eyed, you would not only feel anxious, but you wouldn't believe what I was saying.

So you all should see if you have this default line or if the whites of your eyes show. Look at your profile pictures. In your profile pictures, here are the three biggest mistakes you will make: one, they're showing the whites of your eyes. Yeah, yeah! So people, you are signaling accidentally anxiety. So try to make sure you're not showing the upper whites.

Second mistake you will do is make a contempt micro-expression. So that's a one-sided mouth raise. So just do a one-sided mouth raise for me. Does it make you kind of feel better? Don't do it for too long! So if you do it at home, you'll... There's a facial feedback hypothesis: when you make these faces, it actually triggers the emotion. Just like when you have the emotion, it triggers the face. There's a loop that happens.

So if people make the contempt expression—a one-sided mouth raise—not only do they look scornful, kind of disdained, they actually begin to feel better then and scornful. So do not do an asymmetrical smile in your profile picture; you are accidentally signaling negativity. The third biggest mistake you will make is you do an inauthentic smile in their picture. The only true indicator of happiness is when these cheek muscles are activated. Anyone can fake smile. This is what mine looks like, but you see people do it, right?

Yeah, I do it! Yeah, and people know! I would rather you not! No, see, I just don't have a good smile! What? Look, I am going to say no, it's horrible! Do you know I don't have your smile? I literally have to do this when I take pictures; that's my smile! I can't do the teeth thing! I try to... What am I going to do?

Well, you can smile without your teeth as long as it hits your upper cheek muscle. So try just try this for me: put your pen or your finger in between your mouth like this and smile as high as you can go. Oh, that's better! That reaches all the way up into your eyes! Do you see? Oh no, not that! That looks so much better!

Okay, if you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, you don't have to walk around like that, but if you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, it shows authentic happiness. Or don't smile at all! I hate the advice, "Just smile more!" Fake smiles do not work! Dr. Barbara Wild studied this. She took pictures of people thinking of something they were authentically happy about, took a picture of them smiling, then she told them to fake smile and took a picture of them.

On the surface, you really couldn't tell the difference between the two smiles; they looked very similar. But she had participants take mood tests, then look at the picture—look at one picture or the other, group A, group B. People who saw the positive picture had an improved mood; they caught the happiness from the photo. People who looked at the fake smile had no mood change. This means I would rather you have no smile at all or be neutral than fake smile. But if you can smile in your picture, it is so great for authentic happiness.

It sounds like it might be quite exhausting for some people because I think some people, although they're happy, they feel good, they're nice people, they do have that resting bothered face—I think you called it—and there's other people that I know that just kind of walk through life with this resting smile. Yeah! Like we can all think of that person that's just always happy! Yeah! And then there's these other people who are like objectively happy too, but they just have that resting bed face.

So it feels like life is going to be more exhausting for those people. You know, I think it's about choosing your heart, right? It is hard; it is exhausting for me to show up to a meeting when I'm in a good mood and have someone be like, "Are you sad and tired? Are you okay?" I'm like, "I'm fine!" I find that exhausting. Is it also a little exhausting to make sure that in my first impression, I'm being a little bit more up with my face, open eyes, wide and open mouth? A little less exhausting than that!

So I think you have to choose what are the cues you're going to purposefully add. There are 97 cues; I've narrowed down 97 that I think are the most important. You get to make your own recipe; you don't have to do all the cues. If smiling is not your thing, smiling is not essential for being charismatic. When we talk about being charismatic, it's about being warm and competent, and you have 97 cues to choose from to make that warmth and competence recipe.

And so you don't have to be a bubbly extrovert to be charismatic; you can be a quiet, powerful introvert; you can be a compassionate, empathetic healer. Those look different. And so I think it's less exhausting to find your recipe and to use those cues. A lot of the cues in my book that I teach, I don't use; they just don't feel natural to me. But there are other cues where I'm like, "I really like this!"

Has anyone ever done any really compelling studies on this idea of resting face or resting bothered face, as you call it? There is research on resting bothered face, and there are certain people who, when people see pictures of their face at rest, they assume a mood change. In other words, there are certain people at rest where you look at them, and they look neutral, but there are a certain percent of the population when you look at them, they look angry, sad, or afraid.

So it's real! People look at them, and they look happy, and make you happy. Very few people have happy resting face, though; you either look neutral or bothered. So you said you were a recovering awkward person. Yes! Take me into what you were like. Oh, and what do you mean when you say awkward person? I really wanted to go it alone. I was really overwhelmed by people and interactions. I didn't know what to do with my hands; I didn't know what to say. I felt like I missed a memo that everyone got on conversation.

I always felt like I was saying the wrong things; I had all these awkward silences. And then what would happen is I would try to overcompensate by sharing a ridiculous story or talking too much or completely shutting down. I kind of like wavered between completely shutting down and being overwhelmed and talking too much and saying too much and just verbal vomiting all over everyone. And so I shut down, and in college especially, I just felt so left out. I just felt so lonely.

And I don't know if anyone watching is feeling lonely. I thought it was all my fault. I was like, "I miss the memo; I don't know how to have conversations; I don't even know how to have friends." That's what it felt like. I desperately wanted to make connections, but I had no idea how to level up a new person to a friendship. I had no idea how that path happened. I had no idea how to have a conversation with someone, share something real, and then have a real interaction back. And so it was really lonely and overwhelming.

And what was the catalyst for you to go on this journey? I was in college, and there was a group paper assigned, and you had like five people, and everyone had to do five pages. I went to the professor and I said, "I will write double the amount of pages if I can work by myself." And he was like, "Vanessa, the point of the paper is not the paper; it's working with the people." And I was like... and I started to cry in his office. I was like that student. I was like, "I don't know how!"

And he was like, "Vanessa, you're very good at science; you're very good at breaking things down. What if you studied for people like you study for chemistry?" That was like an ah-ha moment for me. He said, "Why don't you study good conversation? Why don't you study the popular kids? Why don't you look at what are they doing in conversation that's working?" Study it like it's a science. Hence, my brand was called Science of People.

That's when I realized, okay, it didn't come naturally to me, but maybe there's research on actual things I can do with my body, things I can do, I can say verbally, questions that work that will help me learn this—the other way, turning soft skills into hard skills. That's when I started creating my first conversational blueprints; that's when I started creating my conversation formula, and it started to work. I started to try out these kind of tiny experiments, and I actually started to feel like myself, make more friends. It was tools; I had to use tools to be able to connect because it did not come naturally to me.

Was it fixed from day one? No, so it was a journey. It was a real journey. Yeah, I think that's important because often people think, you know, read the book, get the tips and tricks, and you're changed and you're fixed. You talk about, I think later in your life, where you enter a dinner party and your husband was there with you, and you went home and told him that you thought everyone was angry at you. Yeah, when was that? That was probably maybe four or five years later.

Okay, so I started mostly with conversation; that was sort of my first tool I needed was questions, I wanted to ask first impressions and how to close conversation very practically. I also realized about five years later, my—I married my college sweetheart, so I've been with my husband for a long time—and he said to me, "You always think everyone's angry at you." I was like, "Isn't everyone angry at me?" And I realized there are certain people who misinterpret neutral facial expressions as negative.

I have this problem, so I will see a neutral expression on someone and assume they are angry or afraid or stressed or don't like me, and that was creating this really bad loop because when you think someone doesn't like you, you shut down and become more unlikable. There was a study I discovered right around this time. This was done by Dr. Van Sloan. He wanted to know what makes popular kids popular. Very clever study! He studied thousands of high school students across a variety of high schools looking for patterns. Why is it that some kids across these grades and ages are really popular?

He had all the kids ranked across all these schools; he had them looked at traits, and then he guessed what made the popular kids popular. Were they more athletic? Were they more attractive? Were they funnier? Were they smarter? What was it? Can you guess what it was? I'm just basing this on the kids that were popular in my school. They were funnier; they were self-deprecating to some degree; they were good at... they were remotely good at some sports, maybe. They were funny, happy... I don't know what!

So he found that the most popular kids—the one single variable that held true across all the different students—was the most popular kids had the longest list of people they liked. So when he asked one of the questions of the survey was, "Who do you like?" they had the longest lists. And when he looked at their day-to-day, they had micro-moments of liking. They would go down the hallway and be like, "Hey, Chad! Hey, Chelsea! Hey, Sarah!" They liked so many people, and that in turn made them more likable.

This showed me that being likable isn't our control; being likable means you have to be first liker. If you set out to like more people, you become more likable. And that was a really big shift for me because for so long I thought it was all about me. It's a very selfish way to be, right? I was like, "I better be impressive; I better be funny." But actually, what makes us likable is just liking as many people as possible.

I was laughing as you're speaking because I was just playing out all the different sort of personas of people listening right now, and I just had this one persona of the person sat at home who just like slumped over because they realized they hate everybody. When you said that, they were like, "I hate everybody!" Look, I get it! I get it! I get it! And I also think that if you hate everyone, if that's you, let me try to convince you for a second: it could be because you're asking the wrong questions.

Okay, I think I fell into that camp. I don't need people; I don't like people. I was very much in that camp for the first couple of years. Why? Because I had terrible interactions and terrible conversations, and it was awkward. Of course, I didn't like people! But I was also asking the wrong questions, and I was telling the wrong stories. I was trying to be impressive. The best way to be impressive, to be likable, is to help people impress you—to make them feel so liked that they begin to like you back. It's aggressively liking!

So that means that when you're with someone, you should be constantly giving them verbal and non-verbal assurances of how much you want to like them. Watch them change; watch your relationships transform. So I make it a policy of aggressively liking people. So I have three magic phrases for likability. Can I teach them to you? Please!

Okay, so I want you to use these as many times as you can. Three magic phrases for likability: one, "I was just thinking of you." Okay, so here's how you use this authentically, right? You think of a lot of people in your life all the time. If you are thinking of someone and you can text them, text them: "I was just thinking of you! How are you?" "I was just thinking of you! How'd that project go?" "I was just thinking of you! It has been a while since we talked." Or, and better, you see a movie, you see a documentary, you see a matcha latte, you see a mug, you see a ceramic candle, and you're like, "Oh, this made me think of you."

So my text messages, my conversations are full of actual moments where I was triggered to think of that person. Actually, that this thing made me think of you, or "I was just thinking of you." I want to pause on number one because I've got some sort of questions to ask here. Yes, it sounds exhausting! It sounds like it's going to cost me a lot of time that I don't necessarily have. And this is just my surface-level reaction: "Oh God, another job!" You know what I mean?

I just... If I've got to set aside an hour to like text everyone I know and go, "I'm just thinking of you," it's going to be exhausting! I've got like six friends, and I've got my partner, I've got my family, and my team. It's a lot! It's a lot! Then just them! And also, it doesn't take an hour when you're like, "Oh, stainless steel mug! This made me think of you!" Right? Like you're only doing it when it's actually naturally occurring to you. I don't want you to sit at your desk and be like, "I'm due for some 'I was just thinking of you's." No! This happens in the wild!

Okay, you're watching a documentary, you're at a restaurant, you're on the bus, you're like, "Oh, that reminds me of this person!" Quick text! That is less work than missing an old friend and not knowing what to say. It is less work to see something in real life or have a thought of like, "I wonder how Sarah is," and reaching out to them than, "I miss Sarah, but I'm not going to reach out to her."

It's also less work when you see someone and you haven't seen them in a while, or they're a friend of a friend, or they're that casual coworker relationship, and you're like, "What do I say?" I think it's a lot of work to go up to that person and be like, "How was your weekend?" I think that's a lot of work! I think boring small talk is a lot of work! If you actually thought of them to say, "You know, I know you love dolphins; I saw this dolphin documentary on Netflix. Have you seen it? I was just thinking of you!"

I got another concern. So if I start firing out these WhatsApp messages telling people when I'm thinking of them, it's just going to be... it's going to be opening up loads of conversations that I then have to deal with. Do you know what I mean? Like it's going to be like, "Hey, I was just thinking of you," and then they reply, they go, "Oh, how are you?" and I go, "I'm good, thanks!" And then they go, "How are you?" They go, "I'm good, thanks!" And then... do you know what I mean?

And then they ask me... I don't believe in asking "How are you?" That's a whole other thing! This is a good test: if you are worried that they're going to start a conversation that's going to bore you and feel like work, they're not a close friend, so don't text them! Okay? It's a very good test. If there's someone where you're like, "I don't really want to hear how they are," yeah, them! Okay? This is for the people who you want to level up with.

There are three levels of intimacy: people who you kind of know—you know their personal, you know their general traits, where they work, where they live, what they do—that's it; you don't want to go any different with them. Level two people are people where they know your personal concerns; you know their goals, their motivations, their personality traits, their worries. Those are people who you want to invest in. Then there's a last level, which is the most deep level, which is called self-narrative, which is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

If you categorize your relationships, another activity I love for my students to do is make those three levels on a piece of paper. Write down the 20 people you can think of—the top 20 people you spend the most time with—where they fall. So we have acquaintances; we have acquaintances who just kind of know where you're from, what do you do, the B people, right? And by the way, some of the people who you're close with might not be deep with.

Yeah, true! Right? And then the middle layer... I didn't understand. That's the middle layer? That's the mid-layer! So it's general traits, personal concerns, self-narrative. What's self-narrative? So this is what my next book is about; I'm doing research on it right now. Self-narrative is the story you tell yourself about yourself.

So would your partner know the story you tell yourself about yourself? I'll give you an example: 100% she would! I think so! So I think that there are basically three main types of narratives, and you should know what these are for the closest people in your life—maybe only two or three—and you should also know what it is for yourself. The best one is a hero narrative. This is, "I've worked really hard; I've had some challenges and mistakes, but I've overcome with hard work and smarts, and now I am where I am." Every version of their story—their career, their life, their relationships—is that same narrative over and over again.

Then there's what I think is called the healer narrative. Again, I'm doing research on this for my next book. The healer narrative, their story is all about helping others. They typically are in careers of service, of helping others—physical therapists, nurses, healthcare. Their story is, "How can I be more helpful?" They tend to have a problem, though, if you're in a relationship with a healer, is they always put other people's needs before themselves. They have some kind of historic trauma; they can... and a lot of the time, they were put in a position of caretaking too early, like they were told that you're of value if you can caretake; you're of value if you put your needs last.

So they tend to be people pleasers; they tend to say yes to everything. You have to be careful if you work with a healer because they're great to work with; they help, help, help, but they say yes to too much. So a healer is the middle one. The last one is the victim narrative. The victim narrative, no matter what personal, professional, love life, taxes they have, the same narrative: "I experienced challenges and mistakes, and I didn't overcome. No matter how hard I work, no matter how smart I am, the world is against me."

So the question I ask people to begin to uncover their self-narrative is, "Do you feel lucky?" Do you feel lucky? I feel very lucky! I also feel very lucky! People who have a resounding yes to "I feel lucky" are more likely heroes or healers. People who say, "I don't feel lucky; I feel very unlucky," are typically victims. Dr. Richard Wiseman did a study; he asked people to perceive their own luck: "How lucky do you feel?" Then he gave them a challenge. He gave them a newspaper and he said, "I want you to count the amount of images in this newspaper."

They sat with the newspaper and they counted all the images, but there was a trick—there's always a trick in these studies. On the second page of the newspaper, in big print, it said, "Stop counting! There are 42 images in this newspaper!" Almost all of the people who perceived themselves as lucky saw the ad, closed the paper, and gave it back. So there are 42 images. Almost none of the unlucky people did. The unlucky people missed the ad and kept counting, spent a lot of time, and made more mistakes.

This means that if you think of yourself as lucky, you literally see more opportunities. If you think of yourself as unlucky, you miss them. Is it possible to change how you see yourself? I do believe in a growth mindset, so I do believe that if this is resonating with you and you're like, "Uh-oh, I feel unlucky; I might have this victim self-narrative," I do believe it's possible to change your perception of yourself, and that's starting with small moments of heroism.

I think that changing your people skills—saying, "I don't like people," and saying, "I'm going to find a way to like people," saying, "I'm bad at conversation; I'm going to find a way to be good at conversation," to say, "I'm an awkward person." No, I'm a recovering awkward person! If we can begin to take those tiny experiments and change them one by one, we begin to have small moments of heroism, and that's how we change our self-narrative.

As an employer, I think about this a lot—these sort of verbal and non-verbal cues. I actually had an interview some time ago, and I think I came out of the interview, and I think objectively the person might have been qualified, but there was something about their energy or cues or something that signaled something else to me—that they were an unhappy person or they were tired or they didn't really want to be here or something like that. Are there any studies that confirm that our hidden communication is driving our success in the working environment?

Yes! So this study blew my mind: it's 58,000 working hours over 11 different companies, so a huge amount of data. They wanted to know if low performers infect the people around them and if high performers infect people around them. What they found was if you sit within 25 feet of a high performer, your own performance improves by 15%. Here's the kicker: if you sit within 25 feet of a low performer, your own performance decreases by 30%.

This means that our negative emotions are more contagious. If you're around people who are low performers—whatever that means to you—who have negative cues, who are feeling anxious or tired or low confidence, you could catch those cues, and that affects your own performance. This is why it is incredibly critical to invest in the five people who you spend the most time with. You want to make sure those five people are the cues you want to catch. Do you like the cues they're sending? Do they give you the right motivation feelings? Do they make you feel like... do they make you a better version of yourself?

There's just one more chemical aspect of this, which we have to do more research on. This is a very gross study, but it's one of my favorites. It's a little gross. You ready? Okay! So they brought people into their lab; they split them up into two different groups, and they made the first group wear a sweatsuit where they catch your sweat and run on the treadmill, so they sweat a lot on the treadmill. The second group, they wore sweatsuits and they took them skydiving for the first time. Both groups sweat a lot—treadmill sweat and skydiving sweat.

They took these sweat samples and they had unsuspecting participants go into fMRI machines and scan their brains. Then they gave them both sweat samples to smell. Poor these poor people did not know what they were smelling! They went in, and everyone who smelled the skydiving sweat had an activation in their own amygdala—their own fear response triggered. In other words, when they smelled fear sweat, they didn't know why, but they began to feel afraid.

Everyone who smelled the treadmill sweat had no change at all. This means that, yes, we can talk about facial expressions and body language and vocal cues and words, but there's also something chemically happening with the people around us that we can literally smell fear, and we catch it. And that is also why it's really important to follow our gut.

Oh dear! I was going to say, "Well then, we're all screwed, aren't we?" We can't do anything because if we're giving off these chemicals which are impacting those around us, it doesn't matter if I smile and do the whole like... No, because I think intention is the back door into confidence. It's very hard to fake confidence. I don't believe in "fake it till you make it." I don't really. But if I say, "I have a conversational tool for you that's going to make your conversations better," you become less nervous, you become more excited, you ask a better question, they give you a really good answer, you feel super charismatic, they feel really liked, you feel really likable.

Oh, we have a good little cycle! So I think that intention—going in with really purposeful cues—helps you feel more confident and triggers these beautiful cycles. The cycle is this? The cycle you're talking about? The cue cycle! Yes! I'll put it on the screen and in the description for anyone that wants to see it. But when I saw this, the reason I printed this off is because it really hit close to home because I'm someone that meets a lot of people.

And when I meet people, people—there on the very rare occasion—something about someone will just kind of throw my energy, and it throws my energy to the point that I realize I'm then acting a little bit in terms of my interaction with them, and it's almost like I can't control it. Like something about the person has unnerved me or just made... and it's nothing that I could consciously tell you, like say it was the way they shook my hand. Just something about them! Yeah!

Throws me into this different state! Yeah! And when I saw this, I almost figured out why. Because the first step in this cue—you explain it. I mean, it's your cue cycle! Yes! Okay, so we often mistakenly think that we send a signal to someone else, they send a signal back to us, and that's it. We don't realize there's a cycle happening within us, which is that if you send me a negative cue, I internalize it, and that changes the cues I'm sending back to you.

Here's a very simple experiment that showed this: they put a participant in a room, and they had an actor in the room flash them a social rejection cue. That could be an eye roll, a scoff, a distancing, and blocking behavior. So the participants in the room and this person across from them—they don't know as an actor—sends them a social rejection cue. What they found was the moment that participant saw the social rejection cue, their own pupils dilated and their field of vision increased.

This means that somebody saw, "Uh-oh, that person doesn't like me," and their body reacted to fight or flight. "Do does anyone else feel this way about me? Are there any escape routes for me?" And that then changed what cues they sent back to that person. They were more anxious; they were more nervous. If you walk into a room with someone and you're feeling bad, you probably caught a cue.

Here's the good news: you can stop the cue cycle from being negative. There are also positive cues, right? We can catch positive cues that can be good for us, but we can stop the negative cycle if we label the cue we see. Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA studied this very clearly. He put people in fMRI machines, and he flashed them a fear micro-expression—the one that you showed us earlier with your eyes really wide. When people saw the fear micro-expression, they caught the fear; they began to feel afraid, and their amygdala lit up.

But when he taught them to say "fear" or think "fear," he taught them the micro-expression; it stopped activating their amygdala. Meaning if you know how to read the 97 cues and you see contempt or social rejection or a mouth shrug or a lip purse—all not great cues—you can, in your head, say, "Lip purse, I'm good," or "Clocked, noted." That intel is actually empowering! So that back door into confidence is also you can label it, name it, tame it, and you're in control of it.

That is a much better way to interact and also can help you like people—for all my people who don't like people! Okay, so in those moments, I should in my head just say, "Clocked!" Yeah, that's what I say to myself! Or like, "Red flag!" or "Noted!" You're in... You're particularly famous for a TED Talk that you did, which did very, very well. It was called "You Are Contagious," and it really opened my eyes to the importance of hand gestures.

Yes! Which I didn't really think were that important before. But it's funny because going through this election cycle, obviously Trump has now been elected as the next president of the United States. He is someone in particular that uses a lot of hand gestures, and in your TED Talk, you make the case that hand gestures matter. Oh, so much! I think the hands are the windows into the soul! I think what we underestimate is the power of our gestures.

Love it! Just love it! Just those jazz hands! So here's... I want to do a little experiment with you. So I'm going to put my hands in my lap. I've been very careful to leave my hands on the table for the entire interview; that's on purpose. Now something funny happens in your brain when you can't see my hands, and the longer my hands are underneath the table, the more your amygdala will begin to fire, and the more distracted you become with, "Where are her hands? Why are her hands under the table?"

And the moment I bring my hands back out again, your brain goes, "Ah!" And that is because hands show intention. And this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. So if we go back to caveman days, if we were approached by a stranger, caveman, and they went, "Friend, friend, friend, friend, friend!" We saw they weren't carrying a rock or a spear, and they were probably a friend. In fact, when we go, "So nice to meet you," we can see someone's hand; we know that they're literally not going to harm us.

So our brain still keeps this mechanism that if we're on video and we can't see someone's hands, or they walk into an office with their hands in their pockets or behind their back, we feel a little bit uneasy. So there's two things for this. First, is the moment someone first sees you, you want to be, "Friend, friend, friend! Good to see you!" What? Put your hand up for people that can't see! The moment I walk into a room, "Hey! Nice to see you!" Even before I handshake, even an old friend, I'll be like, "Oh my gosh! So good to see you!"

What about Zoom? For people that can't see, she's basically putting her hand in the air, which is like a little wave. We love a palm! As humans, we love seeing someone's palm. There's something about it that makes us feel like, "Ah! They are literally open-palmed!" So that's the first. In the first few seconds of someone seeing you in person or on video, try to flash your palm.

Very, very simply. Second, we understand competence in two ways. Very highly competent people know their content so well they can speak to you on two tracks. They can speak to you verbally, but they also can speak to you with their hands. This is why we loved picture books as kids. And so when someone is speaking, we're listening to their words, but second, we're looking: are their hands outlining their words?

So for example, all the best TED Talks start the same way. And this is what got me my TED Talk: we studied all the TED Talks from 2010 looking for patterns, and my team and I coded every TED Talk we could find looking for differences between the most viral TED Talks and the least viral TED Talks. We found the most viral TED speakers used an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular TED talkers used an average of 271 gestures—so not quite half!

Meaning if someone walks on stage, here's a really good TED Talk: they all start this way. You ready? "Today I want to talk to you about a big idea. We're going to share three different things that are going to change your life." So for people listening, I was outlining with my hands along with my words. If I were to get on stage and say, "Today I have a really big idea; it's huge," and hold up my hands in a really small way, your brain is 12.5 times more likely to believe my gesture over my words.

And so what we can do as speakers, as very highly charismatic speakers, is think about how can I outline very basically—not modern dance—what I'm saying, or how can I emphasize things with my gestures? If something is big, show me! Is it beach ball big? Is it... What is this? Big? A donkey big? Is this a donkey? I don't even know! Yeah, big! A goat! A goat! This is a goat! Pig! If you have something that's really small and no big deal, doing this actually helps you think that it's not a big deal.

I'm making a little kind of dismissive gesture with my hand. This also works with emphasizing points you want people to remember. If you have three ideas, tell someone you have three ideas. It is very hard to lie with our gestures. For example, you want to do an experiment with me? Sure! Okay, I want you to say "five" but hold up the number "three." Five! Hard, right? Yeah, so it's really hard! I have to think about them separately!

Yeah, it's really hard! Our brain is not meant to lie with gesture, which is why humans pay so close attention to gestures, because we're looking to see, "Are they congruent?" It is so hard to be incongruent with gestures. Liars typically use fewer gestures, so we're also drawn to people who are using gestures, who are congruent with their gestures, because it makes us feel like, "Oh, they know their stuff, and they're being honest."

So it made me reflect: how do we establish causation here in terms of these hand gestures? Could it be the case that the more confident TED speakers are doing more gestures because they're less nervous? So is it about nerves? The less confident, more nervous TED speakers are doing fewer gestures just because they're self-soothing a lot, and they're kind of closing off their body? Is confidence the thing here? Is it nerves?

I don't think so! I think it's about engagement! So I think most TED speakers—I watch these TED Talks; they're all good—all of them are good, and some of them are experts in their field. The difference is, do I want to watch their good? It is hard for me as a viewer to pay attention for 18 minutes with someone who didn't use enough gestures. It was like physically hard for my brain to pay attention.

I think those speakers, whether good or not, had over-rehearsed and rehearsed out their hand gestures or were holding a podium or were holding a clicker too hard. So I actually think that it's less to do with the speaker's nerves or confidence, and it's more to do with, are they going to let themselves use their hands to explain their points? And that becomes more engaging.

One of the things I've noticed on this podcast is people who are using their hands are more expressive, and if they're more expressive, there's likely to be more sort of intonations in their voice. And if there's more intonations, it's more engaging, and if it's more engaging, then it's more retentive for the algorithm. If it's more retentive for the algorithm, it's suggested more. If it's suggested more, there's more views!

So I would like to tell my guests—all the past, particularly future guests—that if you have more expression in what you're saying and more intonations in your voice, then our show will grow! Okay, let's talk about two things here. One is we did a test on my YouTube channel and found that if we used a thumbnail of me doing any hand gesture, it didn't even matter what it was—it could be this, it could be this—any hand gesture that got more clicks!

People even in the thumbnail like to see the hand gesture even more than my crazy facial expressions. We tried both! So yes, we are! Because if you see a thumbnail of me, you know, holding up two, you're like, "What two things is she talking about? What is it?" So it's... we like it! It shows competence!

And the second thing is that vocal variety is an incredibly important aspect of charisma. We're talking about gestures, but there is a feedback loop here that the more—like if you... if I were trying to sit on my hands for this interview, you would notice my facial expression would get less charismatic; my vocal tone would be less charismatic. It's really hard to be charismatic without movement. Vocal variety is a critical aspect of both warmth and competence.

That is because when we hear someone who's able to, for example, give us the TED Talk voice—so I'm going to give you the TED Talk voice. You ready? "This point is going to change the way that we think about the world, and if we don't analyze this point, we will be in huge trouble!" Like that is a voice that is telling you, "Oh, this is important!"

You also hear that really good speakers will use like a numbers voice. So a numbers voice sounds like this: "Did you know that 43% of humans all believe in the same thing? 43%!" Like there's... and if you're telling a story, it changes again. So a story tone would go like this: "You're never going to believe what happened to me! So last week, I'm walking down the street, and I saw this guy!"

It's a totally different vocal variety that is a gift to your listener that makes you more engaging because they're able to clock, "Huh, we're doing a number now! Oh, we have a story now! Oh, this is an important point; I better write it down!" Really good TED speakers are outlining their talk for you in many different ways.

It's so interesting because in this podcast, we had quite a long conversation a couple of months ago about arms on the chair—the chair that you're in now—and it was just this observation we had when we first flew out here to New York. The chairs that we ordered were pretty similar to this, but they just happened to have arms on them. And what I noticed was that guests would lean in, and it would take out their arms. Yes! So it took out their arms, and they became less expressive, and the conversations were less interesting.

Yes! So we removed the arms again! Okay, so let's talk about this just very briefly. Yeah, I actually do recommend chairs with arms—not in this setup—because look at the difference! So actually, right before this interview, you asked me to scoot my chair in, right? Your amazing team asked me to scoot my chair in. Thank you for that! Because it makes it so that I want to put my hands up. If I were to be sitting farther back, I'm just going to lean back for a second. I would be tempted to put my hands in my lap.

Yes! So the critical piece of this is you're having me scoot up to the table. It would be really hard if I had arms because then I would want to go like this, and it would make me look like a duck! Yes, right? So you want to use a chair with arms to be broader. It actually does broaden your arms out unless you're really close to the table. Then you can put your hands on the table.

But it's amazing how the physical environment can change how we are perceived and how we move. But even that, we're very intentional about sort of mirroring our body language and just making sure that we're head-on because this conversation is entirely different if we're side-on. Very much! It's not going to be the same! Very much! And there's not going to be the same level of intimacy.

We also thought a lot about how big the table was. This is quite a big table. What's the distance? I'm going to say it's about... Just sh... two meters? Wait, can you hold your arm out? Okay, so this perfect distance—the perfect distance between two people having a good conversation is that we could shake hands if we wanted to! Okay! And that is because there are four different proxemic zones.

So the fancy word for space is proxemics. I don't know if you have the beautiful graphic I printed out. Oh yes, that's it! Yes! So there are four different space zones, and these are really good to know if you're trying to set yourself up for success. The public zone is about 5 to 8 feet away. I don't know—not feet, but 5 to 8 feet away. Then you have the social zone, which is where we like to socialize with people. That is, depending on who you ask, 3 to 5 feet away.

Then there's the personal zone—that's our favorite zone—that is about arms distance apart, right? So we could shake hands if we wanted to. That's where our best conversations happen. And then there's the intimate zone. A big mistake people make is they place their video camera too close to their face, which means they are accidentally signaling intimacy cues with their colleagues and their coworkers.

Have you ever been on a Zoom with someone where their face is the entire camera? Yeah! I was on one earlier on, and you're like, "Please back up!" And that is because your brain is going, "Too close!" Even though they're across a camera. So what I would really recommend is measure the distance between your nose and your camera. It should be one arm length, so it should be the tip of your nose to the tip of your fingers or a foot and a half to three feet away. That is the ideal zone for having good conversation over Zoom.

That's really interesting as well because I was thinking about the conversation I had actually on the way here in the car with a colleague of mine, and they had called me on FaceTime. Now, the thing with FaceTime is it's going to be close; it's going to be close, and it did feel a little bit intimate. It does! Because they called me on FaceTime. Yes! And obviously, if I was on my laptop, they would call me on Zoom or something else, and there would be a...

So I think that that's why we can sometimes, at least introverts, feel like, "Don't FaceTime me! It's way too personal!" It's because there's a setup there that is actually accidentally tricking you into being in the intimate zone with someone. This is also why loud bars and nightclubs work so well for facilitating romantic relationships. What happens in a loud bar or a loud nightclub is you can't hear someone, so you go, "What?" And then you get a little bit closer, and all of a sudden, you're accidentally standing in someone's intimate zone, which then that cue cycle begins to kick in where you're like, "Well, if I'm standing within a foot and a half from this person, maybe I should feel intimate with them," which then makes you lean more, makes you want to touch more.

That is why people go to bars and nightclubs to facilitate these romantic relationships—it's accidentally going into the intimate zone. When I was younger, I've said this a few times on the podcast before, but it feels very relevant. My brother, my older brother Jason, he ordered this book called "The Game" by Neil Strauss. Yes! And he ordered it to university, but he accidentally put the wrong address, and so it came to home.

This sounds like an elaborate story for me, like buying a pickup artist book, but it came to home, and I read the book, and it was my first time understanding that body language was important, but even something you could learn. And, you know, when I say body language, I mean everything. And it's interesting because now, after reading your work, I actually think maybe what I should have been aiming at was how to be more charismatic.

And you talk about these five science-based habits for being more charismatic. I guess the first question is, what is charisma? Yes! And then what are these five science-based habits that can make me more charismatic as a person? Like, how do I know if I'm charismatic? You are charismatic, but you lean higher on competence. So let's break it down.

Okay, so this is not my work; this is the work of Dr. Susan Fiske. This is instrumental study; it's been repeated many times back in 2002 that found that to be charismatic, you have to be both highly warm and highly competent—or more importantly, to signal high warmth and high competence. And this makes up 82% of impressions of people: warmth, trust, likability, friendliness, competence, power, reliability, capability.

So very highly charismatic people, you meet them, you see them, and they are signaling, "You can trust me; you like me, and boy, am I reliable and competent at the very same time!" So when I say you are charismatic, but you lean very high in competence, which means that people can see you as cold or stoic if you're not showing enough warmth cues. Have you been told that you're intimidating?

Hard to say it to me! I'm joking! But no, I do get that! I do! I do! I think I have some degree of self-awareness as to how I come across, and I think how you described it is exactly how I come across. And that's not a bad thing, right? Like you get to pick your own recipe! Like I lean a little higher on the warm side. I'm also female; there are differences between men and women.

So typically—not always—men default to higher incompetence; women are defaulted to higher in warmth—typically, not always. This isn't a bad thing, but you should know that if you are trying to come across as warmer on your team, you're trying to inspire more collaboration, you're trying to make more friends, you want to dial up your warmth cues. If you're someone who's interrupted a lot, not taken seriously, people forget meeting you, you need to dial up confidence.

This is like a thermostat; you can dial up warmth cues and dial up competence cues, and this changes the way people treat you. So I have five power cues for competence, and I have five warm cues for warmth. We're going to go through all of those. I saw this wonderful graph which kind of explains it, which I'll put on the screen for anyone that's watching.

And this was really, really interesting. There's a danger zone. The danger zone, I'm guessing, is when you're low warmth and low competence. That's it! Those are those folks that are stoic. If you don't send enough warmth cues, if you don't send enough competence cues, people cannot trust you; they have trouble working with you; they have trouble talking to you.

This is the curse of very smart people. Very smart people think, "My ideas will stand alone; my book smarts are great; I don't need to communicate these cues; my ideas are enough." That's what happened to Jamie Siminoff in the tank. He did not show enough warmth or competence cues; he relied solely on his ideas and his numbers, and he could not get a deal.

So people who want to be taken seriously, you have to show warmth and competence. The other problem with highly competent folks—and you lean higher in competence, so this is for you too—which is it's directly from the research: too much competence without enough warmth leaves people feeling suspicious. So no matter how competent you are, no matter how good your ideas are, if you are not showcasing that with warmth, people are skeptical of you.

And this is what happens with a lot of my students: they're like, "People don't trust me; they don't believe my ideas; they're skeptical; I get pushback." Or they... I do sales trainings; they can't close; you'll push back on their numbers. And that is because some part of them is saying, "I hear your competence, but you're not giving me enough warmth."

Can you be too warm? You can be absolutely too warm! You can be too warm and too competent! Too warm—you know what that looks like? Yes! That's too warm! Okay, okay! Too warm is... So we'll talk about the five warmth cues. Too much of any cue is dangerous, right? So too much nodding, too much laughing, too much vocalizations—those are all too warm, and they make us think this person is a bimbo or a ditz or not competent.

That's what happens! We have too much warmth; it takes away from our competence. Where should we start? Let's start with the power cues! Okay, the power cues! So this is competence! Yes! Power cues! Let me get some of my power cues! Mmm! Okay, so we talked about the importance of hand gestures. There is a very good competent hand gesture which everyone should know. If you want to be perceived as higher in competence, it's called the steeple.

Oh, this! The steeple! Yes! It's on the cover of my book, if you want to see it! Yes! This looks... When your hands look like a little steeple, they're kind of relaxed, open—it's a triangle for anyone that can't see—kind of like a triangle! Yes! A triangle! It's a power pose for the hands! Why? If you are doing this pose, you're showing, "I'm not hiding anything from you; you can still see my palms, but I am very relaxed and poised enough so that I'm keeping my hands together."

Now be careful! Don't drum! This is evil fingers! Yeah! This is Mr. Burns! For those of you who know! Right? So it's a nice still steeple. They have found—they rated hand gestures in a study, and they found that this was the single most—the highest-rated hand gesture that leaders made was when they made this gesture.

Now personally, I don't use this a lot in my interpersonal interactions because it doesn't feel supernatural to me. It's funny because we took one picture for my cover photo, and every single picture of me from my cover photos, I was smiling, and my wonderful photographer, Maggie Kirkland, said, "Vanessa, can we just do one of you serious?" And I was like, "But I'm not serious!"

She's like, "Just one! Just do your most powerful power cue!" And this is the only picture, and that was the one that we chose for it. So it's just funny because it's a very high competence cue. So you can try the steeple; just be careful not to do evil fingers! Evil fingers with it! That's a high competence cue!

That picture of you on the front, what is that signaling? So it's a perfect balance, right? So one, I have the steeple cue—competence gesture. Two, I'm angled towards you; my body is angled towards you, which is a warmth cue. That's fronting! My toes are angled towards you, which is warmth. I also have a smoldering eye contact look, which is high competence, which we can talk about. And I have an up face, right? I'm not in my resting bothered face, so that's a slight warmth cue that is actually how it makes me feel.

There's an element of power, but it's not an intimidating level of power because I balanced it with that warmth. Yeah! It's like a welcoming! Woo! We did it! Now I got to do it with the next one! Steeple! Okay! SE! SE! Yeah! Second, this is a weird one. The most important measurement on your entire body is the distance between your earlobe and your shoulder.

This distance right here—watch! If I were to do this in the interview the entire time, if I were to have a very small distance between my ear and my shoulder, I would look anxious. I would also have a really hard time giving you vocal power. You would have a hard... Do you trust me? No! You look nervous, right? I look nervous!

There's a direct correlation between confidence and anxiety and the distance between our shoulder and our ear. And very quickly, we're trying to just assess someone. The first few seconds of seeing them, we're trying to assess how confident are you? Can I catch it? We don't like people who are anxious; we don't want to talk to someone like this because we don't want to catch that anxiety. But we do want to talk to someone who has the max distance between their earlobes and their shoulder.

So when you're in a first impression, also in your profile pictures, I want a relaxed distance—shoulders down, ears out—which is another reason why I like that this is how your table is set up because it pushes my shoulders down, so I have a max distance that makes me look more confident, but it also makes me feel more confident.

There's a look here! So when you do the steeple and then you roll your shoulders down and back, you will begin to feel more confident! Don't you feel good? You do! But what if you raise your head, though? Because if I'm trying to get my ears away from my shoulders, I might go like this! Actually, they're the same distance!

So you want to actually keep your... Yeah, you want to keep your chin level, and if you can help it, you don't want to actually look down at someone—down your nose at someone. It's quite a scornful, judgmental... Exactly! So you just noticed it even when I did it! So it's not this; it's just this! So maximizing this difference!

Third one! I love eye contact! We all know good eye contact is important, but here's what you might not know about good eye contact: eye contact is a power move when you look at someone at the end of your sentence. So we're very used to if someone's thinking about something and they're processing something in their head, and I'm telling you that there are 465 gestures in a TED Talk, that is the most important way that I want to showcase something to you.

That we like it when someone is actually accessing different memories or areas of their brain, but then when I end my sentence looking right at you, you're like, "Oh!" So highly competent people make eye contact specifically at the end of their sentences to drill a point, and ideally when the other person is saying something important.

Okay, interesting! I just did it then, but I do that when I'm doing interviews because I kind of like look off into the distance to think a little bit, and then I come back to ask. The worst advice I hear people give—body language experts give—make more eye contact! Make 100% eye contact! Actually, in Western culture, as they've studied this, the ideal amount of eye contact is between 60 and 70% of the conversation.

If you make over 70% eye contact, it's actually considered a territorial gesture. So if I were to be making 100% eye contact with you, it would feel very invasive, very awkward. We like it when someone is processing or gathering information from around. Like if I'm processing something or I'm thinking about something or I'm accessing all that matters, is at the end of my point, I'm looking right at you, and that feels so much more powerful!

Okay, so that's number three! Yeah, that's number three! Okay, fourth one—one of my favorites! It's called a lower lid flex. Lower lid flex is one of the least utilized but one of my favorite cues. So biologically speaking, when we are trying to see something far away, we harden our lower lids. Like I'm trying to read the titles on your bookshelf; I harden my lower lids.

That is because when our eye is trying to see far, it squints to block out the light, so you'll see more details in my face when you harden your lower lid at me. So harden your lower lid! If you look at People's Sexiest Men Alive, almost every man in that magazine is... It's Zoolander, right? Blue steel! Blue steel is actually just a lower lid flex!

That is because when someone is trying to really focus on something and really understand something, their lower lid is flexed, as you're doing right now. And boy, oh boy, do we like it when someone is lower lid flexing at us because it means you are really trying to understand and see me! So a lower lid flex is a great power cue to use in moderation, right? Nothing too much!

That when someone is saying something on a date or in a meeting or a colleague is saying something really important, and you want to show them

15 years is that we are losing the ability to connect with each other in person. With the rise of technology, especially smartphones and earbuds, people are more isolated than ever. We used to have more spontaneous interactions, whether it was on public transport, in cafes, or just walking down the street. Now, people are often plugged into their devices, creating a barrier to casual conversations and connections.

Additionally, social media has changed the way we perceive friendships. While it allows us to stay in touch with many people, it often leads to superficial connections rather than deep, meaningful relationships. People may have hundreds of friends online but feel lonely in real life because those connections lack depth.

Moreover, the pressure to present a perfect image on social media can hinder authenticity in friendships. People may feel they need to curate their lives, which can lead to feelings of inadequacy and isolation when they compare themselves to others.

In summary, while technology has its benefits, it has also created challenges for forming genuine connections. We need to be more intentional about fostering real-life interactions and being present with those around us.

18 years ago, you could maybe wear a Walkman around campus or around the city or on a subway, but really your ears were open. So what would happen is you’d get on the subway, or you’d walk across campus, or you’d walk down the hallway, and someone would be like, “Hey Stephen, how’s it going?” “You know, pretty good, crazy week.” “Oh really? What are you working on?” It was so much easier to have those tiny micro moments of connection. That Van Sloan study was done before AirPods, and I wonder if you were to redo it now, what would happen?

In that study, he found that the most likable kids had the longest list of people they liked. When he observed them, they were walking down the hallway, saying hello, chatting next to someone for five seconds at a locker, saying “after class” and sort of talking, sitting at a lunch table, leaning over someone, asking about that. So much micro connection—very small conversations. Our friendships don’t often happen in these big deep conversations; they happen in these micro moments. AirPods destroy it, and I see this especially with younger folks because they always have their AirPods in when they’re commuting, when they’re walking, when they’re jogging, when they’re at the gym.

I don’t know about you, but when I was single for five seconds, when I was 17, the gym was like the place. At the gym, no one really was listening to anything. At least I can remember that the rare person would have their Walkman in, but everyone was AirPod-free. So there were a lot of micro moments of connection happening. It was so much easier to talk to people. Now, if someone’s working out with their AirPods, they’re insane. I’m like, what are they doing? They should go home. It’s weird. Or they’re with a friend working out together, and that’s intimidating.

So I’m worried about this because we need weak ties. Weak ties are, in the research, these very casual connections of someone you see at the gym once a week, and you kind of know them. “Oh yeah, you know Stephen, nice to see you.” You recognize their face. If you were to see them at a restaurant later in the week, you’d be like, “Hey, don’t you go to that gym?” “Oh yeah, yeah, we do. So what are you doing this weekend?” Those weak ties are incredibly important for our happiness. That’s how we build big friendships; that’s how we can find a soulmate; that’s how we can make good business contacts.

I’m seeing less and less of that because of AirPods and because of hybrid work. We’re just not in the office that much, so we’re having less of those little micro moments in a hallway. The five minutes before a meeting starts is really critical to your career success. How you talk to your boss, the small talk you make, are you asking boring questions? It’s telling your colleagues and your boss a lot about who you are. It’s proven that likable people make more money, likable people get more promotions, and likable people have more friends and more friends at work.

So when we have fewer moments to show how likable we are, it’s really hard to get those things. At my company, Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company, Flight Group, we’re constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that’s a new show, a product, or a project. It’s why I launched the conversation cards. I’ve relied on Shopify before, who’s a sponsor of today’s podcast, and I’ll be using them again for the next big launch, which we’ll hear about soon. I use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world.

With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely. No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we’re giving you a trial for just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to shopify.com/Bartlet. That’s shopify.com/Bartlet, or find the link in the description below.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably going to want to listen to this. It’s a message from one of our sponsors on this podcast, which is LinkedIn. If you’ve listened to me on this podcast for a while now, you’ll know that I’ve been on a bit of an evolution as a business owner and entrepreneur. One of those evolutions that has become clearer and clearer as I’ve matured is that the single most important thing in building a business, in building a company, is hiring. The definition of the word “company” is actually a group of people, and that is the first responsibility and job that any entrepreneur has and should focus on. But surprisingly, most don’t.

About 80% of my team have been hired from LinkedIn, and I think there are very few platforms, if any, in the world that could give you that diversity of candidates with that much information and data on their profiles. It usually costs money, but for the entrepreneurs that are listening to me, I’ve got you a free job ad post for your company on LinkedIn. Just go to linkedin.com/doac to post your free job ad today. That’s linkedin.com/doac. Terms and conditions apply.

What about lying? This is one of the things people are most interested in—how to spot a liar. It’s funny because, like the rest of our conversation, one could infer that it’s about how to be a liar. I’m joking. No, but it is about how to show up in a certain way to get success in a certain context, whether it’s dating or work or whatever. But then we want to figure out if someone’s playing us. Is it possible to spot a liar? Most people can only spot a lie with 54% accuracy. They’ve actually studied that the average person is very bad at spotting lies. You’re better off tossing a coin. We are very bad at spotting liars, and this is important to know about yourself. We should not overestimate our ability to spot lies; we are usually not good at it.

So it is very important to give someone the benefit of the doubt because you don’t know. It’s very hard to spot. It is possible; there are certain statistical cues to deceit. There are cues that, over and over again, research finds liars typically do, but not always. There’s no Pinocchio’s nose; there’s no one cue that means someone is lying. But there are a couple of cues that come up over and over again. One we already talked about is the question inflection. It’s very suspicious if someone is speaking and all of a sudden they ask a question if they’re not actually asking a question.

If all of a sudden you hear the question inflection used on a statement, or a number, or a boundary, or a timeline, that’s when I’m like, “Let’s double click on that for a second and talk about that budget.” So you mentioned the number was 500,000. Where does that number come from? Let’s talk about more, and I want to hear if I’m going to hear it again. Interesting. So that’s a double click for me; that’s like, let’s make sure that I heard that right. Let’s make sure that you feel confident about it. Where does that come from? So that’s just a little red flag that says dive deeper.

Nothing is a sign of lying; it’s just a sign that you should dig deeper. A volume drop is another vocal cue of deception. So when we’re anxious or nervous, we will lose volume and we lose breath. I hear this a lot in sales calls. Someone will— I always know what part of a sales presentation makes my entrepreneurs the most nervous because they lose volume during that part of their presentation. So it sounds like this: “So let’s move on to our team. So our founding partners are, um, me, myself, uh, Joe, Jimmy, and we all met at NYU, and we’re going to now talk about…” I’m obviously making it obvious for you, but if you’re listening for it, you’ll hear where someone is like—they literally lost fuel; they literally lost breath.

So a sudden drop in volume is a very interesting cue to double click on. Like, what just happened there? How do you feel about your co-founder? How long have you known each other? Anything we should know about that? How’s the relationship? How do you fight? How do you communicate? Right? That’s where I would aim most of my investor questions if I was hearing that volume drop in that specific area.

Now, that’s vocal. Non-verbal, what you’re looking for is incongruencies where the verbal does not match the body. The biggest and most obvious one is when someone says yes but shakes their head no, or says no but shakes their head yes. So I might say to my daughter, “Did you clean your room?” “Um, yeah, I did.” She’s shaking her head no. In Western culture—there’s a cultural exception to this one: India, Bulgaria, and Pakistan—they nod a little bit differently, the research actually shows that. But in countries outside of India, Bulgaria, and Pakistan, when we agree with someone, say yes or tell the truth, we typically agree with ourselves and shake our heads yes. When we don’t agree or don’t like something, we often shake our heads no.

We can sometimes also do this in disbelief, like, “Wow, I cannot believe that just happened.” So I’m always looking for incongruent nods. This happens a lot if you ask someone, “Do you like the new girl?” “Yeah, you know, she’s, um, great.” Right? You see that 100% of the time, and people don’t realize they’re doing it, but they’re shaking their head no. They do not like that person. You’ll also see this with mismatched facial expressions, and the biggest one for liars, the research finds, is disgust.

Disgust is an expression that people make without even realizing it, and this is across cultures. When we don’t like something or we smell something bad, we crinkle our nose up, and we flash the upper whites of our teeth, and we go, “Ugh.” So you’ll notice that liars typically feel dirty when they lie, so oftentimes they’ll show disgust with themselves for lying. So you’ll ask someone, “So what do you think of the proposal?” “Yeah, um, it’s really good.” And they might even sniff. “Really? What’s a sniff?”

Um, what does it signal? Oh, it’s a disgust activator. Like when we are disgusted, our nasal cavities want to close because we want to take in less of it. So even though it’s not about food, it’s about a preference, liars will often show a little bit of disgust when they are lying because they are a little bit disgusted with themselves. So you’ll see this activation here. By the way, no one does that naturally, like, right? This is very unnatural to hold my face, but we do it when we feel disgusted. The nasal cavities—when we nasal dilate, our nasal wings dilate, that’s what it’s called. These nasal wings dilate, and we begin to scrunch them up. It’s like we don’t like what we’re seeing, smelling, or hearing.

So what I will do is I will share a proposal with someone; I will talk about something, and I watch for any disgust. I’ll say, “You know, here’s the plan for 2025. Here’s what we’re going to do.” And if I see [Music], I know that that team member or that person is not that into it, and that’s why I double click. “Any questions? How do you feel, Stephen? Do you like this idea?” “Yeah, I love it.” “Yeah, no, horrible, horrible.” You look like you’re about to throw up, by the way.

I heard you say that the most toxic relationships are the ambivalent relationships. The word ambivalent means—what does it mean? Okay, so ambivalent is actually not toxic. Toxic is like we know it’s bad; we don’t want it; we’re creating boundaries around it. Ambivalent means we’re not sure. Ambivalent relationships are the relationships in your life that are the most damaging. They’re the relationships where you wonder, “Does she like me? Do I like her? Gosh, I wish she would cancel this dinner we have. Am I tired after that? I’m dreading it. Do I have to go? Gosh, I wish I was home.” Those are ambivalent relationships where you’re not sure, and they are so energetically draining.

Because a toxic person, you know they’re toxic. You’re like, “I don’t like that person. They’re not serving me. I’m not going out to dinner. I’m going home. No thanks. Not going to text you. Not going to tell you I’m thinking about you.” Where an ambivalent person, you’re like, “I should check in with that person. I really should go to the dinner. Oh, it’s been five months since I’ve gone to dinner with them. Oh man, do I even know what they’re up to these days? Do I even care? And then most importantly, do they like me? Do they support me?”

That’s why I asked about that friend that you were unsure about. I was like, “Are they jealous? Do they have a problem with you?” Because you might be picking up on that they are ambivalent towards you, and you’re picking up on that. There’s a research study that was done with police officers, and they wanted to know what makes for a thriving workplace. So they asked police officers to rank the people in their precinct, and they found that the police officers who had the most ambivalent ties were more unhappy in their job, had less work-life balance, and had more workplace stress than the people who had toxic relationships.

In other words, the police officers who said, “All 10 of those people are toxic,” were happier at work, and the police officer who said, “I don’t know if I like that person, and that person, I don’t know if that person likes me. I don’t know if I want to go out to lunch with that person again. I kind of would rather be alone,” because it is so mentally draining to have ambivalent relationships. So it’s really important if you’re making that list of people—going back to the very beginning, you know the people you’re really close to, not very close with, kind of close with, really close with—if you’re not sure, put them at the bottom.

In the next 30 days, try to ask them the questions that we shared: “Working on anything exciting? What’s your biggest goal right now?” and see if you like their answers. It’s important to either move them up or move them out. Don’t let them be ambivalent. One of the things that is highly searched on Google—I was looking at Google to figure out what the most searched questions are—there are some tools that I use to figure out what people want to know, and one of them was just, “How do I start a conversation?” So that’s what my next book is about.

I’m happy to hear that. Okay, one is don’t overthink your opener. Starting a conversation is like, “Hey, I’m Vanessa.” Like literally, your opener can just be that. My sister, my youngest sister, said the best advice I ever gave her was, “You just told me to say hello to people.” And that is it. Your opener is just, “Hey, I’m Vanessa. Hey, nice to meet you.” So don’t overthink the opener because that opener—your body is actually doing a lot of things: your brain and body are like competence, warmth, facial expression, voice tone. If you’re like, “What’s your biggest goal in life?” it’s way too much.

So one is your opener should actually be basic so the other person’s brain gives them a chance to feel safe. “Okay, friend, we’re friends. Hey, how are you doing?” Right? I held up my hand. So don’t overthink your opener. “Hey, nice to meet you. Hey, I’m Vanessa.” Your first question is where things get more interesting. Okay, so if you don’t know their name, you want to say, “Oh, what’s your name?” Great, I’m Vanessa. Then you have a choice, and I like to take the better route. You can say, “So what do you do?” But I really don’t like that path; it’s autopilot.

So what I like to do instead is ask a version of the excitement question: “Did you do anything fun and exciting this past weekend?” if it’s a Monday. So Mondays, I always ask, “Did you do anything fun this past weekend?” Fridays, I always ask, “Have any exciting plans coming up this weekend?” And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I don’t talk to anyone.

What is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about? For the person at home, the typical question, the most prolific question that you get—there’s one story that I love that I try to keep front of mind, which is about Harry S. Truman, former U.S. president. Most people don’t know about him that he was actually severely introverted. When most people think about U.S. presidents, they do not think about introverts. In fact, most presidents have to be kind of a booming extrovert personality, and he was very introverted.

He did something very interesting at the Democratic National Convention back in, I believe, 1944. He knew he was not a good public speaker, which also is very rare for a U.S. president to become president without being a good public speaker. He knew he could not cut it on stage with the very charismatic people, and he was not the preferred candidate. So he was like, “I’m not going to compete on stage. I’m not going to try to outspeak them. I’m not going to try to go work the floor and shake hands. It’s not my way. What I am going to do is try to find a way to do what I’m best at, which is one-on-one conversations where I can win people over with an argument.”

So at the Democratic National Convention, it was really hot in Chicago in the middle of summer. He rented the one air-conditioned room in the basement of the convention center, and one by one, his team would invite person by person down into that air-conditioned room. He would tell them his story; he would tell them his points, and vote by vote, as the votes were being tallied, he would win over every single person that went to that room. One, it was air-conditioned, so they wanted to stay there as long as possible. Two, he would hear, “What are your concerns? Why do you not want to vote for me?” And he would explain to them why they should vote for him.

Vote by vote, he ended up winning the National Convention without having to speak on stage barely at all. I share this because stop competing on stages where you can’t be your best. Start creating rooms where you can think about what your social strengths are. You have one. What is it? Is it storytelling? Is it being funny? Is it listening? Is it being empathetic? Is it being a decoder? Is it being persuasive? What is your social strength? Create spaces and rooms where you can exercise that strength because no one wants you to pretend to be an extrovert or pretend to be something that you’re good at that you’re not.

It’s much better to do what you’re actually good at and attract the right people. Your social strength might not be in person, and that’s okay. There are some people who are great at texting; there are some people who are great at sending voice notes; there are some people who make their friends by broadcasting and then picking out a couple of people. That’s how you met your girlfriend. You broadcasted; she resonated with something that you said, and you gave her the way to find you. She did, and then you met.

So maybe it’s broadcasting. I think we have to think outside the box. It’s not only in person; there are so many ways you can have social strengths. I’ve heard it all now. Yeah, I get it. I believe it. I’m into it. What is step one? I’m going to buy your books. There are two of them here, so I’m going to buy both of these books. Both of them will be linked below. What else can I do to start on my journey of becoming you? You were a recovering awkward person. Before, now you’re not. Yes, what’s step one?

Okay, step number one is begin to break autopilot. Make a commitment for the next 30 days you are not going to trigger autopilot in your conversation. No more “What do you do?” No more “How are you?” No more “Where are you from?” No more “Okay?” Right? Ask better questions. “Okay, what’s your biggest goal?” “Did you do anything exciting?” You’re disgusting me. No, I’m thinking. I was telling you, you look good.

Okay, so that’s challenge number one. Challenge number two: find out where you fall in the warmth and competence scale. Are you highly warm? Do you need to dial up competence to be taken more seriously? Are you highly confident? Do you need to dial up warmth to be seen as more likable and friendly and trustworthy? Do that email audit. So take the quiz, then do the email audit. And then, if you can, here’s the bonus challenge: send the Charisma quiz to someone who knows you well—someone at work, maybe a partner. Ask them to take it as you and screenshot their results.

Sometimes how we perceive our warmth and competence is not how others perceive our warmth and competence. So if you take it and you say, “I’m perfect; I’m a five out of five,” but they take it and they see you as really high on the warmth scale, that is going to be critical feedback for you.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for. The question that’s been left for you—I always love these— is, “When in your life did you try to outrun your pain, and what was the consequence? When in your life did you turn and face your pain, and what was the consequence?”

There was a really weird moment in my career where everything was taking off. I had a lot of years of hard struggle being a writer. I had a published book—a traditionally published book—that completely failed in 2011. We won’t name it. I put it out there, thought my world would change, and it did terribly. I got terrible reviews; it didn’t sell, and I was literally told, “You’ll never write a book again.” I was just devastated—devastated. My husband was like, “You’ve got to keep writing. You’re a writer; you’ve got to keep writing.”

So I went back to it. I started Science of People; that was officially when I started the actual website, Science of People. I kept writing, and then it started taking off. I had videos that went viral; we started having millions of visitors on the website, and I wanted to prove myself very badly. I wanted to erase that painful memory. So when I got approached to write Captivate, I was like, “No, I can’t write books. I’m a YouTuber and a blogger, but I can’t write books.”

She was like, “This will be a different kind of book. This will be a book about really what you want to say to people, not the book you think you should write.” I was like, “No, I cannot do it. It’s too painful. I will not survive if that fails. I will not survive if that fails.” It took Nikki months of telling me, “This will be different. This will be a different kind of book. You can write the real book that you really want to write.”

So I said yes; I started writing it, and that was when I think I—I don’t know how to end the question—but decided it would be worth the pain. If that failed, it would be worth the pain of at least saying that I tried. That was a very hard choice. Thank goodness it did not fail; it did really well, and I’m eternally grateful for that. When anyone buys a copy, I’m like, “One click further from that failure—horrible failure.”

Vanessa, thank you. Thank you so much. What you write about and what you educate people on is a subject that’s probably more important now than ever. I say that because of the sort of macro climate of society where we’re more lonely than ever; we’re struggling with connection. It’s not coming naturally to us as it once probably did, or at least more naturally than it does now.

It’s crazy; I’ve only been a podcaster really, I think, for about four years. I think I started in 2017, but really it’s been four years since I’ve been uploading. It’s crazy just in that time alone how many more of the questions I’m getting are about all the things you write about. They’re about how to make a friend and how to show up in a certain way and all these kinds of things.

So the work you’re doing is so unbelievably important. There’s so much more that needs to be done as well, but the contribution you’ve had to the 400,000 people that you’ve taught and the millions of people that have bought these books and consumed your videos and everything is a really, really important one. Thank you.

It’s so funny because even me—people see me on camera and stuff—but I learned so much from your work. Thank you so much. There are so many things as well that I think a lot about, and you know, things you can take or leave. You’ve got to say, “Who do I want to be? And who am I, you know, truly?” to then apply these things because there’s no point. I just have no interest in building a facade or anything, but there are things about me which I didn’t even know I was doing.

What kind of friend do I want to be? What kind of partner do I want to be? What kind of way do I want to be in conversation? You get to choose. Thank you, Vanessa. Thanks for having me.

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