The Body Language Expert: Stop Using This, It’s Making People Dislike You, So Are These Subtle Mistakes! Your Resting Face Matters & How To Fix It!

Highlights

• 2024-12-17 08:51 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.

• 2024-12-17 08:51 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.

• 2024-12-17 08:53 Other people were looking for their soulmate or their partner. And so 400,000 students have told me that this framework works.

• 2024-12-17 09:53 What’s an ambivert? So ambiverts get energy from the right people in the right places. So 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.

• 2024-12-17 08:57 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 game, community, made people think and feel more about Community and made them act more collaboratively.

• 2024-12-17 09:54 I send out calendar invites multiple times a week to clients, to friends when we have meeting, one on one call, video interview, I am 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

• 2024-12-17 09:54 So the words that we use, even one single word can actually change the way people think.

• 2024-12-17 09:54 It’s funny because our entire lives are 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.

• 2024-12-17 08:59 They try to become stoic, unreadable, they try to have no facial expressions, they literally try to poke her face all the time.

• 2024-12-17 09:55 Jamie Simonoff, 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 Simonoff entered the tank and he pitched a billion dollar idea. Literally a billion dollar idea, because it went on to raise funding from Shaq 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.

• 2024-12-17 09:55 This is the biggest transformation I see is 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?

• 2024-12-17 09:54 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

• 2024-12-17 10:16 So I call it resting bothered face. Because I have to probably use that word, resting bothered face. Rbf. Same thing. Okay. This is a real phenomenon,

• 2024-12-17 10:17 A lot of hood? Yes. This is hood. Yes. Yes. So that probably makes you. Do people think you’re angry or tired? Both.

• 2024-12-17 10:17 You need to look in the mirror and figure out what is the default of your face.

• 2024-12-17 10:17 If your mouth angles down into a frown, people are gonna think you’re sad. You’re gonna have to be counteracting that with your cues.

• 2024-12-17 10:17 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 of you at rest even have those two lines, people are gonna think you’re angry or frustrated if you have down eyes.

• 2024-12-17 10:19 So if people make the contempt expression one sided mouth raise, not only do they look scornful, kind of disdained, they actually begin to feel better than and scornful. So do not do an asymmetrical smile. In your profile picture. You are accidentally signaling negativity.

• 2024-12-17 10:22 If you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, you don’t have to walk around like that, but if you can act. Not the fear. Not the fear. Just here, just here. If you can activate these muscles in your profile picture, it shows authentic happiness or don’t smile at all.

• 2024-12-17 10:22 I hate the advice. Just smile more. Fake smiles do not work

• 2024-12-18 07:25 And then what would happen is I would try to overcompensate by sharing a ridiculous story or talking too much or completely shutting down.

• 2024-12-18 07:28 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.

• 2024-12-18 07:30 They liked so many people. And that in turn made them more likable. This showed me that being likable is in our control.

• 2024-12-20 13:10 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. Don’t text them. Okay. This is for the people who you want to level up with. There are three levels of intimacy.

• 2024-12-18 10:27 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 is this a group of people? It’s the levels of intimacy you are with someone. So would your partner know the story you tell yourself about yourself?

• 2024-12-18 07:39 So a question I ask people to begin to uncover their self narratives. Do you feel lucky?

• 2024-12-18 07:39 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.

• 2024-12-18 07:50 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. Said, there are 42 images. Almost none of the unlucky people did.

• 2024-12-18 07:50 This means that if you think of yourself as lucky, you literally see more opportunities.

• 2024-12-18 07:52 Yes. So this study blew my mind. It’s 58,000 working hours over 11 different companies. So a huge amount of. 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 25ft of a high performer, your own performance improves by 15%.

• 2024-12-18 07:52 Here’s the kicker. If you sit within 25ft of a low performer, your own performance decreases by 30%.

• 2024-12-18 07:53 This is why it is incredibly critical to invest in the five people who you spend the most time with.

• 2024-12-18 07:54 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 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.

• 2024-12-18 07:56 This means that somebody saw, uh, oh, that person doesn’t like me. And their body reacted to fight or flight. 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.

• 2024-12-18 07:58 you’re particularly famous for a TED Talk that you did. Yeah. Which did very, very well. It was called you are contagious.

• 2024-12-18 07:59 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. And that is because hands show intention.

• 2024-12-18 07:59 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, friend. We saw they weren’t carrying a rock or a spear, and they were probably a friend.

• 2024-12-18 08:00 little wave, 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:01 We found that the most viral TED speakers used an average, an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular TED talkers used an average of 271 Gestures.

• 2024-12-18 08:02 how can I outline very basically not modern dance, what I’m saying, or how can I emphasize things with my Gestures.

• 2024-12-18 08:05 People, even in the thumbnail, like to see the hand gesture even more than my crazy facial expressions.

• 2024-12-18 08:11 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:11 The public zone is about 5 to 8ft away. I don’t know, not feet, but 5 to 8ft away. Then you have the social zone, which is where we like to socialize with people. That is, depending on who you ask, three to five 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:11 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:12 their face is the entire camera? Yeah, I was working 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:12 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 you get a little bit closer and all of a sudden you’re accidentally standing in someone’s intimate zone,

• 2024-12-18 08:15 So typically, not always. Men default to higher incompetence. Women are defaulted to higher in warmth. Typically, not always.

• 2024-12-18 08:15 If you’re someone who’s interrupted a lot, not taken seriously, people forget meeting you. You need to dial up competence. This is like a thermostat.

• 2024-12-18 08:23 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 Simon off 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:29 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:29 To ask the worst advice I hear people give. Body language experts give, make more eye contact. Make 100% eye contact. It’s awkward. Actually, in Western cultures, 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.

• 2024-12-18 08:31 Now. There’s a little side note to the lower lid flex. Lower lid flex is not. It’s inherently in self, a positive cue. It’s a cue of focus.

• 2024-12-18 08:44 One of the biggest ones is an accidental question inflection. A question inflection is when we go up at the end of our sentence so it sounds like we’re asking a question, even if we’re actually using a statement. The brain, the research has actually looked at what the brain does when it hears an accidental question inflection. If we are listening to someone and we hear them accidentally use the question inflection, our brain goes from listening to scrutinizing why. Our brain wonders, why did you ask me that?

• 2024-12-18 08:44 Liars typically accidentally use the question inflection.

• 2024-12-18 08:45 So it sounds like this, hi, we’d love to do business with you. We’d love to have your project. And the cost of this service is $5,000. If you ask your number, you are begging people to negotiate with you. If you are asking for a raise or you are asking for a certain salary and you ask it, you are signaling to the other person. I don’t really believe this number and you shouldn’t either.

• 2024-12-18 09:58 If you often feel like people are holding back or not opening up to you, I want you to use these five warmth cues. This is dialing up your thermostat. Okay. These are for you too. First, we love a triple nod.

• 2024-12-18 09:58 Research has found that if we do a slow triple nod, the other person speaks 67% longer. So as an interview, this is a great cue. Watch. So here’s my triple nod is. Mm, mm, mm.

• 2024-12-18 09:59 So I love a warm triple nod, but you have to be careful with it. Okay? So that’s cue number one. Second, a head tilt. So universally, if we’re trying to hear something, we tilt our head up and we expose our ear, right? We’re as if we’re saying, what was that like? Dogs do this when they’re like, you know, and they expose their

• 2024-12-18 10:02 It’s too powerful. It’s too powerful. Okay, triple nod. Head tilt, one and two. Okay. Third, we already talked about this one. An authentic smile, right? A smile that reaches all the way up into your eyes. Highly warm. People typically do do that authentic smile more. Now, I don’t like a fake smile, so I only want you to do it when you’re authentic.

• 2024-12-20 13:11 Being part of the year I love. I asked this question in December, January and February. I ask everyone, what’s your biggest goal right now? What’s your big goal for 2025? When you ask this question, you’re going to get one of two responses.

• 2024-12-20 13:11 One, someone shuts you down. I don’t believe in goals. Not my person, not my person. I’m a growth minded person. If someone says that, I’m like, cool, peace.

• 2024-12-20 13:11 We’re not going to get along very well because I have a lot of goals. Or they’re going to be like, oh, let me tell you. And they’re going to tell you about goals. That’s also a great thing you can follow up on because then when you see them a month later or a week later or a year later, you can be like, hey, how did that, how did that go? It’s a great interview question.

• 2024-12-20 13:11 It’s a great question. I was just thinking that I should ask people that in the interview because. Trademark. Yeah, because you’re right. Someone that can’t articulate some kind of goal is probably not my kind of person.

• 2024-12-20 13:10 I call those allergy questions interesting. It’s a way to see are we going to have an allergic reaction to each other. It creates an allergy. Like, I know there’s a type of person, it susses them out really quickly. And that’s not my kind of person. Okay, so working anything exciting?

• 2024-12-20 13:09 if we’re getting into self narrative and you’re trying to figure out yourself or someone else’s narrative, you want to ask the question. It sounds innocuous, but it’s not. What book, movie or TV character is most like you and why? It’s kind of a silly, like dinner party question. It’s like, sort of sounds casual. But the answer to this question is so incredibly important

• 2024-12-20 13:11 Does she ever talk like this, where it’s kind of like a frying pan where she’s not using her full voice? Typically, people who use contracted small body language often have that kind of a vocal power. And so they go into a pattern like this. And then like, oh, like, I mean, I just, like, watered the plants this weekend. And like, oof. Also, the intonation, the end of this sentence goes up. Right, Right. So that’s the first thing I would actually try to help her with, is making sure that she does not accidentally use vocal fry. It’s usually an accident. Here’s the fastest way to get rid of vocal fry. If you are using it, you hear yourself using it, or someone else is using it, just speak louder. Vocal fry happens from a lack of breath. What actually is happening is you’re speaking and your vocal cords are rattling. It’s a terrible noise. But that’s my vocal cords rattling together.