301. Trust at First Sight: Create More Meaningful Connections

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: The most effective communication is the communication that removes friction. My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to chatting with Vanessa Van Edwards. Vanessa is the lead investigator at Science of People. She specializes in helping professionals master their people skills, increase likability, and confidently navigate both digital and in-person interactions. Vanessa has written two best-selling books, Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People, and Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. I got to know Vanessa when she joined me in teaching parts of my Strategic Communication Master Class Certificates course. Well, welcome, Vanessa. I have been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. Thanks for being here. 

[00:00:55] Vanessa Van Edwards: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. 

[00:00:58] Matt Abrahams: Shall we get started?

[00:00:59] Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, let's dive in. 

[00:01:01] Matt Abrahams: So you focus on communication among many other things. Why is strategic communication so important? 

[00:01:09] Vanessa Van Edwards: I think of communication as the number one way to remove friction. You know, I'm, I'm a recovering awkward person. And so I used to have a lot of friction in my conversations, in my relationships, where things just felt hard. I think when we look at strategic communication, communication that's built to connect, that's built to break down barriers, you are removing friction from every area of your life, your productivity, your ability to connect, your ability to feel happy, your ability to move forward. And so I think that when people think about getting things done or being successful, they have to add strategic communication to remove friction from their goals.

[00:01:45] Matt Abrahams: I love this idea of strategic communication as removing friction. It makes things easier. Communication is all about connection, and if we can make that smooth and easy, life just gets better. I, I appreciate you sharing that. Uh, you provide a lot of great advice and guidance for non-verbal presence. I really like the work that you do. It's extremely valuable. One area you focus on that I have not seen others focus on that I'd love for you to share a little bit with us about is gesturing. Can you share your thoughts on this, best practices, and why this is even important? 

[00:02:20] Vanessa Van Edwards: I think that gestures are the most overlooked aspect of our presence, and the reason for this is because the brain is very attuned to gesture unconsciously. We don't realize we're looking at gesture so much. So for example, as I'm speaking, if I were to say to you, "I have, um, three big ideas," but hold up the number five, 

[00:02:40] Matt Abrahams: It's confusing 

[00:02:42] Vanessa Van Edwards: My mouth really, really wanted to say five really bad because I was holding up five. So one, there's a loop for you as the speaker that if your gestures are aligning with your words, you feel coherent, you feel confident, you feel like, okay, like I'm capable, I know my stuff. So that alignment's important for you as a speaker. And Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow has found that gesture makes you more fluent, it makes you more charismatic. But also for the listener, your brain is looking for, how do I deeply understand you? Yes, I can listen to your words, I can hear tone, but also I'm looking for visual cues.

[00:03:18] So if I say that I have a really big idea and I hold my fingers really small, the other person's brain goes, "What?" And actually, you're more likely to believe my gesture over my words. And so I think that this is the secret way into a beautiful presence, which is it helps you as a speaker feel like you know your stuff, and it helps the listener remember your stuff. And also, between you and me, I have a secret third goal that I don't always share, which is if you don't know your stuff well enough, you won't be able to gesture. So thinking about gesture is a good self-check of, do I know my content so well that I could speak to you on two tracks? That I can walk on stage, hop into a boardroom, lead a meeting, and speak with my words, but also I could underline, outline, or highlight for people along with my hands.

[00:04:10] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate that self-check idea because a lot of people will ask me, "How do I know when I'm ready? Have I practiced enough?" And I think a great way to check that is, are gestures natural, and are you doing them? And if you're not, it's a cue that perhaps you need to work a little bit more. And I love anything that connects, you know, to science and biology. One of the recommendations I always make with gesturing is that we want to do it beyond our shoulders. Nervous people gesture in front of their chest, and just going slightly beyond your shoulders, again, shows that openness, and I think that's important. 

[00:04:42] Vanessa Van Edwards: I love gesturing beyond the shoulder. I think of it as the strike zone for any baseball players, right? Like, you like the strike zone. Also, be very careful to not penguin. I call it penguining, which is when you press your arms tightly to your side and you just have your arms angling, pivoting out. 

[00:04:56] Matt Abrahams: Right. 

[00:04:57] Vanessa Van Edwards: So it's, it's not just a, a gesturing out. It's also we love the space between the torso and the arm. Very confident people are actually, they have a lot of space. You can see their torso. So not only gesturing out, but also creating a little bit of space there is also good. No penguining. 

[00:05:13] Matt Abrahams: I love the idea of penguining, where the elbows are glued to the body, and we don't wanna do that. In fact, when I coach people, I'll say, "Imagine a ping pong ball or an egg in your armpit," and that just extends that elbow a little bit away. Uh, I wanna share some advice that a, a student of mine actually taught me. What he'll do to really focus on his gestures is he'll audio record himself doing his presentation or his pitch, and then he'll listen to it and not speak, but as he's listening, he'll go through his gestures, not to script or memorize them, but to get that part of his brain that does the gesturing working. And I thought that that was an excellent way of practicing. I do that now myself and find it really valuable. 

[00:05:54] Vanessa Van Edwards: I love it. I, I, I'm gonna try this. 

[00:05:56] Matt Abrahams: Vanessa, can you tell me what you mean by over and under-signaling in our non-verbal communication? 

[00:06:03] Vanessa Van Edwards: So when you're very nervous, you either go into, um, freeze, which means you under-signal. You shut down the face. So anyone, all, any of my students who are, um, very anxious in a presentation, they under-signal, so they lose all expressiveness in their face. They lose all movement and expressiveness in their body. Their gestures, either they clasp their hands tightly or they're in their pockets or tightly to their sides, and they focus fully on just verbal, verbal, verbal. And they literally will try to deliver only verbal, and they lose all expressiveness. That under-signaling, I think, is a natural response of, "I'm scared, so don't notice me."

[00:06:38] If you're an under-signaler, we have to add in movement that feels good to them, whether that's even as small as an eyebrow raise, uh, pivoting on stage, how you hold the microphone. We have to add in expressiveness. The other side, and this is more me, expressers, we over-express. So I over-nod, I bobble head when I'm very nervous. Yeah. Um, I, uh, pace the stage, right? Which is very distracting for your audience. I will over-gesture or fidget gesture, and so I need to lessen my expression, or I need to, apologies. I need to make it more purposeful. 

[00:07:08] Matt Abrahams: We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. One of my favorite things about this show is hearing from listeners all over the world. Communication connects us, and the more people you can communicate with, the bigger your world becomes. So many of you are collaborating internationally, working across cultures, or simply trying to connect more deeply with people around the world. That's one reason I've been thinking more and more about language learning.

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[00:08:18] I really like this idea of under and over-signaling and recording yourself and watching and identifying, where am I over? Where am I under? Am I consistently one way or the other? Is a great way to diagnose. Again, the goal is not to script gestures. The goal is just to become aware so that we can be more purposeful, and I really appreciate that. I know you see presence being more than what we do with our bodies. You are all about impact and word choice as well. What are a few common danger words we use in everyday emails or pitches that can adversely affect our credibility and how people see us? 

[00:08:56] Vanessa Van Edwards: There are two kind of danger zone buckets for verbal. The first is sterile, and the second is accidentally negative. And I think that these are crippling our communication. They add a lot of friction without realizing it. So first, let's talk about sterile. So much of our communication has moved from in-person to solely verbal, only over email, Slack, text, chat. And so more of our critical ideas and our first impressions and our presence is communicating only verbally, which means we are becoming more sterile with our communication because we are doing it so much. So very sterile communication is autopilot words, the subject follow-up. Words like, uh, get back to you, just thinking about it, checking in, wanna circle back.

[00:09:44] Phrases and words that we hear all the time that our brain doesn't even register as emotion. Like it's, it's just, um, default communication. The problem is when we do this over email or chat over and over again, the brain goes on autopilot, too, right? Our, our, our reaction is just, oh, this email's gonna be like every other email I've ever gotten. And so the first thing that I wanna fight with danger zone is breaking the sterile, is adding in words that do have a little bit of emotion, a little bit of behavior. So for example, if you have a meeting coming up, what is the feeling that you want someone to feel when they see your name pop up in their inbox?

[00:10:21] How do you want them to behave that sets them up for success and you up for success in the actual meeting? So a calendar invite is a great example of this. I always have my students do a calendar invite audit, where I have them look at their calendar, they open up the calendar, and I have them write down all the, um, emotion words they see. So meeting one-on-one, review, doesn't count. Video call, doesn't count. And usually there are none, right? But every single time you open your calendar, you're priming yourself with a verbal cue, and you're also, that's often the meeting's first impression that your client is getting or your student is getting or your colleague's getting.

[00:10:58] So if you want it to be a collaborative session, call it a collaborative meeting. If you want it to be a strategy session, call it a strategy session. If you want it to be about 2026 goals, call it 2026 goal review. We can add in very, very small words that wake our brains up and begin to cue for behavior. That fights that sterile. The second is accidentally negative, and this happens verbally. Usually in the first minute of interaction, which is incredibly important for your first impression, we throw away our words. We start by saying, "Oh my gosh, it's been so busy. What a crazy schedule. So sorry I'm late. What terrible traffic. This horrible weather." When we do that, you're literally cueing the other person's brain to go negative. 

[00:11:43] Matt Abrahams: This notion of sterile language and negative language is absolutely something we need to, to look at and to be concerned with. How we prime people impacts how they see us, and doing an audit of our language can help. I am one hundred percent behind you on thinking about meeting invites and calendar invites. Most people don't like going to meetings, so calling something a meeting immediately triggers a negative aspect. So I like your idea of how can we bring action just to the titles of our meetings. And what we say when we initiate interaction can set ourselves up for success. So thank you for sharing those bits of advice, and I encourage everybody to do an audit of how you start things.

[00:12:27] Beyond our bodies and words, you highlight imagery cues, and I really like this idea. What are the colors we wear? Are the props visible in our background? We are secretly telling people things about our status, our trustworthiness. Can you give us some insight into these imagery cues? 

[00:12:45] Vanessa Van Edwards: I love thinking about imagery because we don't realize that we are creating or triggering people's neural maps. Now, this is a concept that I fell in love with. You know, I'm, I'm a researcher, and I fell in love with it because it's this idea that one word can light up a kind of tree in someone's mind. So for example, if I were to, on a dating website and have a picture of me skiing, someone seeing me skiing would trigger a whole tree of activation. Now, for some people, they might think fun, adventure, family, amazing. Other people would think cold, dangerous, scary, adrenaline.

[00:13:27] Matt Abrahams: I'm in the latter camp, by the way 

[00:13:29] Vanessa Van Edwards: I don't ski. So those are two completely different behavioral responses. I think there's opportunity here to be purposeful with the kind of neural maps you're creating. And so we can think about in our Zoom background, the props on our desk, what we're holding in our profile pictures. When I'm working with companies, what's on your website? Um, what's in your commercials? What's on your social profiles? What's in your header? Those are all creating neural maps, and here's the thing I think is maybe a little bit controversial Sometimes you don't want to have a neural map that appeals to everyone. I think it's actually better to create neural maps that appeal to your people.

[00:14:13] I like blueprints, formula, framework. You know, I, I love very specific, uh, black and white teaching of soft skills. There are some people who will not like that, and they are not our people, right? Like, they're not going to like my science-backed approach to conversation because they're our formula. So on our website, we created allergies for those people so that when they come to us, if you love that, you are gonna be attracted to the imagery we use, imagery of science, imagery of chemicals, uh, imagery of words like science and, um, certificate and blueprint. That, we do that on purpose 'cause I don't want to appeal to everyone. And so I think for us and for listeners to think about is who are the kind of people who are your people that you really get along with? It removes friction if you can call to those people faster. 

[00:15:03] Matt Abrahams: We had a great conversation with Seth Godin, who talks very similarly to find your tribe, find the people, and target them. What you add to it that I think is great is, is the idea of allergies. What can we build in not just to speak to the people we wanna speak to, but what do we put out there that signals to people that, that aren't our people that this isn't for you? And we're saving them time, and we're saving ourselves time, so that's really interesting. But taking a step back, this idea of curating the experience for people, not just in what you say and how you say it, but what you show makes a difference. I'll give you an example that I find really fascinating.

[00:15:41] There's some recent research that says with those backgrounds people put, you, you have three choices of backgrounds when you're virtual: a real background, as you and I have, uh, uh, an image that you put up, or that blurry, fuzzy background. And what the research says is the blurry, fuzzy background primes people to think that you're hiding something, that there's something you want to keep away from them, and that's how they come to your communication, to the interaction. So what we show people helps them form opinions of us and filter what we say, and you highlight that very clearly when you talk about imagery cues, and I appreciate that.

[00:16:18] Vanessa Van Edwards: And also, with a blurry background, I think you're actually missing an opportunity, right? Like, my goal in interaction is to make it as easy to communicate with me as possible. That should always be our goal, is that we wanna put people at ease. If you are hiding your background, their brain, one, it's one step even further from in person, 'cause we don't have a blurry background in person, so it, it's even further. But also you're missing an opportunity to give them cues that might help them know you, and that makes it easy to communicate with. 

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[00:17:33] We all grew up with the golden rule, uh, but you advocate for something a little, a little ritzier, the, the platinum rule. What's the difference, and how does applying it change the way we motivate and appreciate the people we work with in our teams? 

[00:17:46] Vanessa Van Edwards: I was raised with the golden rule, treat others as you would treat yourself. And the golden rule got me in trouble. And it did. It got me in trouble because it actually is quite self-focused I believe, I've come to learn that if you are very self-focused interaction, especially at work and especially in, in high stakes interactions, it is very hard to have empathy, compassion, and see where the other person is coming from. Because you've, you're in the filter of, well, how would I wanna be treated in this? The platinum rule is treat others as they would wanna be treated, and it is a very different mental shift in every social interaction.

[00:18:22] It helps you be other focused, which is an immediate click on for empathy because you're thinking, what is happening in their world, in their day? If I were them, what would be worrying me or keeping me up at night? What would my goal or motivation be? And it completely changes your questions. So instead of a back and forth of I feel, I feel, I feel, it's why, why do you feel that way? How do you feel that way? What made you feel that way? And it creates a very different way of communicating. And so I'm trying to encourage people to think more about the platinum rule. This is actually, I think, the more elevated and more challenging way to communicate. 

[00:19:01] Matt Abrahams: It requires that we really appreciate our audience and understand what's important and relevant to them. And when we do that, then we can be in service of them and, and achieve the platinum rule and really give them what they need. Vanessa, this has been fantastic. I knew we were gonna have a, a great conversation. As you know, uh, I end with three questions, one I make up just for you, and then two I've been asking everybody for a long time. Are you up for that? 

[00:19:25] Vanessa Van Edwards: I love it. Yes. 

[00:19:27] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. So you study so many interesting and exciting things. Would you be willing to give us a little sneak peek into something that you're exploring currently? 

[00:19:35] Vanessa Van Edwards: I've spent the last eight years diving into conversation. Captivate is about first impressions. Uh, Cues is about charisma and, uh, non-verbal. The one thing missing I felt was a deep look at how do we elevate conversation. How do we move from casual acquaintances to best friends? 

[00:19:54] Matt Abrahams: Right. 

[00:19:55] Vanessa Van Edwards: And so in October, my next book is coming out, and it's the blueprint for meaningful connective conversation if you want it. Taking back control. You don't need to go to level three with your Uber driver unless you want to, right? So for introverts, for my introverts, this book is really for, for you, for my introverts and ambiverts, is how do we take back control in conversation and create connection without having to fake being extroverted? The book is done, and I'm just, like, I'm just so excited for it to be in people's hands, and so that's gonna be, that's my next big one. I can't wait. 

[00:20:28] Matt Abrahams: Question number two, I'll be very curious for your answer for this. Who's a communicator that you admire, and why?

[00:20:34] Vanessa Van Edwards: Mine is Lucille Ball. I think that laughter is the lubrication of learning. I think laughter is the, um, shortcut to connection. Um, I'm not very funny, but I do try to be, and I think, um, her as a communicator, she was able to communicate so much, uh, about values and family and ambition and fame, uh, through her humor, and also was extremely entrepreneurial and created a whole new way of filming. And so I think Lucille Ball was one of those communicators where she just was able to be herself on camera. 

[00:21:13] Matt Abrahams: She was truly special, not just on camera, but behind, in this idea that levity can really be a useful tool for connection. And for our younger audiences who might not recognize Lucille Ball right away, find your favorite search engine, go search Lucille Ball and Chocolate Factory, and you can see how somebody can communicate a lot of information with very few words. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:21:45] Vanessa Van Edwards: The first one is weird, but, um, dog energy. And what I mean by that is dogs, you know, most dogs, not all, but most dogs are really excited to see you. They assume the best, right? Like, they are like, "Do you have a treat for me? Do you have a pet for me?" I think dog energy, like that assumption of good, that assumption of there could be a nice treat or pet waiting for you, um, in this conversation, I think is the first thing, that bringing that energy and that perspective as opposed to, you know, cat energy, and I love a cat, but you know, cat energy of like, "I'm gonna play it cool. I'm gonna wait until they like me first. I'm gonna be mysterious." That is very challenging, uh, to make, to make, um, good and successful communication. So dog energy. Second is something I touched on earlier, which is this idea of putting the other person at ease.

[00:22:38] I think, um, for those social overthinkers like me, uh, we can get very in our head. The only way I think to get out of our head is to get into their head. So the platinum rule is how can I put this person at ease? That's, uh, an, an incredibly important gift you can give someone and also gets out of your own head. And, uh, third is to appeal to the caveman brain. In successful communication, uh, when you're hiding something, when you are anxious, when you have negative non-verbals, those are perceived as microaggressions that make them feel more afraid and anxious. And so the easier you can be to communicate with, the clearer your warmth, the clearer your confidence, the clearer that you're signaling that you know what you're talking about, that actually puts them at ease and helps relax that caveman part of their brain. I think those are the, the best ingredients you can have for successful communication.

[00:23:26] Matt Abrahams: Bringing energy and desire to be communicated to and to communicate with others, putting others first and what's important for them, and showing that you're open and receptive. Wonderful recipe, and clearly, uh, one that would lead to less friction and more enjoyment in our communication. And I have to say, Vanessa, this was incredibly enjoyable. Lots of great tips and advice. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your collaboration, and I appreciate and wish you luck on the new book. 

[00:23:57] Vanessa Van Edwards: Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:23:59] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about nonverbal communication, listen to episode 137 with Dana Carney. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Alex McCarthy, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, an AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our global Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community.