Welcome to the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast. The show where brilliant professionals share how to sharpen the universal skills required to flourish at work. Enjoy more career fun, wins, meaning, and money with your host, Pete McIdest. Hello and thanks for joining us here for episode 480 with Vanessa Van Edwards. I think you'll dig this conversation because Vanessa shares how to form great first impressions, what makes people like you and key facial expressions you can read that could just sort of change the whole game. So you'll learn one proven way is for making a fantastic first impression to what builds and kills like ability the fastest and three good and bad questions asked during first meetings. So if you want to take a look at the show notes or the transcript or the links to items we've referenced, it's on over at awesometyourjob.com/ep480. And now here's Vanessa's story. Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral investigator at her Human Behavior Research Lab, the Science of People. She's a professional people watcher speaking, researching, and cracking the code of interesting behavior hacks for audiences around the world. She's a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine and the Huffington Post. Her popular courses on Creative Live and Udemy have over 120,000 enrolled students. She's been featured on NPR, CNN, Forbes, USA Today. But more importantly, she's addicted to sour patch kids, airplanes, coffee, and puppies. So thanks to Vanessa for spending some time with us and thanks to our sponsors. Check them out. Now here's Vanessa. Vanessa, thanks for joining us on How to Be Awesome About Your Job. Oh, thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to dig into this conversation. I've seen you appear in all sorts of places. So I know you've got the goods and a lot of great research behind your insights. But I want to hear about your experiment where you stared up at nothing. The lookup experiment. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I love doing street experiments. And I was dying to try this one, which is a lot of the time I hate about eye contact when I talk about body language. And one of the kind of interesting things about eye contact is we cannot help but look where other people are looking. Right. If they're looking at something, it might be interesting, which we like or it might be threatening, which we need to know. So I wanted to test it very simple experiment. I stood outside on the street and I looked up at nothing. And I counted how many people stopped and looked where I was looking while they walked by. And it was almost every single person unless they were on their phone. In fact, I was looking up and lovely lady stood next to me for quite a long time. And I'm standing there and she's standing there. We're both looking up at nothing. And I wonder who's going to break first. And she kind of leans over and she says, is he going to jump? Oh, I was like, oh my goodness. And I just laughed and I said, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry, but this is actually a social experiment. There's no one up there. And she had made up this whole story that she thought that she saw a man in the window. And that's where I was looking. And it was really it was a great experiment because one it told me that yes, we are absolutely very attuned to where people look. But second, our brain makes up stories for things we can't explain. Oh, that was perfect. Thank you. Well, it's a juicy takeaway. And I'm sure you've identified many such takeaways, but I'd love to hear what's perhaps been the most surprising and fast they discovery you've made in all your years of investigating people behavior. That's like asking to pick a favorite child. I like to only have one child. So that's pretty easy to do for me at this moment. Most surprising or interesting probably learning about personality. So I've always been interested. I've always been that person who signs up for every personality quiz. You know, what Harry Potter house or you, what Disney character you, I just love personality quizzes. And I was really interested to find out that there really is only one personality science. That's reliable. And that's called the big five intriguing. Yes. And so reliable just in terms of when the same person takes it shows up again and again again the same way. Yeah. And not only that, but also that across genders and cultures and races, everyone has the same five traits. And that's pretty surprising. You know, because we usually think about cultures shaping our personality and it definitely does. But in terms of these five personality traits, we can measure everyone on these same five traits. And that creates a kind of universality, which I like. I am always looking for universals. I want to find the things that apply to all of us. Because if we learn them, they help us in every situation. All right. Well, so I want to dig into the particular practicals when it comes to captivating folks. You've put a lot of your efforts in that dimension. And so why don't we start with hearing. What are the keys for making a fantastic first impression? Yeah. So first impressions are really important. And we kind of know this, but we don't exactly know how it works. And what's interesting is for my introverts listening. So there's actually a common misconception introverts often think that their first impression happens the moment they open their mouth. So an introvert will often go into an event and they'll kind of survey the room. And then once they decide to approach someone and say, hi, I'm Vanessa. That's their first impression. But actually your first impression happens the moment someone first sees you. And that's good and bad news. So it's bad news because, you know, we can't always hide in the corner until we make our first pressure until already. It actually happens the moment we walk in. The good news is is all you really have to worry about is that grand entrance. You know, we don't have to once we make the first impression actually stays pretty permanent. So one thing you really want to focus on when you're entering into a room is having some kind of purpose or intention. So worse than we can do in our first impression happens by accident a lot as let's say that you're at a networking event. You walk into the room and you're not sure what you're going to do first. Should you get a drink? Should you go to the bathroom? You're carrying your coat and your purse and your briefcase and that coffee that you just got at Starbucks. And you just need a few minutes to kind of calm down for a second. Your first impression has just been made from everyone who's seen you right as you walked in the room. So what I would rather have you do is think about, okay, what's the very first thing you want to do when you walk into a room? For me, it's almost always if I can trying to get something in my hand. So that could be a name tag, that could be a pen, that could be the free pamphlet they're giving out. It could be a drink at the bar. That has a secret effect of making you very purposeful and that also makes you look more confident. It makes you walk more confidently. It makes your eye contact more focused. But also gives you a kind of purpose when you're mentally walking in if you're a recovering awkward person like me. It's nice to have a sense of purpose. So very first thing you want to do is figure out what are you going to do the moment you walk in the room? And so I am confidently purposefully acquiring that name tag or that beverage or placing my items down. Yeah, exactly. And that seems like a silly thing. But actually what we are looking for and other people we're trying to gauge our first impression is the very first thing we're looking at is someone a threat to me. Right. So luckily in the modern business environment, most of the time people are pretty safe. And one way that you can make sure that people know that your safe is actually showing your hands. So the more items you're carrying, the more distracted you are if you're still on your phone, you walk into a room and someone can't see your hands. It actually is a little bit of a red flag people in their brain. When we can't see someone's hand, it's as if we can't see their intention. You know that cliche about hiding hands or he isn't showing me his hand, that actually has a lot of real truth. When we can't see someone's hand, we're just slightly nervous. It's like we can't see their intention. You could have a weapon. You could be a threat. Yes, exactly. So from caveman days, if we couldn't see someone's hand, we wondered are they carrying a rock or a spear? Are they going to reach out and punch us? Or are they going to reach out and handshake with us? So this other reason why I want you to be purposeful is if you are going in ready to take your first item, you're going to be hands free. Right, you're not going to still be on your phone. You're not going to be carrying a bunch of items. Hopefully you can leave them in the car if you can. That actually helps also people see you as friend, not foe. And the second thing that people are doing is they're trying to gauge are you someone they would like to get to know. And we like to get to know people who are purposeful, right? No one likes to have someone who's distracted or wandering. And so interestingly, even just having something as simple as I'm going to get my name tag or I'm going to get a warm tea because I'm cold. Even those two things give off an air of confidence that's very easy to get. Okay, super. So that's the first impression side of things. I think perhaps the most captivating piece of your table of contents for captivate was how do we become ridiculously likable? Yes. So likability is always fascinated me and I'm a recovering awkward person. It's what I joke about in the book. And I was always fascinated by the cool kids at school. Right. Like they would walk into the cafeteria and just everyone wanted to look at them and know them. And they always wondered what's going on there? They weren't necessarily more attractive or smarter or even the best athletes. So wonder if they have this quality that was kind of a secret magical charisma dust. That's kind of what I always wondered. I kind of across the study by a researcher named Van Sloan and he actually studied this. He looked at high school students across a variety of high schools looking for patterns of why the popular kids are popular. And I have a guess. I don't know if you read the study in the book yet, but you can guess what made the most popular kids popular? Vanessa Mike guess is that they were quite interested in other people. What they were interested in what they were up to and they kind of seem genuinely curious and ask follow up questions and such. Take curiosity is a very good guess, but actually what it was. And by the way, there was a number of variables in this. So it could have been GPA. It could have been athleticism. It could have been varsity athlete. It could have been attractiveness. So what he found was very clearly the students who were the most popular actually.
liked the most other people. So when they asked them how many people do you like, the most popular kids actually had the highest number of people that they liked. So what's interesting about this is that it puts you in control of how likable you are. That if you go into interactions and typically we withhold our likability and what I mean by this is we are so afraid that people won't like us. We're afraid they're going to judge us or they're not going to accept us for who we are or that we're too weird or too awkward, right? I can absolutely speak to this, feel this. And so we think, okay, I don't want to like them first, just in case they don't like me. And actually that is the thing that kills our likability the fastest. When we withhold our likability and we're assessing for longer than they are, it actually makes us even more unlikeable. And so the greatest way, the fastest way that you can become more likable is actually to work on your own ability to like faster and to like more deeply. And I was so relieved to hear that because I genuinely am a very curious person and curious, I mean, you mentioned your guess. I genuinely assume the best in people. In fact, sometimes I feel that's burned to be in the past. But I realized that carrying that fear or that history with me actually was contributing to a negative spiral, right? The more I would held my liking, the more afraid I was, the less likable I became. And so then how does one work on one's own capacity to, you know, like more and more readily? So I think this is an absolutely a mental game. And the great thing about this is you are in control of it, right? You're not going into room hoping other people like you, you're actually in control of how you do this. So the mental reframe is if you were about to introduce this person on stage, what would you have to find out about them, about how important they are, how impressive they are to be able to introduce them? That is a nice kind of mental reframe of asking questions that are searching for good. And this is something that I talk about in my TED talk about how I think that we have to assume good in people. And when you assume good, all different kinds of amazing things happen. If you assume that you're going to like someone and you're looking for reasons to like them, you ask completely different questions, especially if you like them with a purpose. So liking them with a purpose means if I had introduced this person on stage or if I had introduced this person to my boss in a second because they wanted a job working next to me, what would I have to find out about them to say that? Or if I knew I was going to about to spend a month with this person alone on a cruise ship, what would I want to know about them or find out about them to like them so that we have a nice month together? That's a very, very different kind of mindset then this person gave me my client. Should I pitch this person? Who is this person? Right? It's a very, very different kind of assumption. And I think actually our assumptions can help us. And so within that search, are there any sort of go to questions you found valuable again and again? Yeah, I actually think that first before I ask answer what works, I would love to answer what I think doesn't work. So I have found that the question, what do you do is one of the worst questions for likeability. And there's a couple reasons for this. One is that it immediately engages what what I call a social script. So the moment you ask someone what do you do? It's like you're saying to them, I'm going to stick within the norms, I'm going to stick within a comfort zone, and I'm going to ask a comfortable question. And of course, you've answered that question a million times before. So your brain immediately clicks onto autopilot and you go into the road, oh, well, I'm an author and I research human behavior. And what about that? And you actually what I found, if you listen to people and they answer this question, they actually answer it as if they're apologizing to you or as if they're reading a boring excerpt from their school textbook. Because they've said it so many times, it doesn't even interest them anymore. And the problem is that then it begins this cycle of autopilot, but goes like this. So what do you do? And where are you from? Great. Yeah. So great talking to you. I'm going to go get some more wine and have a good night. Right? Like it's the same over and over and over again. And so I would challenge you to go on and what do you do diet of never asking that question again. And the second reason why I don't like that question is because sometimes people don't like their answer to that question. If you ask someone what do you do right up front, it means or it implies that you are going to define them by what they do. And so what I found is that if people really love what they do, they will find a way to work it into the conversation without you asking. If someone doesn't mention what they do after 10 to 15 minutes of speaking with them, it means that they not only don't feel like they're defines them, but they might not even like it and not knowing that might actually allow you to discover other things about them. So when you go on that, what do you do diet? I would highly recommend other kinds of questions. So you can ask a slight variation of that question, which is still comfortable, which is working on anything exciting these days. So the reason why that one is really nice is it's still comfortable. It's not like too crazy. It's not like what's your biggest worry? You know, like that that can be a little deep. And it allows someone to say, oh, you know, I'm learning to garden or if someone isn't working, if they don't have a traditional job, they can say, oh, you know, my daughter's starting kindergarten next month. So it's a way of opening up the conversation to let them talk about something positive. And this is something I really truly believe in and interacting for good. Is it also assumes good? If you ask someone, are you working on anything exciting recently? It asks their brain to search for anything in their life that's exciting, which is a wonderful experience mentally, right? If you're thinking about, by parking and the weather and the food and this networking event and gotta work on that project, have so many emails, have a long to do list. That's just mental trap after mental trap. But if someone invites you to talk about anything you're excited about, that could be a vacation you have coming up, that could be a side hustle, that could be a work project. It's a much more pleasant mental experience. And in that way, I feel like it's giving a gift to the people we're interacting with. I'm thinking now in advance, as I'm headed to the podcast movement conference, and I am thinking about there's lots of times I'll just be meeting all these people in different contexts. But if you are interacting positively and searching for something good and exciting, whether there's all sorts of safe yet also positive openers like, oh, what's the best thing you've seen so far? What are you really looking forward to to going to or did you hear anything that's surprising? And then we're all the events that's kind of what's on our minds. And so they're going to share, oh yeah, I heard this really cool speaker who mentioned this, I had no idea that that even existed. And then there we go. Right. And so by the way, you just did it exactly. Any variation of that question is exactly what you want to do. So maybe it's, are you working on anything exciting recently or coming up? It could also be, did you hear anything exciting from the speaker? It could be, hey, do you have any exciting episodes coming up? It could be, you know, is this an exciting season for you? Whatever it is, you can do a variation of that for wherever you're from. The whole point is to ask someone to look for good. And that totally changes the dynamic for your interaction. And it also helps them give you reasons they are likable. Lovely. Well, so I also want to get your take on, you mentioned there are seven universal, you like universals, facial expressions. I'm curious, what are they and how could they help us? Yeah, this is actually the science that hooked me in the very beginning of my career. So when I read this research, I was absolutely flabbergasted that it wasn't taught in schools. I mean, I was like, how was I not taught this? How does not everyone know this? It's such applicable, easy science. So the research is done by Dr. Paul Eckman and Dr. Paul Eckman, I don't know if you've seen the show lie to me. It's a great show and Netflix if anyone wants to go watch it, which is based on his research. And he's a researcher who discovered that facial expressions are universal. And this was a really big surprise in the research community. It used to believe that they believed that babies were that they learned facial expressions that a baby was born and looked at his mother or father's face and then mirrored it or minicked it. But actually what he found is that can generally blind babies babies who've been blind since birth show the same facial expressions as seeing children at the same time. Meaning there's something in eight. There's something coded in our DNA that causes us to make these faces. And so Dr. Eckman discovered seven universal expressions. They are happiness, my favorite of course, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, anger, and surprise. When I learn these, whenever I teach this, I teach us in our online course, I warn all my students, this is a blessing and a curse. Once you learn these facial expressions, you will never be able to unlearn them. And it's kind of like someone just switched your television set to HD, high definition, all of a sudden you're seeing things you never noticed before. And those can sometimes be uncomfortable truths. But I would always rather live in real truth than ignorant bliss. And can you contrast for me, disgust versus contempt and say what they look like? Yeah, I mean, it's a little hard on audio. I have a whole free guide. You're welcome to look out on my website. It's science people.com/face. And you can see them in video and in action. But you can try this with me as you're listening. So you asked for disgust and contempt for those the two. Okay, so contempt is a one-sided mouth raise. So if you just raise one side of your mouth, it's the simplest micro expression. It kind of looks like a smirk. So if you try that with me, just one-sided mouth raise, it'll kind of begin to feel a little better than a little like smug, a little scornful. It's actually a very negative micro expression. Whereas disgust, think of smelling something bad. So, crinkle your nose up and flash the upper whites of your teeth. So, like,
"Uh, that face you make, your lip is pulled up as high as possible. That is the face we make where we are discussed by something." And by the way, it's not just smelling something bad or tasting something bad. We make that face if we hear something we don't like to. All right. And so then when you have it switched on HD like that, you can suddenly see everyone's reactions to stuff, like even your own stuff, like what I'm doing, disgusts you, or is that with contempt? Yeah, and I think it's what's really important is I like to think of it as like reading between the lines. So oftentimes I give a couple of examples of my book of scenes or reality television shows where there's a scene that plays. And if you just look at the verbal, it seems like everything's fine. One of my favorite examples, I'm obsessed with the Bachelorette, the Bachelorette of Bachelorette. I joke with my husband that I watch them for work. That's how I'm able to get the TV from him, of course. And by always, I play a Bachelorette fantasy league and I always win every year because if you look behind the words, you'll see the real emotions there. So in one of the examples I give is she says, yeah, I love that you did that. Everything's great. That sounds like it's going to be really fun. But she actually shows a flash of contempt. She shakes her head no and then she flashes sadness at him and sure enough he ends up going home. And on the verbal on the surface, people think, oh, yeah, she liked that. And if you actually know what to look for, you can see, he had an opportunity that moment. He had an opportunity to see those emotions and then address them. So instead of taking just the words, he could have said, you know, let me explain more about it. Let me talk to you at what I do. Are you okay with that? How are you feeling with that? He had an opportunity to dig deeper and possibly I think address it and then he may be co-stayed. And so when they're always saying, I feel like Vanessa and I have a real connection. Yeah. You can see if they really mean that or they don't mean that. And that's how you come out on top. Exactly. Exactly. It seems like you've been watching the Bachelor. Just a little. Gotcha. I got to go a long way for me. Sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. That's what my husband says. And I only watch it in the background. Okay. He's also grabbing a glass of wine with me on Monday night. So okay. All right. Well, we're in our final few minutes. So I want to hear a couple of your favorite things. Could you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring? Yeah. So I have a quote that I have on my computer. I read it every day and it says, "May anyone who comes into contact with me, whether they hear about me or they see me or they think about me experience a benefit and happiness?" Hmm. Lovely. Thank you. And how about a favorite book? Oh, man. I'm going to say the book that kind of changed my life was, "Why men don't listen and why women can't read maps." It's by Barbara Nallan Pee's couple. It was the first self-development book I ever read. It was on my mom's nightstand when I was teenager and I looked at it and I wondered why she was reading it and I kind of snuck the book, read it without her knowing. And it was the first self-help book I had ever read. And it was the first time I ever realized there were scientific differences between the genders. And therefore there could be other scientific differences between people. And I remember reading that book and understanding my dad better, and understanding my brother better, understanding my crush better, and just feeling so empowered with the knowledge. And it made me get into self-help. Maybe you want to write a self-help book. Oh, that's cool. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more, get in touch with you, I would point them. But with me, oh, I would love to get in touch.
[email protected] is where everything is. We have all my YouTube channels and my research, my YouTube channel, my research. And of course, captivate is wherever books are sold. And you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs? Yeah. The most important thing you can do is assume the best. And I don't just mean in others. And that's great too. Assume that people are likable. Assume that they're interesting. But also assume the best for yourself. There's a very, very powerful scientific principle called the expectancy effect, which is that what you expect is more likely to happen. So if you expect to be good at something, you're more likely to be good at it. If you expect something to go well, it's more likely to then go well. And so I know that it's very common to say, no, no expectations, go on, no expectations or even worse, go on with low expectations. So I don't get disappointed. And I know that we're afraid of being disappointed or disliked. But if you assume that you're going to be liked and if you assume the best, I'm then actually sets you up for greater success. And it's also set up this nice idea of sweet anticipation that sometimes hoping is a great exercise in itself. Well, Vanessa, thanks so much for sharing this good stuff. And I wish you all the best of luck and all the ways you're captivating folks. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Vanessa's take on those conversations they have in the small talks zone and how you're so much better off not saying so what do you do, where you from, et cetera. And I just got back from podcast movement, which was such a blast, nearly 3,000 podcasters assembled in Orlando. A good times. And you're going to meet some of them. So while I was chatting with these folks, occasionally we did drift into that territory where a folks started to ask me, also, what do you do, where you from? And I noticed immediately, hey, I'm kind of bored. This is not a fun. And I'm not enjoying this person's company in the conversation nearly as much if they were to instead ask me things such as, oh, hey, so what was the most interesting thing you learned so far? Or, hey, so what are some of your favorite podcasts or whatever, some of your best episodes ever? You know, it's always like, oh, yeah, I'll tell you about those. And I'll smile and be excited to tell you about my recent discoveries, you know, from a session or from someone I just talked to or some of my favorite moments in podcasting. So yeah, it really does light up the conversation when you search for that good stuff. So thanks, Vanessa for that good stuff, the show notes, the transcript, the links to items we've referenced are at
[email protected]/f480. If you haven't already, I hope you'll push subscribe. If you do, you'll catch our next guest. It's Drew Tarvan. He's talking about humor at work or more broadly, just how to have more fun at work and have more enjoyable experience. So I hope to catch you then. And if you are just in desperate need of us, something good to listen to prior to that, I would recommend you check out the modern manager with Mamie Can for Stuart. Maybe was on our show back in episode 321 in which we discussed meetings and how to make them all the more effective and all the less time-wasters. And then I was on her show back on episode 40 there. And what I really like about Mamie's podcast is that she really puts the time and effort into finding great people, great content that's really applicable for y'all if you're doing some managing or just about to start doing some managing. She brings the goods and she goes the extra mile with regard to finding little bonus resources and follow-ups for you to make the most out of each conversation. And she's pretty serious about her audio quality as well. I enjoyed seeing the software platform she was using and how she upleveled my game a little bit with her inspiration. So anyway, maybe Can for Stuart, the modern manager is a good show to listen to if you just can't wait a couple of days until our next episode or even listen to them concurrently. So anyway, that's what I got. Hope to catch you next time. Peace. Thanks for listening. To get the most out of the show, we recommend two key things. First, check out the extra resources at awesometyourjob.com. You can find this episode's transcript and links as well as the perfect episode for your situation. You can search the full-text transcripts of hundreds of episodes or explore episodes tagged by topic and competency covered. Second, subscribe to the podcast and get future episodes automatically. You can subscribe by telling Siri and several other smartphones and speakers. Subscribe to the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast or by tapping subscribe in your podcast player of choice. If you'd like some extra help figuring out podcasts and how subscriptions work, visit awesometyourjob.com/subscribe for guidance. Hope to catch you on the next episode of How to Be Awesome at Your Job.
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