How to Read the Room, and Why You Should

0:00Good morning, I'm Michael Covnet and this is the next big idea daily. Your quick dose of the best new nonfiction from some of the smartest authors around. Now what does it mean to read the room? It refers to the ability to accurately size up the dynamics in any social or professional setting, the ability to interpret the power relationships, the emotional needs, the nonverbal signals of any group of people you find yourself in. It's a complex skill, but it is a learnable one according to Pamela Meyer. Pamela is a certified fraud examiner and the founder and CEO of Calibrate, a firm which trains businesses on fraud detection. Her viral TED Talk How to Spot a Liar has more than 30 million views. Pamela's new book is How to Read the Room, the Art and Science of Social Observation. And she'll join us with some of her big ideas in just a moment. Then later in the show, best selling author and behavior researcher Vanessa Van Edwards

1:04will decode the signals that shape charisma, trust and credibility with ideas from her 2022 book, Q's. Master the secret language of charismatic communication. How to read the room right after these ads. Hi, I'm Pamela Meyer. I've been studying human behavior for decades. I train executives, I train institutional leaders, and I train everyday people in getting to the truth, spotting lies and reading the room. My newest book How to Read the Room is about the Art and Science of Social Observation. Insight number one, the more consequential the room, the worse we are at reading it. All right, now you'd probably expect the opposite. You'd think that when the stakes climb, so does your attention. If you're a motion, the investor who can write that check that saves your company, I bet you think those are the rooms that you read the most carefully.

2:04But in fact, they're the rooms you read the worst. The moment a situation really matters to you, your body actually treats it as a threat. Your heart rate climbs, adrenaline moves, an attention which felt wide and easy just a minute ago, all of a sudden pulls into a tunnel. Ecologists have known this since the 50s when James Easterbrook showed that a rousal shrinks the range of cues someone can take in. When we're under pressure, we get sharper at seeing the one thing that we're braced for and we get blind to everything else around it. Now, that's a problem. In a busy room, we're small, but very crucial signals can be missed. Usually what gives the room away are the little things that leak around the edges. The board member who stopped taking notes, the client who laughed to half second late and then smirked. On top of that, if you put people under acute social stress, what happens is they stop shifting their attention flexibly from one cue to another. The fast automatic read still fires, but that slower judgment.

3:05The part that weighs nuance just drops out. You start running on first impressions of the exact moment when your first impression is likely to be wrong. And it gets even worse. That pressure and self-consciousness you feel doesn't make you feel impaired. It makes you feel very certain. So the people furthest from an accurate read are often the most confident that they nailed it. And that confidence climbs as observational accuracy fails. So the high stakes room hands you two problems all at once. It shrinks what you can see and it convinces you that you saw everything. The thing is that none of us feel biased in these moments. We actually feel focused. That's how we trick ourselves. That sensation of being very locked in and dialed up and fully present is very, very close to the sensation of your field of view collapsing. So what do you do with a system that betrays you precisely when you need it most? Well, you need to bring your own temperature down before you walk in. The photographer, Dorothy O'Lange, had a brilliant view on this dilemma.

4:08She said that when she was working well, she would annihilate herself. The nervous question, how am I coming across? Would Kana go silent? What would be left is a room for the actual person in front of her to photograph. So she did the inner work first, so she could essentially annihilate and forget herself in the moment and take everything else in. So before your next consequential high stakes room, try these three things. One, treat room reading as a meditative practice, something you kind of settle into before you walk in. The way you'd steady yourself for anything that requires your full attention. Make it your job, and this is really important to put everyone else at ease. Worry about their comfort. When you do that, there's no attention left over for your own self-monitoring. The self-focus that was shrinking revision will all of a sudden disappear. And then finally, do the hard work ahead of time. Do the deep work. Name the fear underneath the meeting. You scared you're going to look competent or you scared? They're going to ask you why you switched jobs four times in four years? Are you worried they're going to think you look fat?

5:09To say it to yourself plainly and script will loosen. Do that and the tunnel opens back up. You stop guarding your own performance and you start down the path of true social observation. The stakes are still going to be high, but you've just stopped letting them distort your view. Insight number two. The highest performing professionals almost never improvise their understanding of people. One of the great misconceptions about reading people is that it's a spontaneous act. We imagine the master negotiator, the fabulous interviewer, the legendary diplomat, waltzing into a room and simply kind of having extraordinary instincts. They read faces, they trust their gut, they size people up in minutes, but it turns out that history suggests something much, much different. For more than 80 years, psychological profiling has been one of the quiet advantages of intelligence agencies. During the Second World War, the OSS commissioned Harvard psychoanalyst Walter Langer to build

6:11a pretty extensive psychological profile of Hitler. Decades later before the camp, David Accords, President Jimmy Carter relied on psychological profiles also this time of Monoccan Began and Ann Marce-Dotte. The purpose wasn't curiosity, it was prediction. Carter wanted to understand how each man interpreted risks, status, conflict, trust, and most importantly concession before either one of them entered the room. We see this same principle in criminal investigations, hostage negotiations, executive recruiting, even elite sales organizations, the highest performing professionals rarely walk in the room cold. They arrive with a working hypothesis about the person sitting across from them. Turns out, everybody has a pattern and the pattern isn't random, it's built over decades. Some who spent a childhood moving from school to school often learns to study the unwritten rules of a group before speaking. That was a formative experience for them and formative experiences tell us so much. A leader raised in a boom and bust household may well hear financial risks before anyone

7:16else in the room does, knowing that about them helps to understand them. Experience teaches people what to notice, what to ignore, who to trust, and what danger looks like. That's why I developed a triple beam method, it's called background behavior and believes it's three bees and it's how we profile people to look for recurring patterns and how they behave. The goal is to put people in boxes to ask them better questions and really deeply understand them. If I know you immigrated as a teenager to this country, I may ask about adaptation instead of achievement. If I know your company nearly failed ten years ago, I understand why your cost is about expansion. If I know about a teacher that changed your life, I have a much better chance of understanding why you invest so much energy and mentoring. When you do this, when you try to get at people's beliefs, what they deeply believe which doesn't change over time, when you observe their behavior carefully, when you understand their background deeply, they get so much more interesting to you. They come understandable and that is a tremendous advantage because behavior that once may have

8:18seemed irrational all of a sudden begins to look predictable. Reading the room doesn't begin when the meeting starts. By then, the professionals, the top professionals have already done their homework. Insight 3. A full mind cannot read a room. You might know the old joke among lawyers that a case comes down to what the judge ate for breakfast. And in 2011, researchers actually tested this. They tracked more than a thousand parole decisions and the joke turned out to be somewhat close to true. Next thing in the morning, judges granted parole about 65% of the time. And then as the hours ground on, that number slid and slid until it hit almost zero. Then the judge took a break, had a snack, came back, and the rate popped right back up. Same crime, same files, same season judge. The thing swinging a human beings' freedom seemed to be the judge's blood sugar. And the judge had no idea it was happening.

9:18Now that famous study has taken some fair criticism. Researchers have pointed out that cases weren't random and lawyers with weaker cases sometimes went last, which could explain part of the slide fine. But the deeper idea underneath it has held up. A depleted brain makes worse calls than a fresh one and it rarely sees the difference. A tired overloaded brain stops heavy cognitive processing and grabs the near short cut. They can revert to stereotypes and snap judgments which require much less mental effort. The careful generous, this person is much more complicated than they look, read of someone actually costs mental energy. And fatigue is only half of it. The effect is weirdly physical too. Give people a bitter drink and they judge others more harshly. Sit them in a hard chair and they turn stiffer in a negotiation. Hand them a heavy clipboard and every decision all of a sudden feel serious to them. Your body feeds signals into your judgment all day and you experience it simply as a hunch.

10:24So now put yourself in that room, five meetings deep, no lunch, phone buzzing in your pocket. You're the judge, it's 1145. Walk in that way and the person holding back or looking down will read to you as hostile. The nervous one will look shifty. Anybody with real complexity may well get flattened into a type. We severely underestimate the role that cognitive load plays in how we misread rooms. So before you enter a room that actually matters, do the unglamorous thing eat something. Clear the small decisions and unfinished business off your plate beforehand so you're not replaying them in your mind. Because the sharpest thing you can bring to a hard interaction is a mind with a little bit of room left in it. One side four, much of what we know about reading body language is wrong. Leaping to conclusion is for louts. That's what I tell my students with body language in particular. It's what everybody does. We see crossed arms and we assume defensiveness.

11:25We see averted eyes and we think deception. We treat gestures like they carry fixed meanings, but they don't. A gesture only becomes useful when you know three things. It's normal for that person, their baseline, where there are several cues are changing altogether at the same time. We call that a cluster and what's happening around them, the context that informs the situation. This is why experts begin with what we call the baseline. They learn how someone usually speaks moves, gestures makes eye contact and without that reference point for measuring changes later, behavior is very easy to misread. It looks anxious in one person, maybe entirely ordinary in another. If someone just starts tapping their foot, maybe they're just a foot tap or maybe they're not anxious, maybe that's their norm. Then the experts look for clusters. One cue, very weak evidence. Several changes appearing at once and all pointing in the same direction. Now that deserves attention. A faster voice, a tighten posture, a sudden shift in gaze can mean much more together

12:28than any one of them does alone. And even then, the experts never declare verdict. They simply hold a working hypothesis. Cross-darms may mean resistance. They may also mean cold, concentration, habit, someone's in pain. The surrounding context determines which explanation fits. The myth that liars avoid eye contact shows how badly fixed rules can fail us. In a survey spanning 58 countries, 72% of people associated gaze aversion with deception. Yet in an airport study, the liars held eye contact longer. They're overcompensating for the myth they knew it honestly was supposed to look like and they kind of performed it. The real skill is not memorizing more tells. That's not how you become a master body language interpreter. It's really learning how little a tell means by itself and focusing on clusters, on someone's baseline and on the context around them.

13:29Insight number five, AI will commoditize social signals. Human judgment is going to become a really scarce resource. AI is excellent at extracting signals from what it's already captured. Words, faces, messages, calendars, transcripts. But it turns out that rooms are really messy. They're full of signals that never arrive in clean form. A pause, for example, might signal caution. It might mean anger. It might mean confusion. It might mean deference. It might even mean just someone's being strategic. A smile may mean agreement, but it also may mean containment. Silence might mean consensus, but it also may be there for reasons of fear or calculation or maybe everyone's just tired. AI can label the signal. It is far less reliable at judging what the signal costs the person sending it. What power relationship may have shaped it or what history sits behind it. It doesn't know context. That's the human advantage.

14:29The machine can tell you that someone stops speaking, but the perceptive leader asks why they stopped. The perceptive leader asks whether speaking was so risky that it caused somebody to become silent and why that happened. The perceptive leader asks what actually happened last week that made silence the safer choice. This distinction really matters because automated summaries can create the illusion of social knowledge. A meeting report might tell you who spoke the most where the sentiment fell, which topics produced disagreement, but it's still going to miss the most consequential fact in the room, which is that no one challenged the chief executive because everyone had learned what dissent costs. The more automated our summaries become, the more valuable it is to have a leader who's going to ask over and over again, what did the room actually tell us? Reading the room becomes more important in the AI era because social signals are going to become cheap and plentiful. Human judgment about meaning, power, history, and consequence will still remain scarce.

15:36Thank you so much. I'm so glad you joined me for these five insights. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about the book. Thank you, Pamela. Okay, we're going to take a break. And then Vanessa Van Edwards will share ideas from cues. Master the secret language of charismatic communication. Hi, my name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I'm a behavioral investigator and bestselling author. I am also a recovering awkward person. So I wrote cues, master the secret language of charismatic communication, teach anyone how they can cultivate authentic confidence. I'm going to share with you five of the big ideas for my book. The first big idea is that highly charismatic people use specific signals called cues to communicate with the world.

16:37My research actually started with this 17 years ago when I noticed that highly charismatic people. It didn't matter if they were athletes, politicians, celebrities, or even business leaders. They all used the same set of cues. Cues are the social signals human send to each other. We are constantly communicating with these cues, almost like a hidden language that is being spoken all around us. I identified 96 specific cues that highly charismatic people use. I also noticed that there were specific cues used by not so charismatic people. Duping athletes, lying politicians, business leaders in trouble. These folks in shame and guilt and fear also showed strikingly similar cues. I remember watching a specific interview on Larry King Live where Lance Armstrong insisted he wasn't doping in 2005. It after he told a big wapper that he never doked.

17:40He showed a specific cue called a lip purse. I wondered what was that? A lip purse, as you will learn in the book, is a cue of withholding or being tight-lipped. Once I learned this cue, I started seeing it everywhere. This made me wonder if there was a way to code or catalog all of our cues into a usable glossary that we could all use. The answer is yes. Learning cues is like finally being able to speak the foreign language that's being spoken all around you. Cues unlock our communication. Every single cue you add to your toolbox makes it easier to communicate and signal to the world. The second big idea is that these charisma cues can be cultivated. I used to believe that charisma was an innate trait. You were either born with it or not. But luckily, research shows that charisma can absolutely be learned, and you don't have

18:41to be an extrovert to be charismatic. In fact, there are different flavors of charisma. So there is the bubbly extrovert, life of the party charisma, but there's also the quiet contemplative introvert type of charisma, or the compassionate empathetic healer type. The key and my goal with this book is to help each person find and identify your unique flavor of charisma and then signal with the right cues. The third big idea is that our cues are contagious. There was one study that completely changed my mind about cues. It was very simple. Researchers found that when participants spotted a cue of social rejection, a cue of social rejection could be an eye roll or a scoff or a dismissive tone of voice. Yeah, great idea. The moment participants spotted that cue of social rejection, their own field of vision increased.

19:41In other words, when we feel that our social survival is threatened, our eyes change so we can see more of our environment. We can see potential escape routes, see if anyone else is sending us a cue of social rejection and decide what to do next. In this way, cues create cycles. We spot a cue, it changes our physiology, and we change our cues back to the world. We have to be aware of the cues we send and receive because they're triggering all kinds of both positive and negative loops. Charisbatic people are positively contagious. They show up as their best most confident self, and this infects others to be their best most confident selves. In this way, learning to use charisma cues is not just good for you and people's perceptions of your charisma, but it's also good for others charisma. The fourth big idea is that there are four different channels of cues.

20:42First, nonverbal. Our body language, posture, gestures, and facial expressions all signal things to the world. Second, vocal. Our volume, pace, cadence, the way we say our words shapes how people perceive them. Third, of course, verbal. The words we use and the syntax we use. And lastly, imagery. This is the colors we wear, the ornaments we use, the props we hold in our profile pictures, hats behind us in our video calls, even our fonts have personality. Charisbatic people are aligned. They are congruent with all four channels of cues. For example, I might say the words, I'm fine, but if I change to a negative vocal tone, I'm fine. You know I am definitely not fine. Charisbatic people are often called authentic because they align. All their channels of cues match.

21:43The biggest mistake smart people make is they focus on one channel, words. They have the best idea or the perfect pitch or script, but they forget about the delivery. The best idea in the world can't be heard if it does not have the right cues. I like to use this metaphor. If your idea is a car, the cues are the gas. We need cues to move our ideas and get them to the right places. The fifth big idea is that there is a formula for charismatic cues. Research out of Princeton University found that highly charismatic people rank high in two specific traits, warmth and competence. This formula is a powerful blueprint for every interaction. And it can completely change the way you communicate if you know how to use it. According to the research, warmth and competence cues account for 82% of our impression of

22:47others, 82%. Highly charismatic people consistently signal trust and credibility. We see them as friendly and smart, impressive and collaborative. Here's the problem. Most of us have an imbalance between these two traits. If you are highly warm, you have a strong desire to be liked. This can be good. You strive to be friendly and personable, but it can also be challenging. Highly warm folks are often people pleasers and struggle to say no and set boundaries. Your desire to be liked can get in the way of your need to be respected. You might be seen as trustworthy but not always powerful, compassionate but not always competent, friendly but not always impressive. If this is you, you likely have good relationships with your colleagues, but you may find it hard to pitch yourself or your ideas.

23:50You might even get interrupted in meetings or feel underappreciated for all the hard work you do. In social or casual settings, people enjoy talking to you, but might not always ask for your business card. On the other hand, if you are highly competent, you have a strong desire to be seen as capable and impressive. People take you and your ideas seriously, but you might have a harder time building rapport. You could be seen as smart but not always approachable, dependable but not always collaborative, important but not always kind. People might even be intimidated by you. They may tell you that you're hard to talk to or come across as cold. In business settings, this can be a double edged sword. You're taken seriously as a leader, but you might have a harder time working with teams. Clients, customers or colleagues may find you credible, but might not feel comfortable

24:51telling you all their needs. Richard Susan Fisk found that competence without warmth is likely to leave us feeling suspicious. In social settings, this means your option perceived as important, but it might take you longer to build deeper connections and make friends. In the book, I'll help you identify if you're higher in warmth or competence, or if you hit that sweet spot, balance of both. The last option is if you don't show enough cues at all. The other big problem that we make in professional settings is we under-signal or don't use enough cues. If you don't send enough warmth or competence cues, it's hard for people to take you seriously. My mission with this book is to help you hit the perfect balance of warmth and competence with your cues, so you're both respected and admired. I'll teach you which cues are warm, which cues are competent, and those rare

25:52few that are a blend of both. And lastly, we will review which of the cues are negative. I call these Danger Zone cues. They are the cues we should avoid showing ourselves and be on the lookout if we see them from others. I can't wait for you to learn all 96 cues and put them into action in your own life. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy the book.