How to Read a Room Like a Pro & The Surprising Truth About Self-Esteem

Something You Should Know

This episode explores the science behind everyday phenomena, ranging from the physics of polarized sunglasses to the chemistry of aging book

Key takeaways

• Rotating a phone 90 degrees can resolve screen blackouts caused by polarized filters in sunglasses.
• Effective 'reading the room' requires observing micro-signals, body language, and shifts from an established baseline.

Main topics

• Polarized lenses and LCD screens
• Social observation techniques

Notable quotes

If you can read the room, it's going to be fascinating for you because you're going to start to see things no one else sees.

Conclusion

The episode provides actionable psychological and scientific insights

Transcript preview

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Use code S-Y-S-K at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code S-Y-S-K. Speaker 4 (1:22) Today on Something You Should Know, ever try to see your phone screen while you're wearing sunglasses and the screen turns black? I'll explain how to fix that. Then the real benefits of being able to read the room. Speaker 1 (1:37) When you can read the room and you can actually start to see what people's intentions are, what they meant, where the secret alliances might be. If you can read the room, it's going to be fascinating for you because you're going to start to see things no one else sees. Speaker 4 (1:49) Also, ever notice that smell in a used bookstore or library? What is that? And a top expert on self-esteem offers some fascinating insight into how it works. Speaker 2 (2:01) So as I'm researching self-esteem, I find this peculiar thing, which is that people with low self-esteem reject the very things that should make them feel good about themselves. They deflect compliments. Positive feedback raises their blood pressure. When they have a spouse that likes them too much, they're less intimate with that spouse. Speaker 4 (2:17) All this today on Something You Should Know. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted. Listing is quick and simple. And when an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And importantly, there are no seller fees on Vinted. So when you sell something, you keep everything you earn. I like this whole idea because instead of clothes just taking up space, Somebody else gets to wear them and you get some money out of the deal. Your closet looks better too. I mean, everybody wins, even the closet. So maybe it's time to stop waiting for someday. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees so you keep everything you earn. Speaker 3 (3:38) Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Speaker 4 (3:51) So I bet this has happened to you. You're wearing sunglasses and you go to look at your phone and the screen suddenly goes really dark or disappears completely. Well, this episode starts with an explanation of why that happens and how to fix it. Hello there. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So if you're out in the sun wearing your sunglasses and you need to look at your phone, you often have to take your sunglasses off because your screen... through your glasses looks very dark. The reason for that is both your sunglasses and your phone's LCD screen use polarizing filters. Hold them at certain angles and those two filters essentially work against each other, blocking the light that's coming from your phone's screen. But here's the useful part. Turn your phone 90 degrees. As you rotate it, the screen should suddenly become visible again. because you've changed the angle of one polarizing filter relative to the other. It's also an easy way to find out whether your sunglasses really are polarized. Look at any LCD screen through them and slowly rotate the glasses. If the screen noticeably darkens and brightens, you've got polarized lenses. If they don't, you don't. And that is something you should know. Speaker 4 (5:16) Wouldn't it be great if you could walk into a meeting or a party or just about any gathering and quickly size up the room? Who are the real players? Who actually has influence? Who trusts whom? And who's uncomfortable? And what are people communicating without ever saying a word? Some people seem naturally good at reading a room, but apparently it's a skill the rest of us can get a lot better at. There are signals and clues most of us simply don't notice, and learning to spot them can tell you a lot about what's really going on between people. Pamela Meyer is an expert in deception and human behavior and a certified fraud examiner. She's founder and CEO of Calibrate, which trains organizations in fraud detection, threat mitigation, and security. Her new book is How to Read the Room. The Art and Science of Social Observation. Hey, Pamela, welcome to Something You Should Know. Speaker 1 (6:17) Hi, great to be here. Speaker 4 (6:19) Well, this is information I think everybody would like to know. Because, see, I think I'm pretty good at reading a room. But I think, well, maybe I am. But then I think, well, maybe I just make up stories about people in my head. But that I don't really, I'm not really reading them. I'm just imagining them. But I wish I could do that better. And what does that mean when you read a room? Speaker 1 (6:42) Well, first of all, when you do make up stories in your head like you said you do, we all do that. And technically what we're doing when that happens is we're overlaying a narrative without looking carefully. This is what we all do. We think we know what's happening, so we create the story, but we miss all the micro signals. And when you read the room, you actually look much, much more closely because reading the room is the ability to walk in. to any room really, and know who has the power, who's checked out, what's not being said. It's part social observation and it's part emotional intelligence. It's rooted in both. And the reason we've lost it, you know, we really don't have this ability today, is because our culture has become one that just rewards talking instead of observation. Speaker 4 (7:28) Explain that. What do you mean we reward talking? Speaker 1 (7:32) Well, you know, we're a social media culture. And so people are out there industrializing attention and jumping up and down and trying to get as many likes and as many views as they can. And so there's a, I call it the blah, blah, blah culture. And so everyone walks in the room wondering what they should say, preparing what they should say, having summaries from ChatGPT about what they should say. But that's not actually what gives you the edge. What gives you the edge is pausing, careful observation. Noticing not just who's in the room, but who's not in the room, not just what was said, but what's not been said. And when we do that, it's actually a skill that's pretty easy to learn. When we do that, we actually see things that we've never seen before. Speaker 4 (8:11) So when you walk into a room and you say you observe things, what are the things that you, when you immediately walk into a room, what do you start looking at and looking for? Speaker 1 (8:22) So when you walk in the room, the first thing you can do is pause. and just soft focus on the room and read the vibe. You know, is it positive? Is it negative? It is ambivalent. Is it flat? Pause and just take note. You know, is everyone unusually upbeat in a meeting about a kind of troubled project? All right, what is that? That's ambivalent, right? That's a performative mood. Is there something people are worried about that hasn't been surfaced? You'll feel that in the vibe. And just like, you know, you've probably heard many people who are psychologists tell you you can't really know an emotion if you can't name it. It's the same thing with the vibe. And what are some good vibe names? Positive vibe, negative vibe, flat vibe. The most common and the one that... we're used to that we don't really note carefully as an ambivalent vibe which is very common and not necessarily negative. Sometimes there's an ambivalent vibe just because you have lots of different personality types in the room with different agendas. But when you note that it's ambivalent then you can start to dissect where that comes from. Speaker 4 (9:26) Yeah, so what do you do with that? Yeah, what do you do when you've identified the vibe? What does that do for you? Speaker 1 (9:34) That's a first step. I mean, you walk in, you identify the vibe, then you need to look much more closely about the bodies. Where are people leaning? Where's their posture? Who's leaning in? Who chose which chair? Who's sitting next to each other? Who's smirking? Who's smirking back? Who suddenly went still? So you're looking when you first walk in for a vibe and a baseline, but then when you look more deeply, you're watching bodies and you're listening to language and trying to find a shift from that baseline. Speaker 4 (10:03) But what do you read into that? What do you read into the smirker or the leaner? I mean, what does that tell you? Speaker 1 (10:09) Well, so that's the interesting question. Oftentimes, we are really quick to judge that. But in fact, if you've prepared well to read the room, and you've really thought through who's in the room, done some profiling, understand something about people, thought through what their agenda is. then you can start to say, oh, okay, that's why they smirked. I know that Joe actually doesn't have the budget he says he has. So when everyone's asking him for money, he's rolling his eyes or he's smirking because he's contemptuous because he's supposed to have the budget he doesn't have. So if you go in and you're prepared, you start to understand the signals very differently. Speaker 4 (10:49) Is it different in a business meeting versus a party, a social situation? Speaker 1 (10:56) It is different. You can still prepare for both. So, for example, if you're going to a party, you're not necessarily going to figure out, you know, who's got a master's from Cambridge and who doesn't. But you may want to know, like, for example, I know you and I share the same dog name. I know you had a dog named Taffy years ago, which we had. My cousins had a dog named Taffy. You know, I've done my research. You should know a few things about somebody, right? Speaker 1 (11:22) so you can kind of connect with them. So when you walk into a room that's a party, you know, you want to think through kind of where's the action and, you know, if you're an introvert or an extrovert, where you might want to stand, how you might want to connect with people, what's going on from a much more kind of jovial or perhaps romantic perspective. Speaker 4 (11:44) So what else do you know about me? Speaker 1 (11:48) Well, you know, before you walk in a room, We teach people to profile, right? We should know something about your behavior, about your background, and about your beliefs, because that kind of prep really helps us understand and predict. So I know a few things about you, because I wouldn't walk into the room and waste your time, right? I know that you were part of the Back to the Future attraction, that your wonderful voice was part of that many years ago. I know you were in a band when you were a teenager. Wow. Speaker 4 (12:19) You've done your homework.