301. Trust at First Sight: Create More Meaningful Connections

Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - Matt Abrahams, Think Fast Talk Smart

Matt Abrahams interviews Vanessa Van Edwards on nonverbal communication, presence, and building meaningful connections through strategic messaging and body language.

Key takeaways

• Gestures aligning with words boost speaker confidence and listener comprehension.
• Over- and under-signaling can hinder connection; awareness improves presence.
• Language choices like 'meeting' or 'checking in' create autopilot responses and reduce impact.

Transcript preview

The most effective communication is the communication that removes friction. My name is 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, increased likeability and confidence in navigate both digital and in-person interactions. Vanessa has written two best-selling books, Captivate, The Science of Succeeding with People, and Queues, Master the Secret Language of Kerosmatic Communication. I have been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Shall we get started? Let's dive in. So you focus on communication among many other things. Why is strategic communication so important? I think of communication as the number one way to remove friction. You know, 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. I love this idea of strategic communication is 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 appreciate you sharing that. 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? 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 gestures so much. So for example, as I'm speaking, if I were to say to you, I have three big ideas, but hold up the number five. It's confusing. My mouth really, really, really wanted to say five, really bad, because I was holding on 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, I'm capable, I know my stuff. So that, so that, so that you as a speaker and Dr. Susan Goldwyn 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 could listen to your words, I can hear tone, but also I'm looking for visual cues 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 word. 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 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. 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 perhaps, 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. 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 penguin'ing, which is when you press your arms tightly to your side and you just have your arms angling pivoting pivoting out. Right. So it's not just it's not just 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, it's also good. No penguin'ing. I love the idea of penguin'ing where the elbows are glued to the body and we don't want to do that. In fact, when I coach people, I'll say, imagine a ping-pong ball or an egg in your armpic, and that, and that 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. I love it I'm gonna try this. Vanessa can you tell me what you mean by over and signaling in our non-verbal communication? So when you're very nervous, you either go into freeze, which means you under signal. You shut down the face. So anyone, any of my students who are 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