In this episode, I unpack the lessons from “Cues“, by Vanessa Van Edwards.
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Full Transcript:
This is a book called Cues from Vanessa Van Edwards. it’s a great book. The idea behind cues is basically, it’s all the little things that people do, both verbally and non-verbally, that make people more interested in you or less interested, that kind of thing, as you interact with them. Talking to another friend about it, we both don’t like that idea in theory. It should be very much like, yourself, which is true. The book doesn’t advise you to not be yourself, but rather to not do silly things that can make you look untrustworthy or uncaring
those sorts of things. So there’s a bunch of different cues they talk about and I’ll kind of get into those a little bit but the two main areas she talks about are warmth and competence and I think as she gets into some of these quotes I think that’s where Ali and I work so well together because she always is putting out warmth cues and I tend to put out competence cues which is great but it’s also good if we can kind of do you know kind of cross a little bit. If I can be a little more warm she can appear a little more competent. She’s obviously wildly competent but just the things that appear that way. It’s kind of cool to look through that sort of lens.
Lots of cues for charisma. When talking about warmth cues, it’s really people answering the question in their head, can I trust you? And looking for competences, can I rely on you? So they’re kind of similar things, but a quote from the book I just kind of mentioned a little bit is, you might notice that highly competent people will often partner with highly warm folks to balance them out. The most famous duos include a highly warm character and a highly competent character. This is a good way to think about how those traits play off each other. And so the problem, of course, if you’re higher in warmth, it can kind of get in the way of you being respected a little bit. If you’re higher in competence, it can leave you
to being suspicious. People don’t really trust you as much. You don’t have that warmth behind it. So being competent is things like being impressive, powerful, smart, capable, like being an expert, being effective. Warm words are more things like trustworthy, collaborative, kind, compassionate, a team player, open, those sorts of things. And so, we’ll then get into how cues work. And really there’s kind of three steps to it. There’s decoding. So you kind of read cues from others, internalize how they affect your behavior and mood, and then you kind of encode them. You send them to others and then the
circle just kind of keeps going around as the cues kind of bounce off each other and so much of this happens without you realizing it and this is the part that some people most of you on the team I mean Ali does especially well had this kind of natively and I simply don’t so this kind of book has been great for me to kind of understand these things someone else I was talking to I published about this on my blog a few days ago another woman wrote so gosh I could have written this book when I’m talking to my clients this is all the stuff we talked about so she gets this up naturally which is fantastic so it’s just good for other people to get it so
Leaning into some of the cues, non-verbal cues is where they start, it’s kind body language things. I’ll go through them quickly, just the ones they list in the book. One is to lean in like a leader. If someone’s speaking, if you literally lean in, that will show that you’re interested in what they have to say. Opening your body, they say open body, open mind, so open up non-verbally. Again, of like just being literally more open. If you’re cross-armed, that’s gonna, if people see that, that’s a common one. If cross your arms, just even be comfortable. It can kind of look bad, so just be open. Front forward, so just
facing
them directly. So if I was trying to listen to you this way, that’s cool, but if I actually front and face you, can help. That’s something I’ve really tried to focus on specifically, and that can be good. Be smart with space and talk about the different levels of space. How if it’s a casual person 10 feet away, if someone you know really well, you can be really close, but playing that space carefully, because that can be interesting. And engage with gaze. You’re just kind of looking at people intentionally. Not staring them down, but also not looking aloof, and just paying attention to where you gaze. So there’s lots of little ones in between.
of the big ones there.
The other ones that can create the wow factor, says, I don’t know that these are wow factor necessarily, but using head tilts to show curiosity, nodding, very similar. You can tilt your head to listen, can nod to agree. Eyebrow raising, I’m not real good at, looks great, but if you do that to show interest, some people do that very, very well. When I lived in Dothan, Alabama, my boss there, the youth director there, she had a great eyebrow, it would just shoot up, it was really cool. And then smiles, of course.
smiles that people can tell when they’re real and when they’re fake. And even if they’re real, if you’re smiling all the time, that can also not help because people don’t know if you’re being legit or not. It’s kind like I read in a different book. They said when you answer the phone, always answer in a neutral voice. And then when people say who they are, then you go, my gosh, I’m so excited to see you or hear from you. So if you answer excited, then you stay excited. That’s one thing. But if they hear you say, hey, hello, who is this? Emily, I’m so glad you called. It kind of raises that up. And so same thing with smiling. If you’re always smiling, that’s not a bad thing.
but
Yeah, if you smile when it’s time. She says don’t perm a smile, but be smile ready. And then use touch carefully and appropriately to build trust there, arm touch, those sorts of things. And then mirroring can help too. And we’ve sort of seen that a little bit. But if you kind of mirror people’s behavior a bit, can make a difference as well. Then she gets into how to look powerful. So just some of the power cues you can use. Posture is important. I’m sitting in my chair and usually not having good posture. Using a lower lid flex to show contemplation, which kind of the gaze can be good again.
if done properly. She talks a lot about steepling. She kind of gets into that later where you kind of, you know, you see people like this. And the reason this is helpful is because it’s opening your palms. You know, people can see your hands, they trust you a bit more because it’s just kind of instinct. If you don’t see the hands, you can wonder what’s going on. Again, most of us don’t wonder consciously, but you still kind of see it unconsciously. And so steepling is, I mean, we see people do it a lot and it can be a helpful thing.
She talks about palm powers next, showing your palm, just to keep attention. You can use that to kind of point to things. You don’t have to point necessarily, but just using your palm to direct things. And she also talks about how to nicely get someone to stop interrupting you. And so we see this from each other. If you use the fish, she says, kind of have your mouth slightly open, just like, get clearly ready to talk. noticed that. Ali’s really good about noticing that. I saw it tech today a few times on the call. She’s like, Brooke, what do you have next? And I saw it too. I mean, you can see it, but someone’s kind of like wanting to say something, you can see it. The bookmark, Robert is great about this one, kind of like saying, like I’ve got
more thought here or you know I’ve got something to say like not jumping in to get attention just kind of like okay cool we know we have something to say and then there’s the anchor touch too if you’re nearby you can have again touch a forearm or something to do it but the fish in the bookmark I see a lot those can work well. How to spot a bad guy and not be one yourself so there’s things that can come across poorly so distancing can be a problem you know physical distance can create emotional distance so don’t turn away and turn toward and don’t step backward but move in you know get too close but if someone turns to talk to you and your first step is back that’s not
great start. Self-comfort, this is an interesting one. I do this a lot. you’re of like rubbing your arm or whatever little itches any self-comforting things can kind of look suspicious a little bit. Blocking can be bad. She talks a lot about blocking. Blocking with obviously your body and your hands and stuff, even like with a laptop or something. If I’m trying to talk to you and my laptop’s open in front of me, that’s kind of creating a barrier there. So again, sliding off to the side or again, facing sideways when you’re talking to someone with your laptop to the side or anything else. It could be a podium, know, good speakers often don’t stand behind a podium that kind of come out and don’t
have the blocks there.
Let’s see, avoid your face at rest and be careful what you’re doing there, which could be anger or sadness or contempt. An interesting thing here was how the expressions you make in your face actually impact how you feel. She talked about how people who use Botox to numb their furrow muscles feel less angry and irritable. So if you can’t furrow your brow, even if you feel like it, guess, but you actually don’t feel as irritable. And then the same, let’s see, if people Botox their smile lines, so their smile lines go away, they feel less
which is just crazy to me that you’re feeling these things but the way your body responds makes you feel differently which is crazy but again there’s a lot of science behind all this. It’s really cool. Then she talked about how to sound powerful, ways to sound confident, slowing down. She talks about that a good bit. I need to keep working on that. I think I’ve been a little better here. Probably still way too fast but trying to work on that but using space and breath to engage. Also lower pitch if you can speak. you get nervous you tend to get a higher pitch and so if you can
down and speak at a lower pitch, can project confidence. Lower tends to be slower too, which is also a good thing. Be careful not to use the question inflection. Some people use that too much. You never know if they’re asking a question. You don’t want do that.
Yeah, vary your volume to highlight what’s important. Don’t always talk at the same volume, but if things are very important, make sure that they’re known as important. And then pause for power. Powerful people pause purposefully. So she talks about that a good bit, and we’ll get into that a smidge more in a second. She then gets into vocal likeability. So never answer the phone in a bad mood or while holding your breath, she says. lot of times, the holding your breath was interesting. It seemed weird to me, but then I noticed that. People get a phone call of like.
Hello, like, we all sort of do. I guess you’re kind of priming for the first word, but it’s an interesting one there. Let’s see, vocal variety is interesting. So here’s one. So her name is Vanessa Van Edwards. And she says, when I’m nervous, I tend to swallow my name. I’ve had to practice slowing myself down. When I say my name, I gesture toward my heart and enunciate my name clearly instead of rushing through it. I found many people rush through their name. After all, we’ve heard our own name a million times, but your audience hasn’t, so say it slowly. And then she also says this, and I need to pay attention.
next time I have a presentation, she says, struggle with pauses or speak too fast, add pause lines. And so in your presentation, in your talk, you can literally have a space in there where you’re saying, I’m going to pause here, just to force yourself to pause somewhere. You would think that would come naturally at the end of a paragraph or page, and it should, but again, some people, myself, tend to just blow through those. And so having pause lines to give yourself a place to pause can be helpful. That’s good. Let’s see.
and then communicate with Charisma. So this gets into a little bit of more like email kind of stuff. That was interesting. She talked about Hotmail and how Hotmail back in the day for young people as one of the first hot email services, company said, we want to do email, so let’s do that. And what got them huge was at the very bottom of every email sent, whenever a user sent an email to someone else, the bottom said, PS, I love you. Get your free email at hotmail.com. And it was fantastic because that was sort of warm and competent, you know, about free email, but also the I love you. Feels weird to me, but she said it really
He helped quite a lot and made a big difference to how they did that. There’s also studies that PS is, let’s see, what’d she say here? In his research, communications consultant and author Frank Luntz found that the postscript, the PS, is the second most read part of an email after the opener. And I know I’ve looked through some of our emails, we have a good PS in there. I’ve not found other data on that, I haven’t looked too much, so Frank Luntz may or may not be accurate, but it’s still interesting to know that people will often browse the top and then browse that PS and then maybe kind of come back to the middle a little bit so that PS is huge and we
should at least look into that, see if that’s accurate, maybe use it more often. I think, again, we do a pretty good job of it already, but that can be kind of cool. Stop being boring, use Charisma.
Let’s see, this one was kind of interesting too about being careful with the questions you ask when you’re talking to people. And this is one I’m bad about too, but she says, this is a longer quote here. No matter what steer clear of the danger zone by avoiding asking anything boring or negative. Never ask, been busy and try to wait, stay away from non-question questions. These are questions that are so socially scripted, we don’t even register. How are you? What’s up? What’s going on? They’re boring, shmoring, no more. Her favorite ones, she says, working anything exciting recently, anything I can do to help, anything fun this weekend or her personal
favorite, what’s good. But in anything it’s asking what’s good seems to like what’s up. I think that would not do as well but if you ask a more specific question it can lead to more decent conversations.
And then imaginary cues, she got in a few things with, she says imaginary, but it’s like stuff we do, it’s colors and fonts and that sort of stuff, so I think they’re fairly important cues. I’ve researched this one, she said all caps, like when you’re writing text in all caps, said it lowers comprehension. There’s mixed studies on that, but I thought that was interesting that, again, we all know we shouldn’t use all caps, to know that actually lowers comprehension doesn’t just look stupid, it’s kind of interesting.
Let’s see, she talked about colors, red inspires action, blue is more for calming, green means go and kind of also more eco-friendly stuff and also green means amazing web design company. Yellow is like a sunshine, makes us feel warm and lovely, but too much you get a sunburn. This was interesting too when it comes to website pitches. I’ll read her quote again here. Use colors that appeal to your team. Back in 2016, my company was looking to hire a marketing agency. We received several proposals, but one stood out. Why? The pitch used our brand
colors, fonts, and images from our website. Instead of having their brand all over the presentation, they matched ours. Made the company’s ideas look like our ideas because they were already using our brand visual cues. So that’s kind where she ended it. Her little summary at the end is, to summarize, encourage strategic awareness and deliberate use of cues in all interactions to project your best self consistently and charismatically. It’s a reasonably long book, but Vanessa Van Edwards, she has a few great books out there, and this is a good one, again, just to kind of understand, again, a
of these things are, well all of them are obvious, again things I don’t necessarily pay attention to. paying attention to that in myself but also in others is kind of a good thing and again it’s made me do a few things again trying to keep the laptop not blocking me to make sure I’m fronting people to keep my hands open you know I’ll steeple a little bit more and try to look cool doing that. I’m not sure I’ll do the smolder, eyelid flex or whatever she said but some good stuff in there so yeah hope that was helpful.
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