Lessons - How to Make People Like You Before You Say a Word | Vanessa Van Edwards - Science of People Founder & Author of Captivate and Cues

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In this lessons episode, discover why charisma comes from balancing warmth and competence rather than simply being impressive.

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Understand how small communication cues shape trust and credibility.

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Explore practical ways to signal warmth through words and body language and uncover how intentional self-presentation can strengthen connections and influence.

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Maybe describe for the audience charisma, because we just talked about introvert, extrovert, ambivert.

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How does charisma tie into that?

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Okay, wonderful.

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So about nine years ago, I discovered a study that literally changed the way I interact.

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And I'm hoping now it will shift your perspective as well.

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So this is a research study that was done in 2002.

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It's been replicated a number of times.

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It's a very, very good set of research by Dr. Susan Fisk.

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Now, what she discovered is that highly charismatic people, like the definition of charisma, showed all these hypotheses of what charismatic people could be.

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Are they more extroverted?

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Are they more attractive?

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Are they taller?

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Are they smarter?

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Are they funnier?

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All these different variables that we think of when we think of charisma.

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But actually, what it came down to is none of those things mattered.

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The true indicator of charisma is that highly charismatic individuals rank off the charts in two specific traits.

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Warmth and competence.

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That these two traits make up 82% of our impressions of people.

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Isn't that funny?

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82% of people are animoverts and 82% of our impressions.

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I better make sure those are- Magic number.

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Let's say the low 80s.

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Let's say the low 80s.

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That we tend to focus when we're going into a boardroom or a presentation or a party or a networking event or a date, we're focused on like 10 things.

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I got to be funny.

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I got to be interesting.

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I got to be impressive.

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I got to be smart.

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I got to be attractive.

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But actually what the research shows is you'd be better off putting all of your energy into showcasing warmth cues and competence cues.

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So it's critical that these are in balance.

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Warm cues are signals of trust and likability and affability.

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Competence cues are cues of reliability, power, and efficiency.

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What is happening is that highly charismatic people, when you first see them on camera, see their LinkedIn profile, meet them in person, they're very quickly answering two questions.

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And these are the questions that we ask every single person we meet silently.

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Can I trust you?

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Can I rely on you?

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If you can quickly answer those questions with your cues, you are considered more highly charismatic.

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That is the formula for charisma.

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It's so interesting.

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And because it actually seems like those two characteristics of charisma could almost be competing at some point.

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Okay, such a good point.

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Yes.

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So what often happens, the reason why charismatic people are so special is because most of us do not have a balance.

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Most of us are too high.

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And I also want to be clear, this is how you are showcasing your warmth and competence, not necessarily your actual warmth and competence.

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So for example, most of my students are high achievers, brilliant, very smart folks who have trouble showcasing their ideas.

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They have great ideas, but they don't get a lot of buy-in on their ideas.

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Here's the problem of very smart people.

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Very smart people are focused on competence.

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They get really great data, charts, graphs.

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They have solid background research on their data.

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They have great slides.

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But if they forget to showcase or wrap that idea in warmth, it leaves people feeling suspicious.

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And that is directly from the research.

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The research has found is that if you have too much competence without enough warmth, people are suspicious of you and they're suspicious of your ideas.

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So the curse of smart people is they focus so much on their smart, and that's all they're showcasing, that no one believes them.

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I want to understand how people can, I think people, at least audience members for this particular podcast, they understand competence and they probably over-index on that side.

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And I would assume so.

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However, when they're listening to you and you're saying warmth has to balance out and there has to be almost this, this, this,

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balance really, for lack of a better word, of both of both of these components.

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How does somebody manufacture warmth?

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Because that's a missing component.

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And I'm just thinking, again, business context, even going on a date, pitching to investors, getting a job, hiring an employee, getting them to buy into your company, whatever it is, if you're highly competent, then there's that discord and there's that distrust.

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And then you're not optimizing the efficiency in that particular engagement.

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Yes, so this is the number one challenge of all of our students.

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So in people's school, I have a program where that is exactly what happens.

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They come in and they're like, how do I manufacture warm?

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I feel all this.

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I have this idea.

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And so what I always say is, actually, you have warm.

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So we're not manufacturing anything.

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Are you passionate about your idea?

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Do you really want it to work?

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Do you think that people can trust you?

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Great.

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That's warmth.

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Warmth is about passion, trust, and enthusiasm.

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No.

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I occasionally get someone who's like, no, I don't love my idea.

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I'm going to be hard.

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It is really hard to manufacture fake warmth.

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You can do it for a little bit,

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but you might want to get into another business.

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And then I say to them, well, are you passionate about making money?

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Are you passionate about helping people?

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Where is there some kind of passion here?

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So one is that, yes, your idea is really important.

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Get your slides right, get your data right, get your due diligence right.

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And then remember how freaking excited you are about how freaking excited you are to help someone, how freaking excited you are to make money.

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That is true passion.

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And then remember that you did the due diligence and that's where the trust comes from, right?

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Trust gives people reliability and your competence.

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Then we come down to the manufacturing part.

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What I would say is showcasing.

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You have the passion, you have the trust, and you have the competence.

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How do you signal both?

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It comes down specifically to the different channels of communication.

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I simplified about four channels of communication.

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There's lots of ways we do this.

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This is kind of a framework to think about it because me as an awkward person, I was like, I need the simple.

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I need to know exactly what to do to showcase warmth.

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So we showcase warmth through four channels.

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First, our words, the kinds of words we use.

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I'll give an example of each in a second.

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Second, our body language, our gestures, our facial expressions, our posture.

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Third, our voice tone, how we deliver our words, how we sound as we deliver our volume, our pace, our cadence.

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Last one, smallest one is our ornaments or imagery, the kinds of colors we wear, how we wear our hair, our facial hair, what's behind us in our Zoom background, the signals of the images on our website.

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Those are four channels.

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People are constantly looking through those four channels to try to find warmth and competence signals.

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Okay.

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So let's look at body language, for example.

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Very highly charismatic people, when you first see them, they have a perfect balance of nonverbal warmth cues they're signaling you and nonverbal competence cues are signaling you.

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So, for example, a warmth cue might be a head tilt.

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So a head tilt is a universal sign of engagement across cultures, genders, races.

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When you ask someone, do you hear that?

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they expose their ears, literally a sign of I'm listening.

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So there is studies that show that even in a LinkedIn profile picture, if I were to have a slight head tilt, people rate me as whatever, right?

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So a highly warm person or highly charismatic person might have a head tilt in their profile picture.

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Let's even sit to static profile picture.

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They have a head tilt and they're also making direct eye contact with the camera.

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And they're also fronting with the camera.

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So they're angling their torso, their hip and their toes toward the camera.

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We also like people who are full fronting with them.

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We like to be aligned with them.

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Those cues balance each other out.

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Once you stack all these different cues, I've identified 97 different cues.

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It's like a recipe.

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You get to sprinkle in the warmth cues that you like and the compilates cues you like.

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So when, I mean, when you're going through your life, obviously there's 97 different cues.

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That's a lot of things to remember.

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What are the main, what are the sort of like the introduction to being charismatic and to integrating these cues into your day to day?

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What are the things that people should first start to think about?

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Sort of like step zero.

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Okay.

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Step zero is actually words.

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And the reason for that is because as humans, typically we think about what to say.

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We're less focused on our body language.

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I always like to start with words.

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Also, so much of our, so many of our questions are happening over email.

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or on LinkedIn.

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So actually words is one that we can focus on the easiest.

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So here's step zero is, in your LinkedIn profile picture, do you have a balance of warmth and competence verbal cues?

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And there's a very interesting study that shows you how powerful this is.

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So in this research experiment, they brought people into their lab.

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They split them up into two different groups.

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The first group came into the lab, greeted the researcher.

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Hello.

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And the researcher said, today you are going to play the Wall Street game.

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And they had them play a prisoner's dilemma type of game.

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The second group came into the same lab with the same researcher and they were told, hello, today you're going to play the community game.

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And the trick was the games were exactly the same.

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Everything was the same except for that one word change.

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Is that some people were told they were playing the Wall Street game and some people were told they were playing the community game.

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Everyone who was told they were playing the Wall Street game shared an average of one third of their profit.

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Everyone who was told they were playing the community game showed an average of two-thirds of their profits.

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This is an incredible experiment, and it's been shown in different ways that even suggesting to someone that they're playing the community game activates a part of their brain that literally thinks communally.

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And they take that as a behavior cue, and then they act more communally, where people who were told they were playing a Wall Street game acted more competitively.

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I share this because the words that are in your LinkedIn profile, if they're sterile or overly business-like jargon, they don't have any behavior cueing at all.

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And so what I want you to begin to think about is how can you balance the word verbal cues and the confidence verbal cues in your emails, your LinkedIn profiles?

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So for example...

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Warm words, and this is a little bit more art than science, but warm words make us feel the warm and fuzzies.

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They make us want to connect and communicate.

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They're words like happy, together, best, both, our, collaborate, communal.

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They're words like that.

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Whereas competent words activate a part of our prefrontal cortex that makes us want to get it done.

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So they're words like power, efficient.

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brainstorm, checklist, succeed, achieve, master.

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They're words like that.

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When we hear them, our brain goes, oh, we better get to work.

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We better get things done.

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Those words are literally behavior cues.

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And so the very first ground zero is starting to think about how can you add more of them?

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Not a lot.

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Remember, it only took one word to have a massive behavior change in that experiment.

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How can you begin to sprinkle these in to your emails, your calendar invites, your marketing materials, your social profiles?

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Even you'll notice like on my Instagram, I have a perfect blend of warmth and competence cues in my bio.

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I have questions about how you set yourself up now because I know that you put so much thought into this.

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I'm curious about your background.

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I'm curious about everything.

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Yeah.

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So everything, most everything I do is purposeful in that way because I'm trying to set myself up for success because I am still a recovering awkward person.

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the more that I feel like I can control the cues, whether that's on social or in my background or things like that, it helps me feel calmer.

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Like that's my backdoor into confidence.

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And so like in Instagram, in my profile, I have like, you know, mom, mom too.

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Very warm, right?

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So then I have Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

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very competent, right?

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Then I have recovering opera person, funny, warm, vulnerable, right?

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Then I have like creator of people school, super competent, right?

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So you can balance out your profile.

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And then in my grid, I try to have a balance of warm and competent posts over the course of a month.

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So that, cause I know this is where I get advanced.

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So like super advanced, but I think we have to go here, which is, I want you to have a balance.

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but I also want you to dial it like a thermostat.

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And this is what very highly charismatic people do is there are certain people who are warmer, right?

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Like by default, we typically have an imbalance.

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My warm posts appeal to them.

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I have certain followers that are super competent, like data analysts, researchers, my competent posts appeal to them.

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So I think it is my job as a creator and as a teacher to meet everyone where they are.

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And so I'm gonna give my warm people their content.

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I'm gonna give my comfortable their content.

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When I'm giving a keynote, typically have a 60 minute stage presentation and I count my slides.

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They are perfectly balanced between warm slides and competent slides.

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Warm slides, gifts.

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Memes, stories, social proof, funny example, competent science, any kind of data, chart, graph, research, science, and like competent signals like a credibility marker like Wall Street Journal.

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I know that if I want to be a better teacher, I better make my content both warm and competent so it's hitting everyone for their preferences.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.