Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status, and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them.

Authority isn’t just a matter of position. It’s also a personal quality.

When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language.

But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn but who you are, and that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct.

Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority, and how not to be influenced by false authority.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Chase’s books:
  • Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling
  • The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis and Engineering of Human Behavior
• Chase’s app
• Milgram experiment
• “The Social Psychology of Imitated Jaywalking”
• Chase’s Authority Self-Assessment Matrix
• AoM Article: The 5 T’s of Mastering the Art of Poise
• Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
• AoM Article: Never Complain; Never Explain
• Smoke-filled room experiment
• AoM Article: 8 Reasons You’re Hardwired for Sheepness
• The 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority

Connect With Chase Hughes

• Chase‘s website
• Chase on IG
• Chase‘s YouTube channel and The Behavioral Panel YouTube channel
• Chase on Twitter

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them. Authority isn’t just a matter of position though, it’s also a personal quality. When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language. But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn, but who you are. And that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct. Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority and how not to be influenced by false authority. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/authority.

All right, Chase Hughes, welcome to the show.

Chase Hughes: Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me, man.

Brett McKay: So you are a behavioral analyst and you train military and law enforcement on how to read people and gather human intelligence, so they might be using this stuff in interrogations, interviews, things like that. How did you get into this line of work?

Chase Hughes: I did 20 years in the military, and I joined when I was 17 years old and I was stationed in Pearl Harbor. Long story short, I was out in Waikiki Beach one evening and I was talking to this young lady who I thought was just super into me, and essentially I asked her out and she basically turned me down really hard. And I went home that night and I typed how to tell when girls like you into the internet. And I remember just printing off this massive stack of body language articles and stuff. And I just went down this rabbit hole for like a year. And then while I was getting good at this, one of my best friends, his name was Craig Weberley, died in the USS Cole terrorist attack. And I was reading these intelligence reports that all the failures that led up to this happening was just a training… Intelligence operative training that they couldn’t get people in the region to provide intel and stuff. So I just dedicated the rest of my career to making this stuff possible for intelligence operatives to be able to gain rapport and really build up a relationship with these people where they can get intelligence faster.

Brett McKay: So you went from pick up artistry to helping the military?

Chase Hughes: [chuckle] Right. I wouldn’t call it pick up artistry. I just wanted to be good enough at body language that I would just know when not to ask. And I would just avoid rejection, I think.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, so you’ve written several books where you present the things that you train in the military and law enforcement in a very reader friendly way. And you’ve developed these really sophisticated and, you know, that you have like this behavioral table of elements where you can… You analyze body language basically and what that can possibly mean. But one of the factors that you talk about a lot in your books and you hit home hard is one of the key factors in gathering intelligence, whether it’s from a potential, an enemy combatant, something like that, or if you just wanna know if someone is interested in you or you’re making a sales pitch and you wanna make sure that you are directing your pitch in a way that it resonates with that person. You argue that when it comes to influence, authority is more important than social skills. So what led you to that conclusion?

Chase Hughes: Well, if anybody’s ever taken like Psych 101 in college, you remember this Milgram experiment, and I’ll give you like a 15 second, 20 second recap of this thing. So essentially they got volunteers for this experiment, and they were told… They met this person and you’re gonna give them a quiz and every time they get an answer wrong, you’re gonna shock them with this electrical shocking machine. And with each wrong question, you’re gonna increase the voltage and it gets worse. I’m not gonna go into all the details, but it was pretty bad. Like 67% of people went all the way to maximum voltage, even when the person on the other side of the room that was being “shocked” even though they weren’t was screaming and begging to stop the experiment saying they had heart problems and all this, and there’s hundreds of other psychology experiments like this.

But just looking at this, there’s no secret technique that was used. There’s no like, oh, they use some covert language trick or some secret rapport building technique or any of this. It’s just authority made that happen. And if authority can do that almost on its own with no like secret linguistics or any of those tricks or anything like that, or sales tactics, that seems to be the number one place that we need to focus if we’re starting to learn persuasion or influence or any of that, authority is just so, so important because it can make extreme things happen.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah. Some of the other studies you highlight besides the Milgram study is that researchers have done studies on jaywalking. What was going on there?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. I think that was called the Crosswalk Experiment, where one person essentially just… It’s a dude wearing like jeans and a t-shirt and he walks across the street when he’s not supposed to, when the sign says don’t do it. And then the same dude goes up and puts on like a suit and tie and they cut his hair and stuff, and it increases the amount of people who will follow him across the intersection by like 88% just because of a shift in clothing. And that’s a good estimate. Just our understanding of authority is not all about just and real authority. It’s about perceived authority as much as it is about just having genuine authority.

Brett McKay: And why are we so keyed on individuals with authority? Like why do we tend to follow them?

Chase Hughes: So our ancestors left all kinds of stuff in our bodies to survive. That’s why we have a fight or flight response. And all kinds of just pre-programmed responses, even facial expressions, we’re born with facial expressions like anger and sadness and happiness and fear. So our ancestors also left everything that helped them to survive. So the DNA, let’s say like 100,000 years ago, if our ancestors are learning lessons that helped them to survive, their DNA essentially says, “Okay, I’m gonna hardwire this so I can pass it down.” So obeying authority and being obedient towards a perceived authority was probably one of, if not the most important thing for tribal function. And when humans are in tribes, and if they don’t obey the tribal leader, they might get killed. They don’t get protection, they get less access to resources, they get disliked by the rest of their tribe because the leader doesn’t like them. It’s tremendous. Like it’s the bottom second row and third row of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like all the stuff we need to survive can essentially stem from our relationship to authority figures.

Brett McKay: And individuals who are highly persuasive, whether they’re people who, you know, good salesmen for example, good politicians, but also you could be like con artist. They understand this probably intuitively, correct?

Chase Hughes: I definitely think so. Like a good example would be like a, let’s say a dangerous cult is out there and they’re recruiting people into this weird cult. And how can like a socially intelligent CEO, for example, get talked into joining this weird cult, and just trying to figure that out is this mammalian, this almost animal response, this programmed into our brain to be responsive towards this confidence and charisma and authority. And it just says, you need to trust this person and go along with what they say. And that’s an unconscious process. We’re not sitting there with a checklist, a grocery list, like checking off everything as the person displays behaviors. Like it’s an unconscious list, which we’ll get into a little bit later for sure.

Brett McKay: So yeah, the big takeaway that I think we’re trying to get at, I wanted to frame the rest of our conversation around is, I think a lot of times when people think about social skills or being more persuasive or being good with women, like knowing how to interact with women, they think about all these little like hacks, like things you could say. They think about the specific body language they should use, and you’re arguing like, that’s probably icing on the cake. What you should really spend most of your time focusing on is developing that perception of authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes. So just getting to the point where the display of those behaviors is a byproduct of who you are, not what you’ve learned.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And so we’ve been talking to authority, like how are you defining authority? I mean, is it a matter of position? Can you have authority and not be in the position of authority? Is it charisma? How are you defining authority?

Chase Hughes: Well, in my training, I tend to use five factors to measure a person’s level of authority. And I even have an assessment that if you wanna throw it in the show notes, you’re more than welcome to. And it can essentially assess someone’s level of authority using these five factors. And those are confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude and enjoyment. And once those all combine, it leads to authority, but it produces a behavior that I call composure. And then a person can essentially rate themselves like at the end of every day in their journal or whatever on this composure scale and on those five factors. And the more often they’re doing that, the more that’s being brought into awareness and with composure. And we tend to look at composure as a pendulum where the center would be composure and the left side would be collapse, maybe the right side would be posturing. And that’s what we call those two far ends of that pendulum. When we fall out of composures, we fall one way, it’s into collapsing and we fall the other way it’s into posturing and over posturing behaviors.

Brett McKay: And can composure be situational? Like in some situations you have more composure and therefore more authority and then other situations not so much.

Chase Hughes: It can, and I think the more that somebody is able to bring this into everyday life, and this is one of the things I talk about a lot in my trainings is, are you able to do this off camera? Like when no one’s looking, are you still a leader? Are you still a role model when the cameras are off, no one’s looking, do you still exhibit those behaviors? And the more you get into that sort of lifestyle, the less situations will matter when it comes to authority, I think.

Brett McKay: So what you’re saying is, if you develop these five factors, which we’re gonna talk about, as a consequence of that, you will start displaying behaviors that other people will see and perceive as you having authority, is that the idea?

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So, I mean, okay, for us, when we’re looking at people and we’re sizing people up of whether they have composure and authority, what are we looking at? What factors, what cues are we homing in on to say, “Yeah, this guy’s got it together.”?

Chase Hughes: So our brains will typically, and this is very much an unconscious process, but our brains go through a five-stage process, I would say. So our brains are analyzing another person’s movement and it goes in this order. As far as I can tell, I’ve done about 20,000 hours of research on this. Movement first then appearance, then confidence. And this is essentially when our brains are looking for confidence on a subconscious level, what that means is we’re looking for a lack of reservation in behavior and movement. And so it’s movement, appearance, confidence, connection, like are they fully checked in? So just when you think about connection, just think of the way that Bill Clinton looks at people and connects with them when he talks to them. And the final one here is intent. So how am I understanding and processing this other person’s intent? And if all five of those line up, the subconscious part of our brain sees that this person is very likely an authority.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And as you’re saying, sometimes people wanna hack this and they do the posturing. So they probably read some sort of research where, well, people with big body language, they take up a lot of space, they’re perceived as having more authority, so they start doing that.

Chase Hughes: You’re right.

Brett McKay: But it just comes off as phony-baloney.

Chase Hughes: It really does. And I think one of the reasons that this is common is I think there’s a problem in learning new behaviors where people focus on symptoms and they ignore causes. So let me just look at the symptoms of rich people. For example, if I wanna make money, I’m gonna look at the symptoms of rich people. Okay, they have a big house, that’s what I need. Then they have an expensive car, that’s what I need. But they’re not looking at causes. So when I’m looking at like, I take up a lot of space, my voice is crystal clear, there’s two things that really happen. Number one, the person’s focusing on symptoms instead of the cause of those behaviors. And number two, the biggest disaster of all time when it comes down to authority and actually having real confidence is getting into a mindset where you’re worried or thinking, even just thinking about status and hierarchy. The number one thing that I see when I train operatives is, the soon as they start worrying or thinking about status and hierarchy, it automatically starts to deteriorate their level of authority and confidence.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The alpha doesn’t think about being alpha.

Chase Hughes: Right. It’s not in their head. And I think if you’re doing all of this symptom stuff, you’re getting into performance mode instead of connection mode. And when I say performance, this is if you wanna just figure out what mode I’m in, in a conversation, if you’re in performance mode, you’re maybe tense or feel pressured. You’re observing yourself too much in the conversation, you’re analyzing the event afterwards a whole lot. There’s not much feeling of connection and it feels like an evaluation from the other person while you’re in performance mode because you’re performing and the focus is more on yourself, and in connection mode, your focus is on the other person. It feels like a connection. You’re feeling good about the event without needing to recall all these details. You’re feeling relaxed, comfortable, curious about the other person and just you’re really comfortable sharing your own depth of emotion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we’ve all encountered the individuals who they’re in performance mode, right? If you’ve been with like a salesperson, I’ve had this happen to me when I’ve had people come out to give me estimates for a new roof or something. And it’s interesting to see the different approaches people take and like one guy I can tell like, man, you’re doing all the tricks. And it just… And then you have another guy comes in and he’s not doing that, but you can tell that he’s got his stuff together and I actually trust him more.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true. But I think that some of those things, when somebody gets into performance mode, there’s maybe some anxiety there that this helps them to alleviate anxiety because I’m gonna look up these power poses to give me confidence and I’m gonna look up these articles that are, you know, you’ve seen them on LinkedIn and stuff, like the 31 Body Language Signs of Confident People, which are all of course symptoms. But I think those help sometimes in the interim with people with anxiety, and anxiety is probably one of the things that keeps people from having confidence and developing authority. And I think anxiety comes from three things very specifically. Number one is a decline in the reputation that you have with yourself. And number two is an inability to recognize what you can and can’t control. And number three is unmet expectations or the fear of your expectations being unmet. Those are the three pillars that I have to get rid of in the operatives that I train.

Brett McKay: How do those things come about in someone’s life? How do they show up? Why does that happen to people?

Chase Hughes: I think they just get into this mindset of I need to manage how I’m being perceived. And they tend to think more about status and hierarchy and we’ll definitely cover some ways to get over that here in a little bit if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess they’re needy, and they showcase their neediness and I think everyone’s been around a person like, “Ah, you’re just way too needy.”

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And if you’ll allow me to go back to the pendulum for just a second, and we have composure in the middle and we have collapse and posturing, collapse and posturing on these far ends of the pendulum have a lot more in common than people think. They’re both trying to get the other person to give something up, whether it’s respect, admiration, love, money, whatever it is. Second, their agendas are concealed and hidden from public view. They wear this mask to kind of conceal the collapse or they wanna conceal the posturing behavior. And they both cover up for feelings of a little bit of inadequacy and the feelings of always trying to be tough. And I think they’re both incredibly stressful states to live in and they’re kind of rooted in insecurity. And the one big thing that they both have in common is they both believe highly in competition and they kind of live their lives in a competitive instead of a collaborative frame of mind.

Brett McKay: And then one other thing you talk about too is that people with authority or people with that natural influence, they tend to understand that most people have that neediness and those unmet desires, and they’re just kind of broken human beings. And because they understand that, that’s one of the reasons why they’re able to connect with them is they can give that person what they need.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true, yeah.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig into these factors that contribute to people perceiving us as someone with authority, and actually having it. It’s not just about perceiving, you actually have it, and because you actually have it, it naturally comes out in the way you present yourself. You talk about confidence. How do you define confidence?

Chase Hughes: I’d say confidence is, if I can just use one word, it’s comfort. It’s just comfort. It’s just giving yourself permission. That’s kind of what it is. It’s how you… You have got a good reputation with yourself, and you’re giving yourself permission to do something, and one incredible thing is that if you’re displaying super confident behavior to a person that you’re just meeting for the first time, they will automatically assume that you’ve been that way for decades. So you’re not just confident in yourself, you’re carrying the permission from thousands of other people that you’ve interacted with, so they’re assuming that thousands of other people accepted your confident behavior, so that’s a really key point to make that even if it’s a one-on-one interaction and you’re behaving confidently, that person… If it’s genuine, that person is assuming that it’s been this way for years for you.

Brett McKay: So how do you develop this genuine confidence? I’m sure we could dedicate a whole podcast to this, but generally, what do you tell your operatives, what do they need to start doing in their personal lives to develop this natural confidence that’ll be displayed naturally when they interact with other people?

Chase Hughes: All right, let me see if I can do this like a two-minute summary. So the first thing, I want you to start challenging yourself to be slower than anyone else in the room. So just set a speed limit on your body, just try it on for a few days of like, “I will not move faster than if I was standing in a swimming pool.” So this starts re-teaching your body to just display the signs of comfort. And second, just having the knowledge that you don’t need permission to be confident is so, so critically huge. And keeping track of your own levels of confidence throughout every single day is the way to get that down into the lower parts of the brain, because just thinking about it stays in the top of the brain, “If I can get my lower brain really invested in my confidence, I don’t need… ” I’m not talking about setting goals or anything like that, I’m just talking about at the end of every day, I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna write from one to five or one to 10, how was my confidence today? That’s it. ‘Cause it’s just like when you’re looking for a new car, like on the internet and watching all the YouTubes and all the videos and stuff about, “I’m gonna get this new car,” then you buy the car and you start seeing it everywhere.

Like, I just got a Tesla and I’m like, “Wow, everybody bought Teslas at the same time as me.” But that’s not true at all, right? So I’ve just repetitively shown it to my brain so much that now my brain is searching for it, and if you can just set a competition to move slower than the person that you’re speaking to and to be more comfortable. That’s it. Just start out with those two things, “I’m gonna be the most comfortable person in this environment,” just comfort, just relaxed, “And I’m gonna move slower.” Those two things are like the… And monitoring, those three things, I would say, are this ultimate gateway to developing confidence the fastest way.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s a fast way to do it, but then at the same time, you’ll probably wanna do things where you’re developing that self-regard, you’re doing things that make you feel competent and confident. So it can come down to setting goals and accomplishing them, just doing those things in your private life will help you develop that confidence for the long-term.

Chase Hughes: Yes, absolutely. And just taking tiny, tiny steps out of your comfort zone when it comes to just talking to other people, and you’re essentially teaching the lower part of your brain like, “No, nothing bad’s gonna happen, they’re not gonna punch me in the face if I start acting confident. There’s not gonna be like a tiger that jumps out from a closet if I start behaving confidently.” You’re just slowly, gradually introducing your brain to a little bit more stressful or slightly stressful situations, and over time, and I’m talking like just over maybe 15 days, the confidence starts building itself and you get more and more permission and you’ll notice as a person becomes more and more confident, you can see that they’re just giving themselves more permission.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s the ability… So that long-term, long-lasting confidence is the ability to handle uncertainty no matter what’s thrown at you. And I think that’s why you can tell some people like, “That guy’s street-wise.” And it’s probably because they grew up in the school of hard knocks, and they’ve had to deal with uncertainty over and over and over again, and because of that, they have the confidence in any situation, like, “Well, I handled this when I was a kid, and I was out in war and I handled that alright,” and so it just carries over to everything they do.

Chase Hughes: It’s so true, but that can lead people to thinking like, “Oh, I need to go through this big rite of passage,” which isn’t necessarily true. There’s all kinds of people who are super confident who have not been through anything like that.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Yeah, I mean, you define confidence as the ability to take action without reservation, and I really like that definition, because anybody, they can build up their confidence by taking part in little deprivations in their life, taking on challenges and then following through on those challenges, and by doing that, you’re gonna build up that good reputation with yourself, it’s a sense of self-trust. And this really takes us to our next element of authority, which is discipline. So why is discipline important in developing authority and how do we develop it?

Chase Hughes: Okay. So Brett, if you and I were sitting in ATL, like the Atlanta Airport, waiting on a flight or something, I could ask you with no… Like you’re not some behavior profile or anything, but I could say, “Brett, spot someone across that’s just standing over there, across the gate from ours, who is disciplined.” You could do it. And most people could do it. And I think that discipline has an unusual way, and I’m the number one body language expert in the world somehow, and I still can’t explain this articulately, but discipline has a way of coming up in our non-verbal communication that sends these little gut feelings to other people like, “That person is a disciplined person,” and it makes us, when we see a disciplined person, obviously it’s a little bit inspiring, but it makes us a little bit more likely to follow that person, who they are. So discipline definitely shows up. If I have off-camera discipline where nobody’s looking, it shows up in my behavior and other people can almost feel it.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s basically it comes down to keep a schedule, manage your money right, keep your house clean, make your bed like Jordan Peterson says, that’s stuff you do.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And I say discipline is… I define discipline as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own, so I am taking care of Chase tomorrow, and I’m prioritizing his needs over my own, so think of all the people or all the times, like when I was in college, you’d stay up all night and you know you have exams tomorrow, you stay up all night drinking or whatever. And you wake up the next day and you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.” And you’re mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self. So if you wanna start cultivating discipline in your life, start with small, little things, and just my advice is always to become your own butler, and this is… Wouldn’t it be great if you could wake up and everything was ready for you? Like you got up out of bed and your clothes are all laid out for the next day, and everything’s there? So, you are your own butler, your past tense self did all of that for you, because they put your concerns ahead of their own. And then I continue to do this, and I’ll be in the kitchen with my wife, Michelle, and I’ll be sticking… It’s night time, right?

And I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig Coffee Cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, “Man, Chase is gonna love this.” So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs and I will talk about him in the future, and just getting a relationship to where you’re looking forward in time with concern and getting to the point where you’re looking backward in time at your past tense self with gratitude.

Brett McKay: All right, so developing discipline that’s gonna make you naturally appear more competent and composed to other people. And I think also what it’ll do too as you do these things of being your own butler, working out, sticking to a schedule, managing your finances, that’s also gonna give you confidence, which is gonna just super charge that factor as well.

Chase Hughes: That is… Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So true, and I think all these things do feed into each other. I’m glad you brought that up.

Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so that’s discipline. What about leadership? What do you mean by leadership?

Chase Hughes: My definition when I do trainings on leadership is that leadership is having possession of innate, like non-acting behaviors, your normal behavior produces following behavior in other people on its own. So what this means is, if I’m in another culture where I don’t speak the language, they would still follow some of my behaviors, I would still be effective to some degree as a leader because of how I behave and how I act. And I think if your behavior is producing what I call followership on its own, this means that you most likely have off-camera leadership. You’re not one person at work who’s all organized and everything, and you go back to your house and your bathroom counter is just covered in crap, you’ve got piles of laundry and dishes and stuff like that, but then when you go to work, everyone thinks that you’re really well put together. That would more likely be the person in charge and not the leader, ’cause those are two very, very different things.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the way you develop leadership is you work on that discipline, work on that confidence. So the next factor is gratitude. Why does gratitude contribute to our perception of authority?

Chase Hughes: So, if you look at the people that we naturally follow, that people talk about a lot, and the people that… One of the people that if I’m giving training on leadership, 100% chance, there’s gonna be a video of Andy Griffith on the screen. I believe that… And this came to me from one of my commanders on deployment, if you screwed up on this deployment in the Middle East, he had every box set of the Andy Griffith show, of every episode, and you had to pick a random season and a random episode and watch that episode, and write a paper on how you learned a lesson to fix how you screwed up as a leader from that one episode. And the insane thing was, in every episode, there was something that applied to a leadership mistake, a leadership lesson. And one of those people, like if you look at people like Andy Griffith or Bill Clinton or the people that we just naturally gravitate towards as mentors, as leaders, they all have a look of gratitude on their face, you can see that while you’re communicating with these people.

And I think gratitude has a very distinct way of showing itself in human behavior and on our face that other people don’t consciously perceive, they’re not saying, “Oh, that’s a very grateful person,” they just unconsciously perceive that level of gratitude and it helps us to be more likely to follow a person’s behavior. And I always teach that there’s the two types of gratitude, if you just practice this regularly, and you don’t have to go to Michael’s and build a crafty little gratitude journal or anything like that, but just low level and then high level gratitude. So if you’re eating a taco at Taco Bell, you’re grateful for the employees that put it all together for you, but you’re also grateful for the farmer who’s supporting his family somewhere in the world, who grew the lettuce that’s in your taco. So it’s like you’re zooming in on gratitude and then zoom all the way out, like on Google Earth, to where you can see the entire picture.

Brett McKay: No, I think we’ve all encountered leaders who have that, who display gratitude to you. You’ll go to the ends of the Earth for that person. Sometimes there’s leaders who will… They’ll bark at you and just get results, and in the short term, that might work. But they’re not gonna have that long-lasting influence because they didn’t cultivate that gratitude.

Chase Hughes: So, so true. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny you mentioned Andy Griffith. That’s a great… I’m gonna look into that more, about Andy Griffith as an example of authority and influence. Wasn’t that… He only has one gun, it’s got one bullet and it’s locked up, but he’s able to manage the town with just that?

Chase Hughes: No, Barney carries the gun. Andy never does.

Brett McKay: Okay. Andy never does, right. He gave it to Barney, yeah.

Chase Hughes: He carries Barney’s bullet in his pocket.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

Chase Hughes: And somebody asked him one time, they said, “Sheriff Taylor, why is it that you don’t carry a gun?” And he said, “Well, a lot of people respect me around here, and if I started carrying a gun, I’d be worried that some of that respect might be fear, and I might be confusing the two.” And it’s just… Man, the show is just such a good master class in leadership.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny, it’s super funny.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, it’s great.

Brett McKay: It’s a good… Yeah. There’s this barbershop I went to, they actually set up an old black and white TV, and they somehow fixed it, so where they put in a Amazon Fire Stick, and they’d stream Andy Griffith’s shows. And so you’re just sitting there to get your hair cut in an old-time barbershop, watching Andy Griffith, and just remember laughing out loud at Barney and his shenanigans.

Chase Hughes: If I’m ever out in your town, I wanna go there. That sounds awesome.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s cool. All right, so that’s gratitude. Enjoyment is that fifth factor. What do you mean by that?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. This is just a… It’s super simple, it’s just a person’s level of in-the-moment enjoyment. If you look at people that we nationally, culturally view as the natural leaders of the world, and then just imagine one of them taking their garbage out, or imagine one of them mowing their yard, or imagine one of them just doing a mundane task, you’d still imagine them with a tiny, tiny smile on their face, even if it’s faint. And we all have this ability to detect another person’s level of enjoyment, and I think it’s the most magnetic human trait that draws people in. And if we are able to stay in some kind of what I call calm enjoyment in my training, it’s just, I have the ability to just calmly enjoy these mundane tasks, that I think is the cornerstone of getting started as a leader, is being able to live in this calm enjoyment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. I think no one likes to be around a negative Nelly, we’re attracted to the guy who seems like he’s having a good time.

Chase Hughes: Always, yeah.

Brett McKay: So yeah, so we develop confidence, we develop discipline, we focus on developing our leadership, our gratitude, and just learning how to enjoy even the smallest of things. As we do this, we’ll naturally start displaying behaviors that will tell people that we have influence, we have authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so we’ll start moving differently, we’ll start talking differently, maybe we even start dressing differently, correct?

Chase Hughes: Yes, and I think some of those we’ll do deliberately, but over time, if we’re practicing measuring ourselves every day on confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, enjoyment, and then finally, composure, over time, all those cool behaviors that you read about in articles and stuff like that, those become a by-product of your new psychology, your new mindset of having authority in your life, and then it’s not… You’re not faking it because we are all manufacturing gut feelings in people every single conversation that we have. And if I wanna manufacture good gut feelings in other people, then that stuff needs to be real. So I’m always asking the question, “What can I do to make this a by-product of everything?” If I wanted authority, how do I make authority a by-product? And that’s by just monitoring that stuff every day. You don’t have to be judgmental of yourself, but just getting your lower brain aware of the stuff to begin with, and dragging that stuff out into the light, ’cause most people don’t really wanna think about it. We’re dragging it into the light and getting the brain super aware of it, and it speeds up that development so fast.

Brett McKay: And then if you wanna start implementing consciously some of these body language or social skills you read about, as you do the inner work, the stuff you start actually consciously doing will actually have more effect, likely.

Chase Hughes: So true, yeah. So as an example, a client of mine had trouble with posture and when people have anxiety, we want to… Our bellies are really soft, right? So when we talk about body language, somebody gets fearful, one of the things that happens with the body is the rib cage comes downward to protect all these soft organs that are in our belly, which makes our posture bad. So one client of mine had this issue and I put this kind of a kinesiology tape, like a physical therapist would use this stuff called KT tape, and it’s just kind of like a two-foot strip of like, I would say like mesh kind of tape made for the body. And I would stick it on his back in an X pattern in a way that if he started slouching, it would stretch the skin, and it would instantly… It’s not painful or uncomfortable, but it instantly brings awareness to the fact that he’s slouching. So, little tricks like that. How can I remind myself regularly to be in composure and to be confident? And just as a quick tip, how can I do this even in the car when nobody’s looking? Adjust your rear view mirror in your car for next time you drive to where you have to sit up really straight to see out of your back window. So just angle it up just a little bit to remind you every time you look in that rear-view mirror, to sit up straight. Just small little things on a daily basis like that to start correcting those non-verbal behaviors does go a long way, for sure.

Brett McKay: And again, I wanna circle back, the reason why we’re doing all this stuff, developing our authority, it just makes being influential and makes the social component of our lives just… It’ll get you 90% there, whether you’re interacting with women or making a sales pitch, or your leadership position at work, just developing that inner authority will get you 90% of your influence.

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. And it just makes your life better, just being able to just relax, ’cause a lot of people are living off-camera differently than they are on camera, and the moment that those two things start blending together and you’re like you can walk into work and know that the person I am here at work, when I’m in charge of these employees or whatever, is the same person I am at home, everything changes.

Brett McKay: In the books and in some of your interviews that I listened to preparing for our conversation, you talked about some authority killers. What are some authority killers? What are the most common ones you see in the people you work with?

Chase Hughes: I’ll give you a few here. I think number one is rapid body movement. And as a body language expert, there’s one thing that fear makes our bodies do, is protecting arteries, but it makes our bodies speed up, our head movement, our speech, our gestures, all of that speeds up, which is why I think that slowing down our bodies is one of the fastest ways to re-train the body to be more in composure. And complaining, I think, is one of the big ones. When we hear somebody complaining, we subconsciously make an agreement that they’re probably not a leader, and I will not claim to have any neuroscience to back this up, but think about the last time you heard somebody complaining. There’s something that goes on in the subconscious that says, “Wait, why was I paying attention to this person?” It automatically usurps some of the authority. But I would say overall, the biggest mistake that most people make is allowing the outside environment to determine who they are as a person and how they identify themselves. So starting to just internalize their own feelings and not determine who they are based on how people react. So like, “I need X, Y, and Z to feel good about myself,” that’s one of the biggest.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s a, I guess, in family psychology, family therapy, they call it differentiation, you wanna be well differentiated, so it’s like your self isn’t dependent on the emotions and feelings of other people. And it’s a hard thing to get… It’s a continual thing you have to work on all the time.

Chase Hughes: I do too. I mean, I don’t know if you go through this, but we’re about to hit a million subscribers on YouTube, and I’ll go through there and I’ll read a negative comment, and I will sometimes have a visceral reaction to it, like my heart rate will go up. And I was watching Eddie Murphy on an old interview, and somebody said, “Oh, you have a new movie coming out,” I think it was Jay Leno, and he said, “Oh, the reviews are great.” And Eddie said, “Oh, I don’t read those reviews,” and he said, “No, but they’re really good.” And he said, “Yeah, but if you believe the good ones, that means you’re going to believe the bad ones too.”

Brett McKay: [chuckle] Right, yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t get easier. Never does. So we’ve been talking about how we can develop our own charisma, authority, so that we can be more influential with others. What can we do to avoid being lulled into the charisma authority of potential bad actors? Like someone trying to recruit us to a cult or MLM or manipulative boss, what can we do to be on the lookout for that, so we know, we’re like, “We gotta be careful with this person.”?

Chase Hughes: I will tell you, I published books on hardcore interrogation tactics and stuff like that, and I’m a body language expert, behavior expert, that still does not give me a vaccine against being immune to that stuff. And when it comes to the charisma and authority, you’re not gonna really vaccinate yourself against it, but I would say the more that you learn about how the brain works and how it reacts to authority, and just learn a little bit about the psychological aspect of it, like the bystander effect and the Milgram Experiment, and there’s another experiment called The smoke-filled room where just a person sits because other people do in a room that’s filling up with smoke. And the smoke alarms are going off, they’ll just sit there because other people are sitting there, which are paid actors for the experiment. But in the last experiment they did, the percentage of people that stayed in the room long enough to die was 100%. 100%, just because 11 people stayed in the room and they didn’t leave, they didn’t care about the smoke, so that person stayed because the other people did. So, just understanding those little psychological principles can help you break away because it’s in your conscious awareness, and now it’s not unconscious. You’re taking the unconscious responses and making them very conscious.

And the final thing I would say is, pay very close attention to how you feel in that person’s absence. So if you’re around somebody and you’re like, “Wow, this is an incredible leader,” or “We’ve got an incredible connection and I can’t believe how awesome this person makes me feel,” if the positive feelings go away when you’re away from that person, something is off. You should still feel good about that interaction, it shouldn’t be like you need that drug again, because that person was probably using manipulative tactics on you, so they pumped you up with a lot of neurotransmitters, then you go away and those chemicals wear off ’cause it wasn’t emotional, it was chemical. They gave you a chemical high instead of this emotional feeling of actually feeling good. So pay attention, when that conversation ends with that person, do I still feel good about it? Do I still feel good? And if it’s not good, that might be a red flag.

Brett McKay: Well, Chase, this has been a great conversation. We’ve literally scratched the surface of your work. Where can people go to learn more about what you do?

Chase Hughes: You can just type “Chase Hughes” into the App Store, or you can check us out on YouTube. I’ve got pretty growing YouTube channel and we’ve got another channel with a few other guys that we profile human behavior, called The Behavior Panel, and it’s the most fun time of my week, for sure.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Chase Hughes, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Chase Hughes: Brett, thanks, man.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Chase Hughes. He’s the author of several books on behavior, including The Ellipsis Manual, it’s available on Amazon.com. Also, check out his website at chasehughes.com where you can find more information about his work, including his course on authority. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/authority, where you can find links to resources where we can delve deeper in this topic, including links to Chase’s Authority Self-assessment Matrix and his 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett Mckay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When Nick Gray moved to New York City, he was a shy introvert with few friends. But he wanted to build up his social network. So he started throwing cocktail parties to meet people. These parties changed his life, and he thinks they can change yours, too.

Nick knows what you’re thinking: you don’t throw parties, and hosting them is simply not for you. But, he would encourage you not to tune out. He’s got a great case for why you should give this idea a try, and just as he does in his book — The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings — Nick is going to lay out exactly how to throw a party that’s low stakes and low effort, but will be highly successful in helping you build all kinds of connections.

Today on the show, Nick shares what he’s learned from throwing hundreds of parties and refining his hosting technique to a T. He explains why cocktail parties are better than dinner parties (and don’t have to involve actual cocktails), the best night of the week to throw a party, why the party should only be two hours long and have a firm end time, how many people to invite, and who to invite when you don’t yet have any friends. And he explains why he’s a big fan of two things you might be hesitant about — name tags and icebreakers — and why two of his favorite things to include in a party are grapes and a harmonica.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Related articles by Nick:
  • How to Host a Party at Home With Kids
  • How to Host a Digital Nomad Happy Hour
  • Mocktail Party: How to Host When You Don’t Drink Alcohol
  • How to Do Icebreakers: The Ultimate Guide
  • Event Platforms: Pros, Cons, and My Favorites
• Related AoM articles and podcasts:
  • The Manly Art of Hospitality
  • How to End a Conversation
  • 9 Reasons You Should Host a Party This Weekend
  • Podcast #378: Brunch Is Hell
  • Podcast #362: The Art of Mingling

Connect With Nick Gray

• Nick’s website
• Nick’s newsletter
• Nick on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When Nick Gray moved to New York City, he was a shy introvert with few friends, but he wanted to build up his social network, so he started throwing cocktail parties to meet people. These parties changed his life, and he thinks they can change yours too. Nick knows what you’re thinking. You don’t throw parties and hosting them is simply not for you, but he’d encourage you not to tune out. He’s got a great case for why you should give this idea a try. And just as he does in his book, The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings, Nick is going to lay out exactly how to throw a party that’s low stakes and low effort. It’ll be highly successful in helping you build all kinds of connections.

Today on the show, Nick shares what he’s learned from throwing hundreds of parties and refining his hosting technique to a tee. He explains why cocktail parties are better than dinner parties and don’t have to involve actual cocktails, the best night of the week to throw a party, why the party should be only two hours long and have a firm end time, how many people to invite, and who to invite when you don’t yet have any friends, and he explains why he’s a big fan of two things you might be hesitant about, name tags and icebreakers, and why two of his favorite things to include in a party are grapes and a harmonica. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/party.

Alright. Nick Gray, welcome to the show.

Nick Gray: Thanks. Excited to talk about parties.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you got a book called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings. So you wrote this book, but you came after you started experimenting with hosting parties. How did it change your life? Like what happened to you professionally and personally once you started having these cocktail parties on the regular?

Nick Gray: I’ll start with the biggest benefit, is that professionally, it helped me launch a multi-million dollar business called Museum Hack. I don’t say that to brag, but just to say like there are real benefits to learning to host these gatherings. And I built that business based on having a warm list of people who knew that they knew me, they knew that I did good stuff by hosting these parties, that I ran a well-run event. So professionally, I launched this business. Personally, I got invited to more events. I became someone who got introduced to people because of these events. And this is one of the number one benefits that new hosts will tell me, “I’m now getting introduced to people. I never used to get introduced to people.” “Oh, you gotta meet Brett. He hosts these awesome events,” that became a part of my life, and I guess I take it for granted now that I’m constantly being email introduced or I get on a text thread or at a party or I’m out somewhere and someone’s like, “Oh dude, you gotta meet Nick. He hosts these events.” That never used to happen to me.

Yeah, so I just get invited to meet events, I meet really cool people, and then I’ve built some of my best friends. Those relationships that I’ve built have come out of them first coming to my parties. That was the first step, ’cause I believe that big relationships always start at the acquaintance level, so… Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I imagine you felt good too. I know when I go to a good event from mingling people, the after effect is like I feel good afterwards. I feel happy.

Nick Gray: Yeah, yeah. Somebody asked me… Look, I gotta say. Somebody asked me like, “Oh, your parties, that was an amazing party. Did you have fun?” And I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t say that my parties… I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t say this ’cause people are gonna hate it, but I wouldn’t say that I have fun at my parties. That’s not the reason that I do it. I am so happy afterwards because I’ve hosted a good event and people absolutely love it, but it is not fun… Does that make sense? Is there like a difference in like…

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, it’s not… Yeah, I would say like when you host a party, you feel tired and it can be exhausting, but you do feel good. You feel good because you got to rub shoulders with people and you’re able to bring people together, and that feels… It’s satisfying. Super satisfying.

Nick Gray: It’s super satisfying, and folks that I talk to, ’cause I’m very lucky I get to talk to people who read my book, and one of the things I say is, “Call me the day afterwards. I wanna hear how your party went,” and they say like, “That was amazing. I’ve never hosted a party,” and so they’re very happy and fulfilled, and they have this feeling… Here’s the key thing, you feel like you unlock a key life skill that nobody has ever taught us how to host a good event, like nobody’s taught us how to make friends as adults, and this is one of those things that like riding a bike or learning how to juggle, once you learn and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, great, I got it.”

Brett McKay: That’s a good point. I think a lot of people who might be listening to this and not party throwers and you’re trying to sell them on throwing parties, one of the selling points is if you wanna make more friends, this is an easy… You might think, “Well, party, that’s a lot of work,” we’re gonna show you actually, it’s easier than you think. The barrier to injury is not as high as you think it is. And it can… Like you said, you’ve made some of your best friends through these parties.

Nick Gray: Yes, hugely. Big friendships all started at that because… I don’t know. You tell me what you think about this. I think if you wanna meet interesting people, you have to do interesting things. And an easy hack to be someone who does interesting things is to host a party. Now, everyone wants to know someone who brings people together, and what I found was all that it takes is a simple two-hour gathering. In the time it takes you to watch a Netflix movie or something, you can gather 15 to 20 people and it just might change your life. It did for me. I sound like I’m a commercial or a multi-level marketing scheme, but I’m so red-pilled on the benefits of hosting these gatherings.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about the parties in general. Why did you choose parties, like a cocktail party over a dinner party?

Nick Gray: So I use that phrase, cocktail party, because it represents a lightweight social gathering, but you could call this whatever you want, a happy hour, a gathering. I like the phrase cocktail party because you say it to somebody and they immediately know, “Oh, this is a low commitment. I’ll meet a lot of people. It’ll just be conversations.” And as long as that phrase cocktail party has existed, it’s kind of always been about the people. There’s not a single drink recipe in my book. I don’t even drink alcohol myself. You don’t have to serve alcohol, but I found that cocktail parties got me 80% of the results of a dinner party with 20% of the work. And I can talk a little bit about why you should not host a dinner party, but many entrepreneurs and online advisers are like, “Start a mastermind group or a host a dinner party for other business owners.” I actually don’t think that’s the best advice for somebody just getting started. I actually think it hurts more than it helps.

Brett McKay: Why is that?

Nick Gray: Dinner parties require an extremely advanced level of facilitation and hosting skills. They’re also very stressful. People have dietary preferences. You have to manage the food. The hack, by the way, is that if you insist on hosting a dinner party, just order Thai food, like order a bunch of options, let people eat family style. But I found at least… So let’s say, for example, I’m trying to tightly curate a dinner of six people. By the way, more than six people and the dinner party conversation will naturally bifurcate into two groups. I don’t like that, I want it to be mono-track, and having something like a Jeffersonian dinner with 10 people on a mono-single conversation requires extremely advanced facilitation skills. And my book is really about just trying to convince a new generation of people, “Hey, if you’ve never hosted before, or if the most you would host is on your birthday party or at a major life event, consider how hosting can become a habit that you do once every other month to build up this network of acquaintances.”

Brett McKay: And I like too the idea of the cocktail party, because even if you don’t drink, everyone knows, when they picture a cocktail party, they probably picture, at least I do, 1950s, dudes in suits, women in nice dresses, but they’re just like at someone’s house and they have a drink in their hand and they’re just chatting. And I love that idea ’cause it’s so low commitment. You’re just gonna show up and you’re gonna talk, and the drinks are just something to give your hands to do, why you’re doing that basically. And I think today, oftentimes, I think when people think they wanna get people together, it’s gotta be some kind of big event and you gotta have… It’s gotta be elaborate and whatever, and so people end up just not doing anything. So I think bringing back this idea of the cocktail party is a great way to get people together more often.

Nick Gray: You said it much better than I did, which is that it’s just conversation. A cocktail party is lightweight conversation, a lot of people standing around, usually at somebody’s home, the drinks are the crutch, but they’re there, and it’s easy. You can pop in. If you don’t like it, you can leave after 30 minutes. Think about what it’s like when you invite somebody to an event. If I ask somebody to come over for dinner, I gotta be honest, that is a very intimate, large commitment that requires probably two to three hours of a dedicated schedule block. I really need like somebody to say yes to a dinner party. The key thing is a cocktail party is easy to say yes to. It’s easy for somebody to say yes to. And I found that at the beginning, for someone to be successful in hosting and making friends and building their network of acquaintances, the number one indicator of success for their first party is how many people show up.

Brett McKay: Alright, let’s start talking about planning these parties. We’re gonna call it a cocktail party. You don’t have to serve alcohol necessarily, but it’s just the mental model we’re using to help people understand like, “Oh, we’re just coming together to talk.” How far in advance should you plan a cocktail party?

Nick Gray: You need three weeks to plan your party, minimum, and again, the reason for that is I really want new hosts to be successful, and I’ve found that three weeks gives you enough time to first get the five yeses from your core group and then to cast a wider net and get 10 more yeses. Your goal is to get 15 people, and when you give yourself three weeks, I found that is a very healthy amount of time to fill up your guest list in one or two weeks and then just kinda have the next week to sit and simmer, send your reminder messages, buy the supplies, clean your house. You really don’t have to overly clean your house. That’s one of the biggest myths, is that you have to have a perfect home and perfect condition, shape, location. And there’s not a lot of supplies either. It’s under $100. But three weeks is about… For more advanced people, two weeks, but one of the biggest mistakes is it’s Monday and someone plans a party for Friday. There’s so much wrong with that.

Brett McKay: Well, one of the things wrong with that is, okay, first off, it’s short, not enough time, but you don’t like people having cocktail parties on Fridays or the weekends. Why is that?

Nick Gray: Friday and Saturday nights, at least where I live, are socially competitive days. Socially competitive days of the week mean that you will get bumped. Other things will come up. People are busy. They have things on their calendar. I suggest instead of these red level days to host on an easy day, like a Monday, a Tuesday or a Wednesday night. Those are the three nights that I like. And by the way, the whole thing is two hours, and so you’re not staying up till midnight on Tuesday night and everybody has to work, the party is generally two hours long, 7:00 to 9:00 PM approximately. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights are easier to say yes to. You get less of a flake rate, that’s the people that say they’ll come, but don’t, and I think it’s just non-traditional. It’s a little bit different. It also signifies that a Monday night is not a crazy blackout boozer drinkathon, like this is a social event, it is not about the drinking or the co-partying to the extreme.

Brett McKay: Alright, so you mentioned the title of the book is The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. You’ve put a hard limit on the party. Just two hours. Why the two-hour limit?

Nick Gray: One of the biggest mistakes people make is not setting an end time to their events. That causes slippage in what time people show up. It causes an extended awkward zone. The awkward zone happens at every party, even the ones I still throw. It’s the first 10, 15, 20 minutes of an event when you haven’t reached critical mass in the room when there’s only a couple of people who’ve shown up. At a party when you set a two-hour limit, people will show up on time, number one, that’s very important. Number two, it goes back to making it easy for people to say yes. When they know this is only a two-hour party, that’s easy. It’s a small space in their calendar. I also find that when you end things on a high note, when you end things that are going well, people think more highly of your event and then of you, so I like to end my party when things are going well. It gets people to be willing to come back. They say nice things about my parties. I also think two hours… I don’t know. I have a short attention span. Two hours is good.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And the other too I like about the limit, the hard limit, the hard end time is that we’ve all been in those parties where you’re ready to go, but there was no end times like, “Well, am I obligated to stay?” You can… Once it’s 9 o’clock, you’re like, “Alright, I’m out,” and no one’s gonna say anything ’cause that’s what time the party was over.

Nick Gray: Dude, I wanna talk about that for a second because there is this feeling when you’re at a party and you know when you kinda wanna leave, but you don’t wanna be a vibe kill. I don’t know what the word is.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you don’t wanna be the guy that’s like just ruining the vibe. Right, yeah.

Nick Gray: Right. And when you give your guests the excuse to leave, now you don’t have to end the party exactly at two hours, but you need to make an announcement, say, “Hey everybody, party was scheduled to end right now. Thank you so much for coming. If you need to leave, I just wanna say thank you. For everybody else, we can do a last call, start to wind down your conversations. Thank you for coming, and I’ll see you guys in a few minutes.” When you give them that exit, that release, people are surprisingly thankful for it. For those who have to go, they’re so thankful. “Hey, thank you for running a good event. I really appreciated that you ended your party on time.” You will be shocked and surprised how often that comment happens after you host a two-hour party.

Brett McKay: Well, the other benefit of the two-hour party that I just thought of and one of the reasons why you probably get more yeses is because if you’re a parent and you gotta find a babysitter, it’s hard to find… You can actually ask that 17-year-old to babysit your kids like, “Hey, I wanna be home at 9 o’clock,” instead of this, “Well, I don’t know when it’s gonna be over.” It could be 10 or 11 on a school night. Well, you’re not gonna find a babysitter.

Nick Gray: Right, right. And thinking about that, by the way, for those listeners who have kids that are wondering, “How do I host this party with kids?” We could riff on that. But one thing I have found is that if you have kids, if a lot of your friends have kids, a key unlock, a key hack, whatever word you wanna say, is to hire a babysitter to provide child care at your party, if you are able to, allows it to be even easier for your friends with kids to say yes. Now, maybe it’s not doable for you to hire the childcare for your party, then what you wanna do is host a simultaneous kid’s party in another room of the house. I have a article on my website that speaks about how to throw a simultaneous kid’s party, to play a movie, to get some snacks for them, what to do to make that a success and allow those parents to have adult conversations. What we don’t want is for the kids to be running around the house. It serves as a conversational crutch for the parents, and they don’t actually get to build those adult relationships that are so important.

Brett McKay: That’s a good point. I’ve been to events where it’s kids and parents mingling together, which some of those can be fine, that’s fine, I like those things, but sometimes we just want the adult conversation, and then you see the parents, like the kids will interrupt and the parents go, “Oh I gotta tend to Jimmy,” and it just… It throws the conversation off. Or the parents will invite their kids. I think they’re being well-meaning and well-intended, they’ll invite their 12-year-old, 13-year-old to the adult conversation, and it completely changes what you’re able to talk about because there’s a kid there.

Nick Gray: Yes. One thing that I have heard is that if you are hosting a children’s birthday party, if you are hosting a birthday party for one of your kids, consider using some things from my book, such as name tags for the adults. When we have these birthday parties for our kids and all the adults show up, that is a missed opportunity for the adults to meet new people and make new friends, and I will almost guarantee you that they will not know each other’s names at those events. You’ll say them, but it’s oftentimes forgotten. A little name tag can make a lot of difference to helping adults make new friends and make connections, even at a kid’s birthday party.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about the name tags. That’s really interesting. Okay, so let’s talk about… We talked about when to plan these things, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are best, you wanna set a hard two-hour limit ’cause it just increases the opt-in for it, and plus, it just… People like that, it’s short and they know when they can be finished with it. Let’s talk about where to host these things. Where should you host your party?

Nick Gray: For 95% of people that are listening to this, the best place to host is at your home. Your house is key to building these relationships and creating connections. Now, in certain situations, the house is not viable, but I’m gonna tell you why your home is best, even if you think it’s too small or it’s too far away or it’s too messy. First the why. When you host at home, it’s kind of a vulnerable act to invite someone into your home, and yet it creates this connection that’s almost like going on a little date with someone. It’s so vulnerable to be welcomed into someone’s home that you turbocharged the relationship. Imagine meeting somebody at a bar and the difference in meeting them at the bar or going to their home, you get to come into their personal space, which is so different and unique and it just doesn’t happen that often.

Hosting at home is also incredibly generous. It’s the difference of having to wait and handle a bar tab when people are having to buy their own drinks and things like that. That is not generous. And I believe that to build relationships, you have to give before you can ask, and the fact that you’re giving them drinks and snacks when they come up to your home, that’s very nice. Hosting at home is also nice ’cause you get to control who’s there. Everybody is there that you have invited. Hosting at home, you can control the music, the lighting. You are in charge. You are the leader when it’s at your home.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s the why you, you mentioned that a lot of people have… There’s some pushback. Why do people say, well, I wanna do this, but I don’t wanna do it at my house. What are the common reasons?

Nick Gray: As I’m recording this, I’m in New York City. I live in Austin, Texas. In both places I have very small apartments and people say, I have a tiny apartment, a tiny house. I cannot host people. I don’t have enough chairs. Well, number one, you don’t want chairs. If you have a large house, you wanna remove the chairs because sitting down is actually kryptonite to a successful event. When people sit down, they become locked in conversations, they become a bit lazy and it’s harder for people to approach and join those conversations. So at my parties, I actually want people standing much more often than sitting down. A small space, actually, the energy is way better. A small space is actually better than an enormous mansion for a party because in a small space you have that energy and excitement that feels more like a crowded bar. It doesn’t feel empty and big and ghostly like a huge mansion.

Some people say, “Oh, my house is way too far away. I’m in Green Point, New York. I’m in such and such place. That’s 30 minutes drive.” What I say to that is, don’t make the decision for your friends as to whether they will drive or not. Test it out, invite your core group. You will be surprised that people will be willing to come to you, even if it’s 30 or 35 minutes away. People will come for a cocktail party. It is so hard to meet new people. What you are doing is special. You and your home is enough of an excuse to make this a special night for your friends to come join you. The last thing I hear from people, “Oh, my house is too messy, I’ve got kids, I’m not the cleanest person.”

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very messy. I have junk all over my house and I take a couple large plastic bins or some old Amazon boxes and I kinda just clear off the countertops and put all the junk in the boxes and hide it in my closet. I will stack things on my bed in my room and just close that room off. And I tell you of many years hosting hundreds of parties, nobody has ever barged into my room or my closet and said, “Hey, here’s where he is storing all the junk. Let’s go everybody. We’re leaving this party.” To start a rival house party. Nobody says that, nobody’s gonna be peeking around for your junk, host your party at home, it will completely turbocharge how you can build these relationships.

Brett McKay: For the people who were saying, “My place is too small to host a party.” Here’s an insight from Henry David Thoreau. We all know he lived in a cabin he built on Walden. It was 10 feet wide by 15 feet long. And this is what he had to say about when he had visitors, he had people come to his place. He said this, “It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I had 25 or 30 souls with their bodies at once under my roof. And yet we often partied without being aware that we had come very near to one another.” So if Henry David Thoreau could have 30 people in his 10 ft by 15 ft cabin, you could probably have 7, 10 people in your small apartment.

Nick Gray: You can have 15 to 25 people. There’s this kid whose name is Peter in New York City. He hosted a cocktail party. His apartment is like the size of two yoga mats and I have a selfie of him and everybody packed in there and they’re all smiling. There’s a guy, Noah, who’s on my blog. I wrote about, he had 29 people in his 400-square-foot apartment in Chicago. You’ll be surprised when everybody’s standing and mixing about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’ve talked about where to host it at your home, if you can’t host it at your place, right? So there’s maybe that 5% that can’t do it. Where do you recommend doing it at?

Nick Gray: If you cannot host it your home. Here are some places you can host it. Number one, in a common or community space in your apartment or your neighborhood. Number two, at a co-working space, I have an article will include in show notes about how to host a good event if you’re a digital nomad or you have access to a co-working space. Number three, the key thing and the one that will help the most people. If you cannot host it your home, find a co-host. Find someone that has a larger space. This happens way more often than you think. Who wants to host? They say, “Wow, I got this beautiful house, but I just never host.” Link up with them. Now if you do that, you need to get them to buy in to the elements of my party formula. Say, “Hey, I’m gonna host this, but there’s some things. There’ll be name tags, we’re gonna do some rounds of icebreakers. I’m gonna kick people out at the end.” Get their buy-in for those elements. And that can turbocharge, having that co-host that is a major, major accelerator on your journey.

Brett McKay: All right, so we got the date, location, time for our party set. We talked a little bit earlier who you’re gonna invite. Who should you invite to these cocktail parties and like how many people should you be inviting?

Nick Gray: Okay, let’s start with the number of people. How many people, you need to have a minimum of 15 people to come to your party. Here’s why 15 is important. I have found that anything less than 15, there is not enough energy in the room. You don’t reach a critical mass for conversational collisions. Somebody walks into a room of 15 other people and they say, “Wow, I’m not gonna be able to talk to everybody here. Like this is kind of exciting.” If you walk into a room of seven or eight people, that is, I don’t know, there’s just not enough energy there. I have also found surprisingly that the more number of people actually requires less work during the party for you as a host. When I have 15-20 people, I can kinda step aside for a little bit. I am still an introvert and I need time to recharge.

And during my parties, I will often sneak into my room and scroll social media for a few minutes just to take a breather. And I can do that when there’s 15 people. When there’s less than that, I need to babysit people, there needs… There’s a lot more work you have to do as a host to monitor the room and keep people engaged. More than 22, the ice breakers take too long. The logistics are complicated. Welcoming people, name tags, for a first-time host, I think 15-20 is the right amount. Now to get 15-20, you will very likely have to invite a lot more than that. In small towns, maybe not the case. People don’t have a lot going on and maybe you can invite 25 and you’ll get 15 to 20 to say yes. In larger cities where maybe your relationships aren’t as strong or there’s a lot more going on, you will have to invite a lot more than that.

For your first party, who should you invite? Number one, it’s okay to invite couples. So you invite one person, ask ’em to bring their significant other that can double the size of those that attend. Do not mind… One piece of advice on what not to do. Do not reach from the top shelf for this first party. Say that you know Brett and you’re like, “Oh my God, I really wanna impress Brett, I hardly know him. Do not invite Brett to your first party.” Your first party should be a low-stakes affair where you’re inviting your friends, your neighbors, your work colleagues, those people that you feel close to and comfortable with. That is who you should do for your first party. If you’re trying to use these parties for business to impress potential clients, don’t do that on the first party. Keep it a low-stakes, no-stress affair.

Brett McKay: We also talked earlier about this idea of a core group of invitees. Who are these core group of party invitees?

Nick Gray: Your core group are people that you feel comfortable around your core group are people that if only those five people showed up, you would still have a good event. For me, that’s like my college friends, that might be my sister, that might be my girlfriend and one of her best friends, it might be my neighbor who I know these two guys that are my neighbors and I would invite them because I see them a lot. It’s not a big lift. That’s the five people that you feel close to who you know would show up on time, you know will maybe laugh at your jokes. Who just you can count on. And that’s what I consider your core group. You’re gonna test whether your party date and time are good by texting your core group a message like, “Hey David, I’m thinking of hosting a cocktail party on Tuesday night, March 14th at my apartment from 7:00-9:00 PM, if I do it, would you come? That’s the key phrase to your core group and you’re not gonna plan your party until you get five yeses from that core group.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the core group’s kind of like the sourdough starter, the kombucha starter.

Nick Gray: Yes, yes, yes.

Brett McKay: So after you got this core group, you said these are the five people you know who are gonna show up. What other sorts of people should you start inviting to get that 15?

Nick Gray: After your core group, you get those five yeses. Now you wanna get 10 great guests. These are everybody else at your party. They might be the person you worked with at your last job two years ago and you haven’t talked to them in a while. This might be somebody that you went to high school or college with and you haven’t talked to them in a little while. It might be your neighbors that you don’t know as well. It might be a friend of a friend that you’ve been meaning to meet up with a coffee, could be somebody at the gym that you see all the time and you say, “Hey, I’m hosting a cocktail party with some of my friends on Tuesday night.” Use this phrase, by the way, “Can I send you the info?” You don’t wanna say, do you wanna come? Will you come? It’s not the same as with your core group. For a great guest you’re gonna say, can I send you the info? And then you’re gonna send them the little page that you’ll create, which by the way, you have to collect RSVPs. But that’s that wider net of people who you cast more of into the acquaintance and less of a friend.

Brett McKay: And then at a certain point when you’ve gotten good at the hosting, you can start and asking those VIPs to come as well.

Nick Gray: Yes. And that is the biggest thing that you can use these parties for is to connect with VIPs. If you truly wanna build good relationships, I think you have to be able to give value first. The secret I found is that everybody wants to be invited to a party. I’ve given thousands of party invites and nobody has ever said, “No, do not send me the info for this free party that you’re hosting with free drinks, snacks and interesting people.” Nobody said that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I imagine those VIPs, they’re probably getting invited to things all the time and oftentimes they might say no, ’cause they’re like, “Well it’s, it’s high stakes, I’m gonna feel… ” But if you’re good at hosting these parties, you can present it to ’em like, “Hey, we have this thing on the regular, we’ve got interesting people in our community. We’d love to have you. If you can make it, it’d be awesome.” And they might be more likely to say yes to that.

Nick Gray: One big thing I found is that when I take a picture at my parties, I always snap a group photo and in my book it talks about exactly at what time to snap your group photo. I think probably about 30 minutes before your party is scheduled to end you would snap a group photo. The group photo is helpful, number one to follow up with everybody the next morning, “Hey everybody, thanks for coming. Here’s our group photo.” And then number two, I use that group photo when I plan my next parties, when I invite VIPs to show them what these parties look like, the people who attend it is social proof that this is a good event. And so those parties reaching out to the VIPs. The other piece of advice I found is that if you’re inviting VIPs because they are very busy, I will invite them to multiple events and give them, I say, “Hey, I host these cocktail parties, I get together some interesting people as well as my closest friends in the city. Would you like to come sometime? Here’s my next two.” And I’ll tell them the date and the time of the next two. And I found a much higher success ratio in getting people to come when I gave them multiple dates.

Brett McKay: Let’s say someone wants to start hosting these parties, they wanna make friends but they don’t have friends yet ’cause they’re, maybe they’re new to the city so they don’t have that core. How do you do that? How do you start developing that core group? You can start inviting so you can get these things going?

Nick Gray: If you absolutely have zero friends, this is a little bit out of my zone of expertise. I can tell you what I have done and what I’ve worked with people on. But I will give the little warning that these parties work best when you have at least five friends, five people you know that can be part of that core group. If you know absolutely no one, you still need to pick a date and time, give yourself more, more of a party runway. Instead of three weeks, let’s say four weeks, you’re now gonna set that date and time. Let’s say it’s a Tuesday night from 7:00-9:00 PM, you are now going to start to go to events in your local town or community. A lot of people tell you this, this is not new advice, but I would say that going to a yoga class, a workout class, a sports event, think about you basically have two opportunities to meet people that’s in the 5 or 10 minutes before the yoga class starts and the 5 or 10 minutes after.

And at each of those interactions you can really only meet one person. You’re not gonna jump around the room inviting tons of people. That’s just gonna look or feel weird in my experience. You can go to events like this, you can look up groups around your hobbies, you can join a sports team, you can go and literally pass out flyers in your neighborhood or slide them under the doors of your neighbors. A guy named Richard in Calgary, Canada did this. He moved to a new apartment building, literally knew nobody and put up flyers. “Hey I’m hosting a housewarming party.” He slid ’em under the doors, he put up signs in the common areas and he invited his neighbors to come and that helped him build a core group. The other advice I tell people is that like I love diversity at my parties and diversity extends to the occupations.

I don’t mind inviting the barista of the cafe that I go to. I don’t mind inviting folks that work at the library, things like that, saying this thing to them, “Hey, I just moved to town, I’m meeting these interesting people, I’m hosting a party, just, it’s hard to make new friends as adults, can I send you the information?” If you are new to town, you can lean on that as part of your introductions. “I’m new to town, I’m meeting all these interesting people, I’m new to town, I’m trying to meet some new people.” People respect that you have just moved to town. Why? Because it’s a vote in their favor. You have moved to their town. You think that their town is the best place that you can possibly live and they will respect and appreciate that, that idea that you’re new to town, do not feel shy to lean into that.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words, more sponsors. And now back to the show. So you got your people you’re going, going to invite, how do you invite them? Like what’s the best way? Is it a mass message or do you invite people one by one?

Nick Gray: This is so key. You have to invite people one-on-one. I will say to them, “Hey, I’m hosting an event on Tuesday night in three weeks can I send you the info?” I get them to say yes before I invite them to the party. Why is this important? It’s a double opt-in introduction. I’m getting them to say yes sort of and it boosts the attendance rate. I’m trying to sort of make it a little hard for somebody to RSVP to the party because I don’t want a large flake ratio. I don’t want a lot of people who say that they are going to come and then to not show up.

How do I invite them? Say that I knew somebody, I hadn’t seen them in two or three years from work, from my last job. I’d send them a message like this. I’d say, “Hey John, I haven’t chatted in a while. I’m hosting a happy hour here in town at my apartment on this date and time, I’m getting together folks I used to work with, my neighbors and my friends from sports. Can I send you the info? Hope you’re well and having a great year.” I would send out a bunch of little messages like that to gauge the interest. Once they say yes, then you’re going to say, “Hey, great. Here’s the information please RSVP here.” And you need to get them to sign up on your little event page.

I think this is very, very important. Now there’s a few platforms that will do free events. I don’t like using Facebook events anymore. Five years ago I did, but now I don’t. Now I use this one tool that’s called Mixly, Gen Z, loves this one called Party Full. You could use paperless post. The important thing is you just want a free simple service that folks can just make their commitment to attend your party. It creates a little social contract and then when you display the guest list, it also shows social proof that other people will be attending your party.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that social proof’s important. Before you do the RSVP, you wanna make sure, yeah, that core group you’re gonna show up ’cause like nothing, nothing’s a vibe killer.

Nick Gray: Yes.

Brett McKay: Then you, you sent out the RSVP and like zero people have checked in that they’re gonna come.

Nick Gray: Yes, yes. It’s like the old days of Facebook events where it’s like 97 invited, 3 yes. And you’re like, “Wait a second, what’s going on with this party?” I talk a lot about social proof and I think the reason why is that the purpose of these parties, is to meet new people. Your friends will want to come and be happy that they came because they will meet so many people and the party is structured in a way that there are a lot of little conversations happening. That’s what make these parties successful.

Brett McKay: And the other thing you do, as the event gets closer with that events page, you will actually… You’ll like put bios of some of the people who’ve committed to coming and that can be useful ’cause it allows people who are going to see, “Okay, who’s gonna be here? I have an idea who’s gonna be there.” But also for the people who have been on the fence, maybe they’ll see, “Oh wow, this, there’s gonna be some cool people there. I’m gonna opt in now ’cause I saw that bio on the event page.

Nick Gray: Dude, the bios are my secret weapon. The bios are… I use them in my reminder messages. By the way, you need to send three reminder messages. One that’s about a week before your party. One that’s three or four days before your party and the other the morning of your party. But these guest bios that you mentioned are brief little anecdotes or summaries or talking points about half or more of all of your guests. They could be as simple as, Jim is my neighbor, he has a golden retriever. I think he works in tech. [laughter]

It could be as detailed as saying like, “Brett hosts a podcast, ask him about some of his recent guests we met through the internet.” They’re not long detailed things, but they’re little blurbs about people that give the attendees conversational access points and I’ll tell you why they’re important. Probably half of the people you’ll invite could be introverts, some of them have social anxiety. Seeing this list of who is going to be there, makes people so excited to attend, it gives them the confidence to create these new conversations, and like you said, if somebody’s on the fence, it really ensures that they actually will show up.

Brett McKay: And some people might think the reminders is overkill, but as someone who’s like, I’ve organized events for different things, it is not overkill. You cannot over-communicate because people are getting inundated with all sorts of emails, text messages, so stuff slips through the cracks, and so you have to over-communicate ’cause chances are, they’re gonna miss maybe one or two of those reminders you sent.

Nick Gray: In hundreds of parties that I have hosted, I have never had somebody say, “Hey, you were spamming me too much with these reminder messages.” Instead, I consistently receive over a 90% attendance rate of those that are gonna come. What’s the down side? The downside of this is, yes, maybe you send one too many message, but it takes somebody five seconds to move on from an email message. The upside is that you show that you are a host who cares. In this age of like, too cool to care, you are showing that you are someone putting thought and effort into the planning of this social experience, in this cocktail party, happy hour. You show that you’re a host who cares and people appreciate the heck out of it. You’re gonna be seen as a super connector and people are gonna look at your hosting skills like you’re a magician, when all you did is just host a cocktail party, it’s amazing.

Brett McKay: I was talking about supplies, we kind of mentioned it, it’s not much. Some cups, some drinks, some snacks, you don’t want anything that you have to warm-up. Nuts are great. Maybe a cheese platter. That’s it. $100 max is what you have to spend on these things.

Nick Gray: $100 max, the bar, by the way, is a self-serve bar, so you’re just gonna buy some liquor and some mixers and some non-alcoholic options. People love seltzers. One thing that I added in the last week of finishing my book to the list of supplies, was grapes. I would encourage anybody listening, that sounds so silly, but in all these calls I do with people, the next day I always ask, “What snacks got eaten, what snacks didn’t get eaten?” Everybody eats the grapes, grapes are such a good party snack, and that and the harmonica, I think are my two things that I’m like, “That is so weird, why include those?”

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about a few things you mentioned, harmonicas, we’ll talk about that later, but first name tags.

Nick Gray: [laughter] People are gonna think I’m crazy.

Brett McKay: It’s all right. Let’s start with the name tags, so you make your guests wear name tags. Now, people might be like, “Well, this is like a cocktail party. Grandpa in the 1950s in his coat, suit, he wouldn’t be wearing a name tag.” Why do you make your guests wear a name tag?

Nick Gray: I talked to a kid yesterday who’s hosting a brunch on Sunday, and he was like, “All right, I’ve listened to everything, I don’t know about the name tags. I don’t want this to feel too formal, I don’t know if my friends will be up.” So I said, “Well, what’s the purpose of your brunch?” He said, “Well, I’m having about 20 people over, it’s kind of a house warming.” I said, “Do you know everybody’s name?” He said, “Yeah, of course.” I said, “Does everybody else know everybody’s name?” He said, “Oh. No. No, I guess not.” Name tags are important because while you may know everybody’s name and know that they know your name, they do not know everybody else’s names. And here’s why it’s helpful. When you have name tags, you will show that this is not a party of cliques. This is not a clique out party with your work friends together, your hockey friends together, and your neighbors all mixing. When we wear a name tag, it serves as a sports uniform, that we’re all on the same team, that this is a safe space to go meet new people. It makes it easier, you don’t have to remember all these different names.

I’m bad with names, and ultimately that’s why I started using these name tags, but I have found that… This is the one thing, name tags make it easier to talk to new people. The whole purpose of this party is for your friends to meet other friends. Remember, you have to give before you can ask for anything to build relationships. When you do name tags, even at house parties, it will make it such a conducive environment to create new conversations, and make it easier for people just to go up and speak to somebody new.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point ’cause I think a lot of conversation when you’re starting off with somebody you don’t know, a lot of it’s just spent, “Oh, what’s your name?” And then you have to spend all this time, this bandwidth in your brain, I gotta remember… Saying their name over, “Okay, it’s Jeff. It’s Jeff. It’s Jeff. It’s Jeff.” And then you’re not in the conversation, ’cause when it finally turns to you, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know what they’re talking about ’cause I’m still trying to remember Jeff’s name here.”

Nick Gray: Yes. I’m so bad with names. I went to this one event that was in New York, and there was this CEO who is a woman who started a company, multi-million dollar PR firm, and she remembered my name, and she called me from across the room, “Nick, oh my God, it’s so good to see you,” and I was like a deer caught in the headlights. I had forgotten her name, it was obvious that I had forgotten her name. I could have solved it by saying like, “Oh my God, it’s so good to see you, remind me what your name is again.” But honestly, this had been several years that I had casually seen her at social events, I was mortified. And that could have been solved with a simple name tag.

Brett McKay: And with the name tag, you actually write the name for your guest when they come in, correct? You don’t let the guests write heir own name. Why is that?

Nick Gray: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a small thing, and I have a lot of specific preferences, for example, first name’s only, big block letters. I think you should write the name tag when your guest come in, it gives you a way to welcome everybody, to sort of establish yourself as the party leader. It gives you a chance one-on-one, when I write the name tags, “Hey, what’s up? What’s your name? Thanks for coming.” “Alex.” “Alex, A-L-E-X. Here’s you name tag, Alex. Go over to the bar to see John, he’ll help you find a drink, but thank you so much for coming today.” It gives me a chance one-on-one to have a connection with every single person who attends.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So let’s talk about those early moments. So you have a start time, that you want people to be there on time, and the two-hour limit encourages that, but there’s always gonna be those moments where you just have two, three people, and it’s like you’re 10 minutes in, that’s kind of awkward. You’re like, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” How do you handle that awkwardness when there’s just a few guests and it’s just you and them?

Nick Gray: Number one, know that this awkward zone happens at every single party. I’ll give you some tools and tips how to get out of the awkward zone, but, one, know that it happens and that it’s normal. Number two, a way to ease the awkward zone is to ask some of those people in your core group to arrive five or 10 minutes early. Now, even though they are your best friends, they will still probably show up late, so maybe ask them 15 or 20 minutes to come early, but you can ask them to show up early and say, “Hey look, I just want some friendly faces around the room when other people start to show up.” That will help the room feel a little more welcome and comfortable.

Number three, what does everybody say when they show up and they’re one of the first to arrive? They say, “How can I help?” Well, be ready to give them a way that they can help. I have a list in my book of things they can do to help, but some of those are, help me with the coat check. “This is where people hang up their jackets, can you help them?” Help people get a drink. “John, will you help for the first 15 minutes, I’ll send people over to you to grab a drink.” You can ask somebody to be the photographer. “Tyler, can you take pictures tonight, I always forget to take pictures. Can you take photos?” Be ready to delegate duties to some of those first arrivals. That is a key thing and why? Because now they’ll feel invested in the success of your party.

Some people, by the way, won’t want to help with drinks. “Oh, I don’t… Not really.” That’s okay. Say, “No problem, thanks so much. Just hang out over here and make yourself comfortable, and I’ll see you in a few minutes.” Giving people duties and things that they can do at the beginning is helpful. And then number four, do your first icebreaker. When you have about four or five people, you’re gonna lead this first round of icebreakers, mostly for you to practice. That first icebreaker is just for you to practice, because many people have never led an icebreaker before, never mind at their home. And so you’ll lead a icebreaker to help you exit the awkward zone when you have four or five people. That first icebreaker, by the way, you’re just gonna go around the room, “Hey, everybody. Just say your name, say what you do for work,” and if you have enough time, then maybe you’ll do one more thing. But that’s how to exit the awkward zone and manage that first 10-20 minutes. Again, however, when you host a two-hour cocktail party, you will be shocked at how many people show up on time, compared to normal parties with no end time, when people show up 30, 45 minutes, even an hour late, very common.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about these icebreakers ’cause I think a lot of people they hear icebreakers, they think summer camp, or they think some corporate retreat, and they’re like, “Ugh, I don’t like icebreakers.” So why do you incorporate ice breakers in your party, and how are they different from maybe the ones they might have done at some office retreat?

Nick Gray: I think icebreakers get a bad rep because a lot of people do them wrong. I hate though, “Say a fun fact about yourself.” or, “Two truths and a lie.” I think about icebreakers as green, yellow, red level of intensity or vulnerability, and many people will start with the red level, which is totally wrong. They’ll ask, “What was your worst first date. What was your first kiss?” or something like that. That’s a terrible icebreaker. That is terrible. I will start my parties with a green level icebreaker. Now, a green level icebreaker, an example is, what is one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast? That may sound silly or stupid, but I promise you having led thousands of icebreakers, this works 100% of the time, here’s why. It is easy to remember. It does not require a lot of thought. There is minimal judgment. And it ever so slightly expresses something about somebody’s personality. The answer is also generally very short. Now, some people don’t eat breakfast and they can say why they don’t eat breakfast, that’s fine. But the breakfast icebreaker is good at the beginning of a party when there’s not a lot of rapport built up, and you can just share.

For example, mine would be, “I like scrambled eggs, my secret ingredient is coconut oil, it really fluffens them up. Sometimes I’ll add spinach to them.” Now, note that what I said was, “What is one of your favorite breakfasts?” I didn’t say, “What is your absolute favorite thing to eat?” I just wanna know what’s one of your go-tos. Similarly, if you were to ask as an icebreaker later on, “What is your favorite book?” That’s not a good example. That’s definitive, it’s subjective, and it really will elicit judgment. People wanna know, “What’s the best book? I wanna sound smart. What’s my absolute favorite?” People freeze up. The way to modify that would be to say, “What is one of your favorite books? What is a book you have read recently?” Allow them to pick so they don’t feel like they’re going to be judged on their favorite.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So the ice breakers, what are the purpose? Why do you do these in the first place? Why not just let people just start getting together and talking? Why facilitate this?

Nick Gray: Yeah, I’m sorry, I jumped in too much to the logistics. Let’s talk about the why. You gotta tell people why you’re doing the icebreakers, and the purpose is that it’s a conversational crutch, it’s an excuse to go up and talk to somebody new, but more importantly, it’s a survey of the room. I got tired of going to these events in New York, 20 people in the room, I don’t know who I need to talk to to help my business if I’m trying to network. You want people to say a little about themselves. Are you a parent? You probably wanna talk to other parents. You have a unique life situation. Are you working on a startup? Are you hiring? You probably wanna talk to other people that relate to that. An icebreaker serves as a little roll call around the room, to know who’s there, and to inspire some new connections and conversations. It also has a secret purpose. When you break the room for an icebreaker, you bring an end to existing conversations. Have you ever been at a party and you get trapped in conversation? After five minutes, you’re kind of done talking to this person, but you’re just not ready to say, “Okay, well, thank you very much. I think I’m ready to go meet some other people.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, that happened to me once. I went to an event and I got stuck talking to this person for the entire thing. And I wasn’t able to… And I should have been more assertive. Like, “Oh, I wanna go talk to other people,” but they just kept talking and talking and talking, and by that point, that was the only person I talked to.

Nick Gray: Dude, that happens to all of us. That happens to me even. And I was hosting an event here in New York City and I had to train a bunch of facilitators, and they said, “How do I leave the conversation? After I do the icebreaker, how do I leave?” And I said, “Well, I just say something like this, ‘Hey, thank you so much, it was really nice to meet you. I’m gonna go mix around the room and mingle with some other people.'” And this guy followed up with me the next day, he said, “I never knew that you could say that.” I thought that you just wait till the conversation dies and the other person leaves or something, I never knew that you could end a conversation like that.” That little thing, nobody really teaches us these stuff.

Brett McKay: But the icebreakers as the host, you’re kind of helping people with that, in the conversations they might be in.

Nick Gray: Exactly.

Brett McKay: You’re doing these every 30 minutes or so, is that right?

Nick Gray: Roughly every 25 minutes or so, you’re gonna do two and a half icebreakers. So that first one, I call it the half one, that’s at about… Let’s say your party starts at 7:00, that’s a 7:10 or so, about 20 minutes later at 7:30, you’re gonna do the full… The first big icebreaker with everybody, that’ll take five or seven minutes. About 35 or 40 minutes later, you’ll do your last icebreaker of the night. And that one, by the way, is your value-additive icebreaker. Should I talk about that one? And how that is… Yeah.

Brett McKay: Sure, yeah. And again, I think when you’re doing these, you’re having people stand in a circle and you’re just going around, all right, share your name and then answer the question about your favorite breakfast food. That’s kind of what it looks like.

Nick Gray: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: And you want them to be fast. You don’t wanna let people talk forever, and ever. Just like, “You gotta be done in 30 seconds.” You maybe even set that time limit for people.

Nick Gray: Dude, I’m so glad you mention this, because you need a sense of urgency when you’re running these. A good icebreaker is a fast icebreaker, and you need to be looking at everybody, thanking them, “Oh, thank you, John. Let’s go to Gina next.” You need to be directing the group.

Brett McKay: Yeah, keep the pace going.

Nick Gray: Keep the pace going, and yes, you have to have everybody stand up and get them in a circle. “Hey, everybody. Let’s all stand up in a circle real quick. I promise this won’t be awkward, we’re gonna do this icebreaker to give you an excuse to meet somebody new. I found it’s so great to meet new people, and doing this party, that’s the reason why I brought you all together. Bear with me. Let’s go around the circle. Say your name, what you do for work. If you don’t wanna talk about work, then you can say how you spend your days or something, a hobby that you have.”

Brett McKay: And also, that’s what the harmonica is for, to get their attention. You mention the harmonica.

Nick Gray: I know, I mentioned the harmonica and I hesitate to bring it up, because I don’t want somebody to totally blow me off, but I have found that at a large event with 15, 17 people in my apartment, I was always yelling above the crowd. I turn the music down, I’m clanking a glass, I’m yelling, “Hey, everybody. Hey, quiet, quiet, quiet.” And I tried all these different things to get people to be quiet. And I don’t know how to play the harmonica, I don’t have a musical hair on my body, but I somehow had a harmonica and I just blow a little tone in the harmonica like a whistle but much softer, and that noise, which is a little calming, helps people to quiet down and to be like, “What is this?” It’s also playful and it’s silly. I am not gonna talk anymore about the harmonica for fear of totally losing people, but I have… I will swear by it, it’s in my book, I have videos on my website on how to do it.

Brett McKay: It works.

Nick Gray: You gotta do it.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the value-add for that last icebreaker. What are you doing there for the value-add?

Nick Gray: So the value-add icebreaker, let me give the three questions, I guess I’ll start though and say the why. You want your last icebreaker for people to get smarter. You want them to get ideas or suggestions of things in town or stuff they wanna do, so that they leave your party feeling smarter. I don’t wanna know somebody’s worst job they ever had, that’s not value-add. A value-add icebreaker for me is one of these three, number one, what is the best piece of media, or one of the best pieces of media that you’ve consumed recently? That could be a podcast like the Art of Manliness, that could be a book that you read, it could be a movie you watched, that show you binged on Netflix. Just, what’s some good media that you’ve consumed?

That’s great. People love to get these recommendations, and they’re often trying to write them down, and they leave with all these good ideas. That’s number one. Another one that you could use is, what is one of your favorite purchases you’ve made over the last few months for $100 or less? That could be a kitchen gadget, it could be an object, or an experience. It could be a massage, it could be a tour, it could be a new blender thing you got. But people love this one as well, they love hearing these types of things. And then the last one that I like is, what is your favorite city or life hack for the town that we’re in? Say we’re in St. Louis, what’s your favorite dog park in St. Louis, local business you like to support? What’s your favorite little thing about this town that we might not know or that you’re just passionate about?

I do these icebreakers… By the way, for this last one, you’re gonna wanna give people about a five-minute warning before you do it. “Hey, everybody in five minutes, we’re gonna do the last icebreaker of the night. The question will be… ” and you tell them the question. You say, “Grab another refill, use the restroom if you need to freshen up, we’ll do that last icebreaker in five minutes.” By the way, that’s yet another chance for people to end their conversations. I’m constantly at the party, looking to mix the room up, I wanna see movement in my parties.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk… You’ve done the icebreaker, the party end time is coming near, how do you end a party, and why is it important that you end right on time? And what do you do with those people who, they can’t get the hint, they’re sort of lingering around?

Nick Gray: Let’s start with why. Why do you end the party? Because like we said, you wanna finish the party on a high note, you wanna bring finality, you wanna be the leader of your event, you don’t want it naturally just to fizzle out, you wanna sort of end it with authority and finish it up on a high note. How do you do that? Number one, by setting the expectations. In the invitations, in the RSVP, you’ll be listing a start time and the end time. When people know that there’s the end time, they know they have an idea. You wouldn’t surprise people to say, “Hey, show up to my party at 7:00,” and then suddenly you say that it’s ending. They’ll know when you list the start time and the end time. Now, how do you end the party? 15 minutes before the party is scheduled to finish, I’ll make a little announcement, I’ll turn down the music, I’ll say, “Hey everybody. Party is scheduled to end about 15 minutes, I guess this is last call, so make a last drink, grab some snacks if you want, say hey to somebody new or start to wrap up your conversations. We’ll wind down in about 15 minutes.” I then will turn the music back up.

And when the party is scheduled to end, I’ll turn the music down, I’ll turn the lights up, and I’ll make announcement, “Thank you guys so much for coming. The reason that I hosted this party was to bring people together. I’ve met so many interesting people. It’s hard to stay in touch. I hope you got a chance to meet somebody new. Thank you everybody, and I’ll see you next time.” Then I kinda just start to clean up and start to tidy and people get the hint and start to make their way out. Now, what you need to be aware of is sometimes someone will be there who hasn’t had a chance to talk to you or they haven’t seen you in years, and they’ll say something, “Brett, oh my God, I didn’t get to talk to you all night. Dude, let’s catch up. Let’s sit down.” And what I will say to them because I’m kind of strict on my stuff, I’ll say, “Dude, I am so glad you came tonight. I would love to catch up. I haven’t seen you in forever. I wanna stick to my goals with this and I need to wrap up tonight, can I call you tomorrow? Because I wanna stay in touch and I wanna see what’s up and what’s new with you, may I call you tomorrow?” That will get the person to feel seen, and they will not feel like you’re being dismissive of them.

One final thing you can do is, if people are really having a great time, you can plan ahead with a venue that they can go to next. You can give them a name of a local restaurant, or a bar or something, if you live in a town where those things are nearby. “Hey everybody, thank you so much for coming tonight. Folks are gonna keep going next door at Beatnik. So if you want, meet us down at the bar there, I’m gonna start to wrap up here ’cause I got my goals to finish on time, but if you wanna keep chatting, I encourage you to go down to Beatnik and you can have a drink or a slice of pizza down there.” That’s generally how you wrap up the party.

Brett McKay: So you’ve successfully had your first party, any follow-up you need to do after the party is over? Like the next day, or the next few days?

Nick Gray: I send a simple thank you the next morning where I include the group photo, again, just keeping it sort of top-of-mind if people wanna follow-up or if they forget anything. I would note that if you’re using these parties to try to build relationships, you really only have about 16 hours after your party ends to try to create and deepen that next connection. So if I’m trying to connect with somebody, I will invite them to my party, and that day at the party itself, I’ll say, “Hey, I’d love to get to know you better, can we schedule a coffee for some time later this week, or next week?” Or the next morning, “John, thank you for coming last night. I’d love to chat more. Can I call you later today or tomorrow?” That is the time when you would make that ask.

Brett McKay: Right. Within 16 hours. If you wait too long, it gets cold, it gets stale.

Nick Gray: Yeah. That’s not 17 hours. I just say the half-life of what somebody owes you after a party, life goes on, and if you expect to follow-up with somebody one week after your party, and them to be ultra responsive to your invitation, I haven’t found that. I found that the next morning is a good time for me to follow up, next afternoon is fine, but if I wait two days afterwards, life goes on. Folks are busy, they have work, family, friends.

Brett McKay: And I imagine the next thing too besides that follow-up, is start planning your next party?

Nick Gray: If possible. If you are excited and many people are, keep the momentum going and pick your next party date. Even if it’s 6-8 weeks out, get that date on your calendar. Why? Because now you’ll have it when you meet somebody interesting. You’re like, “Hey, I’m hosting a cocktail party in six weeks. Once I get everything together, can I send you the info?” And this is the thing, you go through life, and you just start collecting interesting people that you get to bring into your world.

Brett McKay: Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nick Gray: The name of my book is The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. It’s available wherever books are sold online. I recorded the audio book, I’m very proud of it. And then I have a ton of resources on this website, I’ll try to include notes in the show notes. I’m very big on social media, I love posting stories and funny videos, so you can check me out. I’m @nickgraynews, N-I-C-K-G-R-A-Y, news, N-E-W-S. And I have a really cool friends newsletter. Oh, and if you wanna download an executive summary of my book, a checklist of 17 things you can do before your next party, sign up for our newsletter, nickgray.net, and you’ll get that PDF download right away.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nick, great. Thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Nick Gray: Thanks. More parties.

Brett McKay: Let’s do it. My guest here is Nick Gray, he’s the author of the book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, nickgray.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/party where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure you check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter, a daily or weekly options, they’re both free. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to Stitcherpremium.com, sign up using the code manliness at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher App on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to review our podcast for Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, if you think you will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #874: Throw a 2-Hour Cocktail Party That Can Change Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all had plenty of firsthand social experience. 

We all know how good it feels to be complimented, appreciated, reached out to.

Yet when we contemplate directing such behaviors toward others, we hesitate. We worry that it will be awkward or figure the person won’t really care about the gesture.

This mismatch between our perception of how others act toward us, and how we think others will perceive how we act toward them, is created by our innate egocentricity. We get caught up in thinking about our own thoughts; if we noticed that we acted awkward during an interaction, we figure the other person noticed our awkwardness too. We struggle to step through our own feelings to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes; if doing something doesn’t give us a sense of positive surprise, we can’t imagine the positive surprise it will create in someone else.

Reams of studies have been done on the human failure to accurately read other people’s minds. But our common weakness in perspective-taking is more than just a psychological curiosity. It has very real effects on our social life, demotivating us from doing the kinds of things that will help us develop richer and more positive connections with friends, family, and even strangers.

Below are nine research-established mental distortions to be aware of. Understanding them will help you be more proactive and confident in social interactions and keep in mind these important and overlooked truths: talking with others will go better than you think; people are less critical of you than you suppose; folks appreciate affirmation far more than you know.

1. You underestimate how much you’ll enjoy talking to a stranger. People in subway cars and other public places tend to keep to themselves — listening to music with headphones in; staring off into space. They’re reluctant to start a conversation with the folks around them because they think their overtures will be rejected or the attempted conversation will be stilted. But such pessimism is overblown; studies find that when you do strike up a conversation with a stranger, the interaction is more welcomed, enjoyable, and mood-boosting than expected. You never know where a conversation with a stranger will lead; at the very least, it will cause you to feel a little bit happier.

2. You underestimate how much new acquaintances like you. After meeting someone at a party, you go home and think, “Boy, was I awkward! They probably think I’m a real goober.” Actually, they probably don’t. People typically like you and enjoy your company much more than you think. Researchers call the mismatch between what you think people think of you and what they really do think of you “the liking gap,” and it can last a long time; even college students who shared a dorm room and interacted daily believed that their roommates liked them less than they actually did for several months. So spend less time ruminating on how poorly you think you came off to others; as researchers concluded: “after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.”

3. You underestimate how much people will care about intimate disclosures. Most people say they’d like to move beyond small talk to have deeper and more meaningful conversations with new acquaintances. Yet they’re reluctant to share the kinds of revelations that would make these deeper conversations possible. That’s because they overestimate how awkward doing so will be and underestimate how much people will be interested in such disclosures. In reality, research shows that people care about the more intimate details of your life more than you think. You don’t want to overshare, of course, but don’t stubbornly stick to only the shallowest of conversation, either.

4. You underestimate how much someone else will be thinking about you after conversing. You have a meaningful and interesting conversation with a stranger or a good friend and find yourself chewing on the things discussed in the hours and even days afterward. But you figure the conversation didn’t feel as significant to the other person, and they’re not doing the same. Wrong. “Studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know” and “remember their stories [and] revisit their advice.”

5. You underestimate how willing people are to help you. We can be reluctant to ask for help because we figure the people we might ask are likely to say no, and that even if they say yes, they’ll feel put out by the request. But studies show that people are much more likely to comply with requests for help than people predict and feel more positively about giving this help than people expect. Folks very often want to help, and they feel good when they’re able to do so.

6. You underestimate how hesitant someone will feel to ask you for help. You see a loved one struggling, and, unsure of what to do for them, assuage the guilt you feel about not reaching out by saying, “Well, if they needed help, they would ask for it.” Probably not. Even though they themselves are hesitant to ask for help, people still routinely discount the discomfort — the feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness — that others feel in doing so. If you wait for someone to ask for help, you’ll likely wait forever. Use your sagest discernment to assess what they need, and then just step in and take care of it. 

7. You underestimate how much your appreciation will be appreciated. It’s easy to let an upwelling of gratitude for something someone did or who they are in general go unexpressed because you figure it won’t really mean that much to them or will make them feel weird. But research shows that people overestimate how awkward receiving an expression of gratitude will make someone feel and underestimate how much the person will appreciate it. Never hesitate to express your gratitude to others.

8. You underestimate the positive impact of giving a compliment. It’s the same deal here as with expressions of gratitude: people overestimate how awkward giving a compliment will be and underestimate how good the compliment will make its recipient feel. Offer praise regularly and freely. 

9. You underestimate how much someone will appreciate you checking in with them. You write up a text to an old friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. Something like, “Hey! I was just thinking about you today. How have you been?” But then you delete the message, thinking, “Hmm, maybe they’ll think I’m weird for reaching out out of the blue like this.” Not so: research finds that people appreciate a check-in message more than you’d think, and the more distant you’ve been, and the more surprising the message is, the more it makes their day. So the next time you find yourself thinking about an old friend, go ahead and hit send on that “Hey man!” message. 

The post 9 Mental Distortions That Are Sabotaging Your Social Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all likely encountered someone who’s acting angry or hysterical. 

A customer flips his lid at you because he didn’t get his order exactly how he wanted it.

A co-worker goes berserk because someone failed to fill up the coffee pot.

A friend is freaking out because she lost her job.

These kinds of situations can feel fraught and catch us flat-footed. 

Because the person is making you and others uncomfortable, may escalate their emotional outburst into something legitimately dangerous, or is someone you simply care about and want to help, you’d like to be able to calm them down.

But how do you do that?

I talked to three-time AoM podcast guest Laurence Alison to get his advice. Laurence is a forensic psychologist who trains military and law enforcement agencies worldwide on how to interrogate and question criminals and terrorists. His job requires him to talk to and build instant rapport with people who are often really, really angry and really, really upset. Here are six rules he’s learned from his line of work that you can apply in your own life.

6 Rules for Calming Someone Down

Your overarching goal when calming someone down is to create a context that allows their angry/upset feelings to dissipate. You do that by 1) preventing them from getting even more amped up, and 2) facilitating the discharge of their stressed feelings. These six rules cover both prongs of this approach. 

Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Instincts 

According to Laurence, the biggest mistake you can make when dealing with someone who is angry or upset is to follow your instincts.

“You feel upset because they feel upset, and you don’t like feeling upset, so you’ll say or do things to calm them down that are actually counterproductive,” Laurence told me. 

If you want to calm someone down effectively, you can’t operate from a place of emotional reactivity. You have to override your feelings of stress that are being stirred up by the other person. You can’t let their emotions spread to you. Your job is to stay cool and collected. 

Rule #2: Don’t Tell the Person to “Calm Down!”

When we see someone upset or angry, we instinctively want that person to stop being upset or angry. So we usually say something like, “Hey, you need to chill out!”

But according to Laurence, you never want to tell someone to calm down. 

“When you’re dealing with angry or anxious individuals, you want to avoid what we call ‘reactants,'” he told me. “These are words or actions that will only agitate the person even more. A big reactant is instructing, advising, or trying to persuade someone to calm down. Being told what to do just sets people off. It’s like a red flag for a bull.”

So while your instinct will be to say, “Calm down,” don’t do that. 

Rule #3: Keep Some Space Between You and the Person

Another reactant that amplifies someone’s upset is crowding them physically. When dealing with someone who’s agitated, you should instead put some space between you and them. Not only does this help reduce the person’s agitation, Laurence says, but it also protects your safety. 

This is especially important when dealing with someone you don’t know, as you’ll be more uncertain of their potential for violence. Laurence recounted a situation that went sideways where a guy didn’t maintain space between himself and an angry stranger:

I had a case where a guy had a barking dog, and the guy said to the guy whose dog was barking, ‘Why don’t you control your dog?’ And the guy with the barking dog responded, ‘Don’t tell me what to do with my dog!’ The guy with the barking dog was a traumatized and mentally-ill person, and just based on that conversation, he bit two fingers off the guy who told him to control his dog.

To be clear, the dog didn’t bite the guy, the stranger did. Keep space between you and the other person. 

Rule #4: Don’t Mirror the Angry or Upset Person

A standard bit of advice you hear about building rapport with people is to mirror them. If they lean in, you lean in. If they talk excitedly about something, you talk excitedly. 

When dealing with an agitated person, however, you don’t want to engage in mirroring. “When you start raising your voice, talking fast, and using highly emotional language like the angry or upset person, you just give their anger and upset more oxygen,” Laurence told me. 

Mirroring an angry or upset person will only trigger a vicious cycle of escalating emotions. As mentioned above, you need to keep your cool. Laurence recommends taking slow, deep breaths and slowing down your speaking. You’re trying to get the other person to mirror your prosocial behavior. Your goal is to be a calming influence on the other person.

Rule #5: Show Empathy

In Laurence’s work with terrorists and criminals, he’s discovered that what most people want when they’re angry or upset is to feel understood. When someone doesn’t feel understood, it makes them more angry and frustrated.

So show the person some empathy. 

Laurence is quick to point out that empathizing with someone who’s irrationally upset about something or acting like a complete jerk doesn’t mean you condone or agree with them. You don’t even have to feel what they’re feeling. 

Laurence’s idea of empathy is more intellectual. Empathy isn’t just about sharing someone’s feelings, but understanding them. He advises looking at the behavior and words of the other person with the kind of detached curiosity Spock displayed on Star Trek. Harness your inner anthropologist and study the curious practices of this agitated human.

Ask open-ended questions to find out why the person is angry or upset. Use the invitation: “Tell me more.” Let the person know you understand by offering phrases like “I can see that made you angry.” Be sincere and non-patronizing in your curiosity. 

Letting the person talk to a receptive ear can go a long way in defusing a highly charged or emotional situation. 

Rule #6: Take a Timeout and Suggest Going for a Walk

The thing about anger and upset is that they’re very fast emotions. They generally come on fast and dissipate fast. 

You can use that to your advantage by suggesting to the angry or upset person that you take a walk together. Again, you want to avoid ordering them to do it. That’s a reactant. Just say something like, “I’d like to hear more about this. How about we take a walk and you can tell me more about what happened.”

This does a few things. First, it can get the angry person away from others who might be uncomfortable. Second, you’re effectively creating a timeout for the person so the highly-charged emotions can blow over. And third, walking gets the angry or upset person breathing, which is good for calming them down. 

Laurence advises that you’ll need to use this advice in context. If you think the person could get violent, you don’t want to go off on a walk by yourself with them. Use this tactic when you feel it would be safe to do so. 

To sum up: to defuse someone’s stress, stay calm yourself, avoid throwing fuel on the fire, and allow the person to feel heard and understood. Their upset will likely blow over quickly; you just have to weather the passing storm with equanimity.

If you’re dealing with someone who’s upset in the sense of simply being sad and in need of comfort, check out this article — one of the most useful we’ve written. 

For more tips on building rapport, in both negative and positive contexts, listen to our podcast with Laurence and his wife, Emily:

The post How to Calm Someone Down appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Charisma can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people want to listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you.

While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal balance of two qualities: warmth and competence.

The problem is, even if you have warmth and competence, you may not be good at signaling these qualities to others. In Vanessa’s work, she’s created a research-backed encyclopedia of these influential signals, and she shares how to offer them in her book

Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. Today on the show, Vanessa and I discuss some of the verbal and nonverbal social cues that make you attractive to others, and keep you out of what she calls the “danger zone.” She explains what the distance between your earlobes and shoulders has to do with looking competent, how using uptalk and vocal fry sabotages your ability to convey power, how to put more warmth in your voice, how to trigger the right response with a dating profile picture, and more.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM series on the elements of charisma 
• AoM Article: Gut Check — Are You a Contemptible Person?
• AoM Podcast #72: The Charisma Myth
• AoM Article: How to Use Body Language to Create a Dynamite First Impression
• AoM Podcast #694: The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice
• JFK vs. Nixon presidential debate
• AoM article on the generational cycle

Connect With Vanessa Van Edwards

• The Science of People Website 
• Vanessa on Twitter
• Vanessa on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Charisma, can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people wanna listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you. While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal balance of two qualities: Warmth and competence.

The problem is, even if you have warmth and competence, you may not be good at signaling these qualities to others. In Vanessa’s work, she’s created a research-backed encyclopedia of these influential signals, and she shares how to offer them in her book, Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication.

Today on the show, Vanessa and I discuss some of these verbal and nonverbal social cues that make you attractive to others and keep you out of what she calls the danger zone. She explains what the distance between your earlobes and shoulders has to do with looking competent, how using uptalk and vocal fry sabotages your ability to convey power. How to put more warmth in your voice. How to trigger the right response with a dating profile picture, and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/charismacues.

Vanessa Van Edwards, welcome to the show.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you have made a career researching, writing about, teaching how to be effective communicators, how to be more charismatic. And a book I just recently read, I really enjoyed, it’s called Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. So let’s start off with definitions. How do you… As a researcher, how do you define charisma?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So the good news is, is that charisma can be learned. So we can define it, and we can learn it. So that’s a good thing. And I always was perplexed by charisma, because one thing we found in our lab… Many, many years ago, we were doing a little experiment, and we were surprised because we asked two questions in our experiment. The first one was, “Who is the most charismatic person you know?”

You’re listening to this, just think about that person for a second. We timed people on their answers. People could immediately tell us the most charismatic person they knew… It took about three seconds. The next question we asked was, “What is charisma?” Trying to get them to define it.

So interesting. We had just had them define or think about the most charismatic person. This question completely stumped people. It took an average of about 15 seconds for people to answer. And typically, they could not come up with a good answer. And we realized, charisma is one of these few traits that we know the moment we see it. We know when we see someone walk into a room who has high charisma, or a pop-on video. We’re drawn to them, yet we have a very hard time defining it.

So when we go to the research, we find that very highly charismatic people, the reason that they are so magnetic and so unique is they have a perfect blend of two specific traits. And the key here is they have to have these traits in equal measure. They are warmth and competence. So highly charismatic people, what they do is they’re signaling warmth, trust, likeability, collaboration, but at the very same time, they’re signaling competence, capability, power, efficiency. And so we love charismatic people because they’re both likeable and respectable. You know, warm and credible. So that’s the actual definition is warmth plus competence.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you can be exceedingly warm and not be charismatic, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, so that’s the key is… What most people have… And this research comes from Dr. Susan Fiske… Is most of us have an imbalance. Most of us have a little bit too high of warmth or a little bit too high of competence. Or we’re signaling too high warmth or signaling too high competence. And what happens with this is, you can be very likeable, friendly, collaborative, but if you have too much warmth, people don’t respect you. People don’t take you seriously. People interrupt you.

If you have too high competence without enough warmth, people see you as a very credible, very powerful, but without the warmth, they see you as intimidating or hard to talk to. Or the one that we hear a lot is cold or stoic. And so the key is, why that blend is so important is you have to have a balance, that I’m approachable, but I’m also credible.

Brett McKay: And are there people who have neither warmth nor competence?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh, yes, that’s… That I call the danger zone. And by the way, this is where I was in purgatory for many, many, many years. So I’m a recovering awkward person. The reason that I’m obsessed with charisma is I don’t have it naturally. I was that kid in school who sat in the corner of the cafeteria and looked and watched all the cool kids with their amazing charisma, and I was always amazed by how they’re able to bottle it.

And so, the danger zone is when you’re not signaling enough warmth nor competence. And what research has found is folks who are overly stoic… And by the way, this doesn’t mean you don’t have warmth and competence. It means you’re not signaling warmth and competence. And this is, I think, the mistake that most of us face is, the reason I wasn’t signaling anything is ’cause I was afraid. I was terrified of being rejected or disliked. So what did I do? I shut down. I shut down all my cues. I tried to be invisible.

And so what research finds is if we don’t signal enough, humans don’t know what to do with us. Our cues tell others how to treat us. And so people who don’t have enough of either signal, they’re pitied. They’re dismissed. They’re ignored. And mostly, they’re underestimated. And this is, I think, a big problem for very smart people. Is very smart people, they rely so much on their technical skills, their book smarts. They think, “I’m prepared. I have knowledge. I have expertise. I don’t need to worry about these cues or signals. I don’t have to worry about warmth and competence. My knowledge will speak for itself.”

And so what happens is they show up with all those technical skills in their head, but what the research found very clearly is if you don’t have enough cues, specifically, you don’t have enough warmth cues, people do not believe your competence. Competence without warmth leaves people feeling suspicious. And that’s why you have such smart people… Most of our students are high-achieving professionals, and they cannot get enough credibility. They cannot get people to believe their competence.

Brett McKay: So another way I’ve heard this idea, the danger zone, described is as a way to describe somebody who’s contemptible, right? I think all of us have someone in our life who we think about and we think, “Oh my gosh, that guy, he’s just really contemptible.” And if you ever wonder why that is, it’s because they lack warmth and they lack… They’re not competent.

So you know, you don’t enjoy being around them. They’re just not likable. But then also, they can’t do anything really well. They don’t… They’re not competent, right? They’re not good at anything. And that’s why we find them contemptible, like, we just… We find them really annoying, and that’s the danger zone.

Vanessa Van Edwards: So annoying is a good one. I… So… Also, people don’t wanna catch it, right? We’re very, very contagious, emotionally contagious as humans. So if you have someone who is not signaling enough… If that contemptuous person… We don’t wanna catch that kind of anxiety, that kind of lack of warmth or competence. And so the reason we’re drawn to charismatic people, but not drawn to danger zone folks is because we wanna be around people who are positively contagious. We wanna catch what they have.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this is important stuff… Like learning… Thinking about being charismatic a lot of people may think, “Well, that’s just superficial. That’s what shallow people do.” But you’re making the case that this can help you get ahead in your career and in your personal life as well.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And luckily… I was shocked by this research. So I was in that first category where I doubled down on my test scores and my GPA and my resume… That was what I thought was really important. And I was failing at life. I could not communicate well with people. I was forgotten. I was dismissed. And the research actually has found very, very clearly that when we are more charismatic, people are more likely to take us seriously.

We like to listen to ideas from very charismatic people. So the way that I think about this is you’ve spent a lot of years likely… People who are listening, investing in your expertise, whatever that is. Whether you’re a creative or you’re a technical person, you have developed this skill set. Charisma is like the social lubricant that you need for people to adopt it. It makes everything smoother.

Brett McKay: So the book’s called cues. And the idea is that there are these social cues that we give off. And usually we do this unconsciously. Like we don’t even think about it. But in the book you’re making the case that we can be more intentional and thoughtful about these social cues that we display so that we can influence how people think about us in a more positive way. So what are social cues and how much do they influence how people see us?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. So cues are the social signals that we send to each other. And what most people don’t realize is actually, there’s two sides of cues. There’s decoding. And this is the thing that most people think of. So you spot a cue on someone else, maybe an eye roll or a smile. Those are all different cues. They tell us what the other person thinks. They tell us how they wanna be treated, but there’s also encoding. Those are the social signals we send to others.

So a lot of the times we only focus on one aspect. We think about decoding cues are being sent, but actually there’s a loop happening. Not only are our emotions contagious, our cues are contagious. So research on this is so interesting. It finds that we tend to subconsciously mirror the people we’re with. Another reason why we wanna be around people with great cues is ’cause we catch them.

Confident people make us look more confident because we tend to copy things. What I really was fascinated by is there… We’re sending hundreds of cues to each other every day. We do it on video. We do it on the phone. We do it in our emails. There are actually four different categories of cues. It’s not just our body language. There’s our non-verbal. So our body language, our facial expressions, our gestures, our posture. That’s one big bucket.

Research finds that’s at a minimum about 60% of how we communicate our message, which is a massive amount of… It affects us in a massive way. The second one is our verbal. So the words we use, right? Even the cues that we send in our emails and our texts and our profiles tell people how to treat us. And we can talk about, how that works specifically, if you want. I find that research fascinating.

The third one is voice tone. So our volume, our pace, our cadence. And the last one is ornaments. The colors we wear, the jewelry we wear, the car we drive. So on… In this medium, the only cue channels I have are verbal and vocal, but that means I have to work really hard on making sure that I’m as contagious as I can through my verbal and my vocal cues, because they’re affecting not only how you think of me. That’s actually less important, more how you feel about yourself and how you take this advice.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about some of these cues that… This encyclopedia of cues that you developed with your team. Let’s talk about some nonverbal stuff first. What are some powerful charisma cues that ’cause people to pay attention to us when we’re talking?

Vanessa Van Edwards: All right. So I’m gonna start with the ones that I think are the quickest. And the reason for this is because I like to start off with the beginner stuff then move to more advanced. My favorite charisma cue is actually the lean. And this is a really, really simple one. And the reason for this is because it actually creates a very interesting brain activation.

So research found that when participants in their lab, leaned forward slightly… So I’m gonna lean forward right now. If you’re listening to this, I’d love if you just lean forward for me like an inch or two, whether you’re seated or standing or running… When you lean forward, they found that it activates a very specific part of your brain, that is pre-action. The reason for this is because when we’re about to activate one of our five senses, we lean in. We wanna see something better, we lean in.

We wanna smell something, we lean in. We wanna touch something, we lean in. And so interestingly, this is also a nonverbal cue of activation. So when someone is really into something, they’ll lean into it. When someone really agrees with you, they’ll lean into it. Very highly charismatic people cue you to lean into their very most important points or a deep thought by leaning in themselves.

And so if you watch Ted speakers, you’ll notice that when they’re at the most important point, they give a little lean and it actually makes you wanna lean in too. So leaning is a really easy one. You can do it on video. You can do it in person. You can even do it I think over audio to like give that, we’re inside something. We’re talking about something really good. It’s a really simple one, but it’s so effective.

Brett McKay: Another one you talk about that I thought was ingenious, is fronting. What is fronting?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. Okay. So when you think about space… So with non-verbal, we’re constantly trying to interact with other humans in space. And so fronting is when we angle our body, our entire body, toes, torso, and head towards the person we’re speaking with. Ideally… And this is a interesting one. When we are on parallel lines with someone else… So if you imagine like railroad tracks, we like in the perfect scenario to be on the same track as someone else. Our feet are aligned, our hips are aligned, our head is aligned.

And when we do this, our body and our brain think, “Ah, we’re aligned. There’s something in between us. I’m gonna speak more. I’m gonna speak in longer sentences.” We’re more likely to say yes, if we’re fronting with someone. The reason why this is important is because I notice we accidentally don’t front when we are on our computer, we’re taking notes, we kinda call over our shoulder. I even noticed of how people with their Zoom set-ups will have their camera off to the side or over one shoulder while they’re typing on their computer.

It is physically hard for someone to open up, collaborate, or connect when you are not being fronted with. And so one of the doctors we interviewed for the book, he found that when he angles his… He swivels his entire stool towards someone, he can actually get the patient to talk more, open up more. So this is a very simple one, that always try to make a point of angling your entire body towards someone.

Brett McKay: Well, I think we intuitively know this, right? If you don’t wanna talk to somebody or if you’re on the subway or a bus, you’re sitting next to somebody you wanna show, “I don’t wanna talk to you,” you kinda shift the other way away from the person.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. And decoding is a great point here is all of these cues have both encoding and decoding. We can send the signal. We can also decode the signal. If you’re looking for who should I approach in a bar, who should I go up to at this networking event, you wanna look for people who are more open to fronting. I jokingly call it croissant feet. Any reference to a croissant is a good reference for me.

So what I mean by this is if someone doesn’t want you to interrupt their group, like you’re in a networking event or you’re at a bar, they will be fully fronting with the person they’re talking with. They have no opening. If someone is in croissant feet, in other words, their foot is angled out, their torso is angled out, they are literally saying, “I am physically open to being approached.” And so you can also decode who wants to talk to me and who doesn’t wanna talk to me based on fronting.

Brett McKay: Okay, so two things there, if you wanna seem more charismatic, signal that you’re charismatic, lean in, and you can do that via audio as well. And then the fronting, just turn towards people, and that will… People… I think one of the things I’ve heard about charisma is that charisma is making someone feel like they’re the most important person in the room, and fronting does that.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, exactly, because you’re literally saying, “I respect you so much. I’m going to give you my full non-verbal attention.” Very rare thing to think about, and that’s how we think about it as humans.

Brett McKay: Well, a point you make, I think we should talk about this. This warmth, competence, dichotomy, you point out that if you wanna be charismatic, you have to understand that some situations might require more warmth and some situations might require more competence signals. It’s not like in every situation, you wanna be perfectly aligned with warmth and balance. In order to get that balance, it’s gonna depend on the situation, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. The metaphor I like to think of is like a thermostat, right? So if you think about a thermostat in your home, you probably have an ideal range that you like… Let’s say between 68 and 72. So 68 might a little on the cooler side, it’s a hot summer day, 72 might be in the winter. Above 72, you’re hot. That’s too warm. Below 68, you’re cold. That’s competent. Too competent. In the 40s, it’s a danger zone.

So this range… You actually have quite a bit of flexibility. Very highly charismatic people, you leverage this range. So if they’re going into a meeting where they’re negotiating, they need to be taken seriously, they’re selling, they don’t want any push back, they will dial up their competence cues. They’ll use more power gazing. They’ll use more purposeful hand gestures. They’ll be more still in their body posture. Those are all competence cues.

On the other hand, let’s say that you’re going to a happy hour, you are with colleagues, you’re in a creative brainstorm session, and you want everyone to be open. You want everyone to feel welcome. It’s not about your ideas, it’s about the team’s ideas. Well, in that situation, you’ll be best served just to show more warmth cues, more nodding, more smiling, more social gazing. Those cues are literally sending signals of warmth.

Again, we’re still in that 68-72 range. You don’t wanna have too much of one, but that’s what really highly charismatic people do. And you… And the example I give in the book is Jeff Bezos. There’s two different interviews of him. One in 60 minutes and one with a Business Insider interview, and it’s the same person, but he looks completely different.

On the 60 Minutes interview, he’s clearly going for warmth, being relatable, being kind of friendly, it’s a more casual interview. In the Business Insider interview, he’s super high in competence. He’s trying to really talk about his business, be taken more seriously, talk about his growth. And he uses cues differently to come across as slightly higher in warmth versus competence, but depending on his goals.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we just talked about some cues of charisma that you found that these just show charisma, the lean in and the fronting. But let’s say you’re in a situation… You kind of… You briefly touched on some… I’d like to flush some of this stuff out. Let’s say you’re in a situation that requires more warmth. Like you gave an example of a doctor who is trying to develop a rapport with a patient, that needs more warmth. What are some cues that you can use to display more warmth?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. So warmth is all about encouraging collaboration. So my favorite warmth cue that I like to start off with… Most people start off with smiling. That’s actually not my favourite warmth cue, and the reason for this is because in a lot of professional settings, it would be weird to maniacally hold a smile on your face. So I actually don’t recommend smiling first, especially because smiling can also be a submissive gesture.

So my favorite warmth cue is a triple nod or any kind of nod. And the reason for this… And this is in Western cultures, and I should make a cultural note. I always try to make a cultural note if there’s anything different. A lot of these cues are universal, but nodding in Bulgaria, India, and Pakistan can be different. So if you’re not in Bulgaria, India, or Pakistan, these tips are for you.

So nodding, a vertical nod, up and down nod means yes, and a horizontal nod means no. And we recognize this, in these cultures as encouragements, agreement, and so what they’ve found is that when someone does a slow triple nod, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” the other person speaks 67% longer. It’s kind of like a non-verbal dot, dot, dot, that’s actually how you can think about it, and this is super helpful. If you’re on video, even on the phone, by the way, even national hotline callers are trained to nod. It literally is telling someone, “Please, tell me more. I’m here. I’m listening. And that is a very subtle way to encourage more warmth. So nodding is one… Another kind of head one that you can try is a tilt. So this comes from an evolutionary. So this is across cultures, that when we try to hear something better, like if I were to say, “Do you hear that dog barking?

Usually, we tilt our head over to the side and expose our ear. That’s a universal response. And so we recognize if we’re in conversation with someone and they tilt their head, they are deeply trying to listen, which is also another warmth cue. So I love those, because if you’re on video call or you’re in-person, you’re trying to offer someone encouragement, make them feel the warm and fuzzies, a tilt and nod are super non-verbal subtle ways to be like, I’m here, I’m listening. Really good interviewers, Oprah Winfrey does this really well. That’s, I think, how she gets people to open up so much.

Brett McKay: So that’s interesting about the head nod, the slow triple head nod. There was this guy at my church a couple years ago, where you would talk to him and then he would just sit there in silence. And it would be so intimidating, I was like, Oh my gosh. And you start nervously filling in the space. But one thing he did too, now that you mention it, he would do the slow three nods while being in silence. It was not just me. It was other people too. It’s like, Man, whenever I talk to this guy, I just blabber incessantly and I feel dumb. And I don’t know if he intentionally did this or he just kinda picked up on it, but it was effective. So those are the slow three nod and just being silent, that can get people just to spill the beans about anything.

Vanessa Van Edwards: I know we’re not talking about vocal yet, but there is some really funny research on vocalizations along with some of these nonverbal cues. So I know exactly the type you’re talking about, that strong silent type, and you just wanna divulge your deepest secrets. I call that a verbal vomit, where they just… You just wanna tell them everything. And a lot of it is because we’re being cued to do so. The other thing that research found is that this is the difference between men and women. Women find men more attractive if they vocalize… Oh, mm-hmm, ah.

Along with a nod or a tilt. So if you want to be more attractive, this is one study specifically for women to men in heterosexual relationships, you might also add in a, Mm-hmm, oh, ah.

And women just love it.

Brett McKay: They love it. Alright. So those are some warmth cues, tilting, nodding, the slow triple nod. But there’s other things you mentioned too. You can do a smile, but you don’t want it to be like a crazy smile. You call it a savor smile, so it’s just like you’re really enjoying what you’re seeing and interacting with, it’s just not like the fake smile thing.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. And the researchers actually looked at types of smiles. I love this research. They found that a slow, what I call savor smile, a smile that spreads across your face is actually the best kind of smile. So it’s not holding the smile, and that is the worst. And this is important ’cause I think that we can get really serious, especially in our professional settings, or even with our partner, we’re talking about logistics and the kids and pick-up times, and we forget that there’s some joy there. And so it’s looking for opportunities to have either mutual laughter, oh, my goodness, there is nothing happier for the brain that two people laughing at once, or showing a savor smile. So especially in the beginning of a call or beginning of an interaction, if someone’s like, Oh, it’s so great to see you, I try to think of what is one thing I could say verbally that will give me warmth, so… A warm word, Happy to see you, so great to be here, oh my goodness, it’s so nice to finally give you a hug in-person, whatever those words are, and pairing it with a slow savor smile. That is like a bonus points in the charisma scale, because it aligns our verbal and our nonverbal, and we love it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Alright. Let’s talk about situations that require more power or competent social cues. And you… I love this. You use the JFK, Richard Nixon debate as a way to a highlight the power of power cues. So what can we learn from that debate on how to utilize power cues?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So that debate… So Nixon versus Kennedy was a very interesting point in our history. And from a nonverbal perspective, it was the first time where people realized there was something happening with our cues. During this time, part of the population watched the debate on television, part of the population listened to the debate on the radio. What was fascinating is this was the first time in US history where there was a discrepancy between the winners or in the perceived winners. So everyone who watched the debate was sure that Kennedy won. Everyone who listened to the debate was sure that Nixon won. And when you analyze just the first 30 seconds of this debate, and I highly recommend, go on YouTube, search it, it’s up for free, if you watch the first 30 seconds of the debate, you will see Nixon gives away non-verbally all of his power.

First, he immediately looks over at Kennedy and the moderator. And as humans, we are very attuned to gaze cues. We want to follow other people’s gaze. They’re telling us what’s interesting. So I think that while Nixon was trying to be polite, he actually gave away all of his power in the first three seconds of the debate by looking over at Kennedy. It literally told the audience, Don’t look at me. Look at Kennedy. He also was not fronting. So he took away that… So fronting is our toes, our torso and our head, he took away fronting from us, which suddenly makes the audience feel disrespected. The second thing that he immediately does, he grips the side of his chair. You could actually see he’s white-knuckling. I don’t know if he did this ’cause he was nervous or he was trying to still himself, but when we see that white knuckle grip, it makes us think, They’re closed. They’re nervous. The first evolutionary… From an evolutionary perspective is our most protective gesture. When we’re angry, we tend to clench our fists because it’s our most powerful weapon against someone else. So that white knuckle made him look angry, it made him look closed.

And interestingly, if you watch the very first few seconds, he’s in what’s called a runner’s stance. He has his knee pulled back. And some interesting historical fact is he had injured his knee on the campaign trail a week earlier. So I think he was actually nursing his injured me. But what happened was, is because if you think about a runner about to take off on a race on the starting block, they have one leg back. This is a universal readiness position. When someone is about to run away or flee, they instinctively go into this position. Well, we don’t like leaders who are about to run away from us. And so in this one little snapshot, we see a clenched fist, someone not fronting with us, and literally looking like they’re about to run for their lives.

Brett McKay: And then Kennedy is like pretty the opposite. He was looking at the camera, looking at the audience, he just looked cool, calm and collected, like he was in charge.

Vanessa Van Edwards: He was not only calm, he was broad. So I think there’s a little bit of a myth I would love to bust, if we can.

Power posing had a moment in 2010 where it was in like every show, everyone was power posing. I love a power pose. It’s very high power, high competence, but it’s also socially aggressive. So you’re not gonna walk into your meetings with your hands above your head. What power really looks like, is what Kennedy looked like in the first second of this debate, nice and relaxed shoulders, a maximized distance. This is the weirdest distance, but it’s incredibly important for perceived confidence. The distance between your earlobe and your shoulder, really highly confident people. They maximize this distance because their shoulders are down and relaxed and their head is held high. When people are not confident, you see this distance shrink, they turtle their head down. They pull their ears up, their shoulders up towards their ears. They hunch their shoulders in. And so he had that distance maximized. He was nice and relaxed and it made us want to catch that calm confidence. Oh, he also did a nod in the first 30 seconds when he was introduced, he gives a very subtle calm nod. So he balanced out that competence with the perfect warmth cue.

Brett McKay: So you mention some power cues there. Don’t be scrunched up. Be relaxed. Be big. Be open. Doesn’t mean you have to put your hands up in the air and do the power pose, but just powerful people take up space and they’re comfortable taking up space around them. And some other interesting ones that you talked about in the book that I thought were interesting was the steeple fingers. And I think on the cover of your book you’re doing the steeple fingers, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: [laughter] that cover was, we argued a lot about that cover. We ended up with me doing a steeple. Yes. A steeple is if you wanna try this with me, actually there’s an interesting loop here. I’m curious. So if you’re listening, put the tips of your fingers together into like a little church steeple, don’t press your palms together, leave space within your hands and just hold it for a second. This position should actually make you feel quite calm and collected. It’s kind of like a power pose for your hands. The reason for this is because when our hands are open and relaxed, especially if our palms are open and showing, right, you can still see our palms when we steeple and our fingers are together, it’s as if we’re thinking, oh, I am calm, cool, and collected. And so that steeple gesture is you’ll notice it on Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary loves to do it.

Political leaders have been taught to do it. Now I always say with cues, you have to try them on. Not, there’s 96 cues in the book, right? Some cues are going to feel great. You’re gonna be like, oh, I already do that. Yes. Amazing. You already do one of those cues. Fantastic. Some cues you might have to try a couple times and be like, oh, you know what? This one works for me. And there’s gonna be some cues that you’ll feel absolutely ridiculous. The steeple is one of those cues. You have to try it on in a couple different situations either you’re gonna love it and it’ll be part of your hand gesture repertoire, or you’re gonna be like, I feel so silly. Do not do it. If you feel silly, I want only, you’d only use cues that make you feel authentic.

Brett McKay: So, well you mentioned charisma cues, so the leaning and the fronting, warmth cues, the head tilt, the head nodding, competence cues, power posture, so that distance between ears and shoulders, the steeple pose, what are some nonverbal cues that people should just avoid? So they don’t go in that danger and contemptible zone.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh yes. This was one of my favorite chapters to write. It was actually the longest chapter. I called these the danger zone cues. And what’s interesting about them is they are the nonverbal cues that you both don’t wanna show, but you also want to watch out for, because if you see them, they can be signals especially of more negative emotions. So fear, shame, anger disgust. And so not only do you wanna avoid showing these, but you also wanna make sure that you are on the lookout to make sure if you see them. That means, okay, I gotta dig deeper. Someone might be hiding something. And I’m always careful to say that they’re bad. And the reason for this is ’cause there’s also times where you do wanna show danger zone cues to shut down a connection. So if someone’s challenging you or you don’t wanna build rapport. You can even save these danger zone cues for I’m out. I wanna set up boundaries, and I don’t wanna talk to you. So very, very powerful cues.

Brett McKay: So what are some examples of ones that you focus a lot on in the book?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So one that I love is called the lip purse. This is a universal gesture. So when we press our lips together, so if you just wanna mash your lips together, like make them into a hard line, can we kinda make that mmmh, uh, sound that is a universal withholding gesture. It’s as if as humans, when we’re trying to keep something in or keep it together or hold back our mouth presses in to say, don’t say that, stop that. And we do this when we’re trying to withhold, this could be something that we’re ashamed of, something we’re embarrassed of. It could be even a lie or a deception. So one of the things we did in our lab, I love this experiment. We played two truths and a lie, You know that game where you say two true statements about yourself and one lie with hundreds of our participants.

And what we had participants do is we had them submit videos of themselves sharing two truths and a lie. And the lip purse was the most common cue that we saw right before, or right after a lying statement. The reason for this is because we know as humans, that lying gets us into trouble, right? It, we don’t like to lie. It makes us feel sort of dirty. And so we noticed that people would say, their true statement, true statement, and then, mm, quick lip purse and the lie. There’s like their body going. Don’t say it, don’t say it or don’t give anything away. And so a lip purse is a great cue because it lets you know, I have to give this person permission to tell me more. So when I see a lip purse, I’ll say, hey are we all good? Do you have any questions for me? Anything I’m not hitting? Does this all make sense? So that’s the way that I think when we see a danger zone cue, it gives us an opportunity just to open up the communication more.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s a great example of being on the lookout for a cue and someone else that is, that’s the decoding part, right?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we talked about non-verbal cues, let’s shift over to verbal cues and you talk about in the book, our voice can convey social cues. How can we use our voice to sound more confident, more warm?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So we have so much that we’re conveying in our voice and that’s because when we’re listening to someone, we are listening for their confidence, we’re listening to how open they are. And what research has found is actually we decide how confident someone is within the first a hundred milliseconds of hearing them speak. And so one thing that we noticed right away is there’s two different cues that we should listen out for vocal power. The first one is uptalk or the question inflection. So when we are speaking, and we’re confident in our words, we use a neutral inflection or a downward inflection. So right now I’m speaking in a neutral inflection. If I’m really powerful about something, I’ll sling my words down at the end. So I’ll go down in my inflection. Uptalk is when we go up in our inflection, it’s when we’re asking a question. So we’ll say my name is Vanessa.

What research has found is that when we accidentally use uptalk on a statement, it literally triggers the other person to think they’re questioning themselves. Should I question them? So we do tons of sales analysis for companies, and we found that when people get the most pushback or negotiation on their numbers, especially their prices, it’s ’cause they deliver their number in uptalk, they’ll say, We’d love to have your business.

We’d love to work with you. And the price of our service is $5000. When we ask, you are begging someone to question you, you’re begging someone to negotiate with you, so the first thing is making sure on your video calls in person in your voicemail, that you are using a neutral or downward inflection, especially on the important statements, your name, your price, advice, timelines, it’s critical that that actually triggers confidence ’cause it shows… I feel confident. I’m not questioning it and neither should you.

Brett McKay: All right, so avoid the uptalk. Another one, you talk about is vocal fry as well, right?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So vocal fry typically affects women more than men. They’ve actually found this in the research that because women wanna be perceived as more likeable, typically are seen as higher in warmth, they will use more question inflection as if to say, Do you like the statement? So it’s actually questioning in their statement, and they also tend to have vocal fry, Vocal Fry is when our voice goes into a kind of wavery. So you hear it’s sizzling bacon in a pan, that kind of wavery, if I were to talk like this in my entire interview, it would drive you crazy. The reason for that is because as humans, we know that if someone’s in vocal fry, they are likely vocally anxious, vocal fry happens we don’t have enough volume, we don’t have enough breath and our vocal cords tense. So right now, I’m working very hard to keep my vocal power in the lowest end of my range with consistent volume, but right now what I’ll do for you just so you can hear the difference is I’m gonna tighten my vocal cords, so you can hear what anxiety sounds like, so when I’m a little bit anxious, I tend to go a little bit higher in my range and I also lose volume, and you can hear that I have a lot more vocal fry, and that is because when we are tense, we lose breath and it’s hard for our vocal chords to rub together.

Now, the moment I relax the vocal cords, ah, it sounds so much better. So we have to be really aware of is the moment you hear yourself go into vocal fry… Speak louder. The fastest way to fix Vocal Fry is to speak up the moment we have volume, we add more breath, if you’re with someone and they hear using vocal fry, ask them, Can you speak up? I can’t hear you. It is the fastest way to fix a vocal fry and also take a deep breath, use the lower end of your voice, and it makes you feel better. And I now I felt terrible by just doing that little five-second demo. It actually makes me feel more anxious, even just doing the vocal fry.

Brett McKay: You mentioned Vocal Fry is more common with women, but I’ve been hearing a lot of, a lot more dudes with vocal fries, I think it’s becoming more common with men, so I think it’s something everyone should be aware of and avoid if you wanna sound more powerful. Same thing with uptalk, avoid that. Another thing we already mentioned is the guy who uses… Let’s call them power pauses right. That’s another thing you do to sound more powerful. It’s you take up space, conversationally by being silent.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And a pause doesn’t have to be long, actually the perfect pause they measured it is about a half of a second, so it’s just enough time to take a breath in and this works, right? We think, Okay, if someone is willing to take a breath, they feel confident that I’m not gonna interrupt them, and it also keeps our vocal power low. So a mistake that can happen is when we’re anxious, we speak faster, which makes us not to pause, which makes us sound less conversationally confident, it makes us run out of breath, and so you’ll notice that people hit vocal fry at the end of their sentence and that’s because they’re trying to get it all in. So they speak really fast. They don’t pause it all. And then by the end of their sentence they don’t have any of the breath left and so they are in vocal fry. So pausing is like a double punch where it allows you to take in a deep breath, and also it makes it prevents vocal fry at the end. Really, really charismatic people we coded TED Talks in our lab, and we found that the most charismatic people use pausing to create drama in their sentences, so they’ll say, today I have a really big idea.

I’m gonna share it with three different ways that are gonna change your life, right? That’s that TED talk speak. There’s a reason we like it is because it’s actually… The pausing is creating drama in a really good way.

Brett McKay: What could we do with our voice to sound more warm.

Vanessa Van Edwards: So warmth is the… This is actually… You always wanna pair a vocal warmth with verbal warmth, what I mean by this is it’s really easy to add vocal warmth when you’re talking about things that make you feel warm. So specially the first 10 seconds of interaction. Are you happy to be there? Are you happy to collaborate? Is it a good morning for the team? I think the biggest enemy of vocal warmth is we go accidentally negative, so we’re starting a call or we’re hopping into a meeting and we say, Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m late. The traffic was terrible. Oh my gosh. It’s so hot. It’s so cold. It’s been so busy, right? When you do that, you can hear my vocal tone also goes more negative and we don’t like hearing negativity. So what you’re better off doing is, What is something positive you can say in the first 10 seconds, that you can match with vocal warmth, your voice can smile, and that sounds crazy, but I’ll do two demos for you, so I’ll do a hello, just one word, this is your vocal first impression, we found in our lab that people could hear the happy hello.

So which one sounds happier to you? Hello. Hello.

Brett McKay: Second one.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Second one.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah and we can hear that happiness, so if you can pair it with a verbal happiness, it makes it more authentic.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s a weird… So smile when you say… Like when you answer the phone, smile, when you say hello.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, and deliver whatever that good thing is that you are ready to give you know, oh I’m so happy to be here a while. It’s such a beautiful day. I’ve been looking forward to this all week. It’s so much easier to naturally smile and it actually changes the way your voice sounds.

Brett McKay: And I’m gonna let people in… Vanessa did this when we first got on. She did that, she was… You could tell she was smiling and she brought in that, that warm stuff and it worked. I was like, Man, I wanna talk to this person. I can’t wait to talk to her.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And I had thought about before our call, I was like, Oh my gosh, I have to tell him about my favorite art of manliness article. I can’t wait to tell him, and so I was waiting with that good piece of news, which made it super easy for me to smile.

Brett McKay: And your favorite articles are the generational cycles article, that you wrote a long time ago.

Vanessa Van Edwards: The cyclical history of men is the single best article on the internet, I literally send it out every two to three weeks, and if you have not read it, you must go read it it’s fascinating.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much for that, I really appreciate that. So let’s talk about imagery cues. Alright, so we talked about our voice, the words we can use can make us feel more warm, what are some ways that we can use our image to appear more competent or more warm?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So imagery cues are really important because they typically create neural maps, and what I mean by this is one single prop, color, image, pin can trigger all kinds of feelings, so I always like to use dating profiles, as an example. This is the easiest way to think about it. If you are skimming through dating profiles and someone is holding a snowboard, that might activate a whole series of other feelings for you. If you like snowboards, adventure, vacation, fun memories with your family. If you don’t like snowboarding, it triggers a whole different set of things cold, hurting, hauling. And so we use imagery already subconsciously, but I wanna make it more conscious, where in your profile pictures what you’re wearing, what’s on your desk, what’s in your zoom background, all of those things are triggering neural maps for people, you wanna make sure they’re triggering the right things.

Brett McKay: What are some things that guys can do in particular to think about how they dress, ’cause I think a lot of guys are, well, how you dress is so superficial, but in your research and your coaching, easy things that guys can think about in terms of dress that can up their competence or their warmth.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, so for dress specifically, you always wanna think about where you fit in, so this can be with dating or even interviews, you wanna dress for the company you wanna work at. You wanna dress for how you wanna dress on your ideal date. For example, if your ideal date is hanging out with a picnic in the park, you don’t wanna be in a button-down, even though other people might like that, because that’s not actually your ideal date, you actually are better off being in a more casual or your favorite T-shirt, your favorite jeans, because it’s going to trigger the right neural maps to the right people. I do not believe in appealing to everyone, I believe in appealing to the right people. So if your ideal partner is the kind of person who would wanna do a picnic and dress more casually. I would rather you trigger a positive neural map for them. So what’s your ideal date? What’s your ideal meeting? Is it online? Is it casual? Is it a business suit? Is it a button down? Dress for your ideal. That’s going to turn on the right people and turn off the wrong people.

Brett McKay: That makes sense. Yeah, if you wear a suit, you might get somebody that they want like fancy stuff all the time, that’s actually not you, and you found yourself in like I’m in a conundrum here.

Vanessa Van Edwards: I’ll give you another very kind of… This happens in a lot of ways not just the basics of formal and not formal. Politicians in the United States are known to wear pins, flag pins. So a flag pin is a symbol for certain people that they love, it’s also an ornament or a symbol of certain sort of people they do not love, and so even when you think about those kinds of things like wearing a pin on your lapel or not, what does that pin say. I want you to think about what are the other pins in your life, they could be images in your profile, they could be things in your background, all of those things are going to either be allergies for people you don’t want, or attractors for people you do want.

Brett McKay: I like that. Well, Vanessa, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh my goodness, thank you so much. Cues is wherever books are sold, I also record the audible and that we have a lot of fun with that so if you prefer audio books. And then of course, my website is scienceofpeople.com. We have a ton of free videos of cues, non-verbal cues, I break down The Rock and so many fun people, Princess Diana, Justin Bieber, so if you wanna see some of the cues in action, you can also waste many, many hours on our website if you lik e.

Brett McKay: Great, well, Vanessa Van Edwards. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: Well, my guest is Vanessa Van Edwards. She’s the author of the book, Cues, it’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, scienceofpeople.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/charismacues where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles, written over the years about pretty much anything you would think of.

And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use the code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #837: The Cues That Make You Charismatic appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

If making small talk makes someone anxious, it may just be because they have a fear of such interactions, and my guest today, Rich Gallagher, can help them overcome it through his practice as a therapist. Or, someone’s anxiety around small talk can be based in part on simply not knowing how to do it, and in that case, Rich helps them by teaching them the mechanics of conversation, which he shares in his book Stress-Free Small Talk, as well as on today’s show.

Rich and I begin our conversation with how small talk is important as an on-ramp to bigger things, how it’s a skill that can be developed like any other, and how learning its mechanics can dampen the anxiety you feel about taking part in it. We then turn to these mechanics of making comfortable and effective small talk, including doing prep work, embracing tried-and-true openers, and avoiding talking too much yourself. We also discuss how to join conversations that are already underway, manage committing a faux pas, acknowledge others to build connection, and end a conversation gracefully. We end our conversation with small talk strategies for first dates and job interviews, and what to do when you go to a party where you only know the host.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Related AoM articles on small talk/social skills:
  • How to Make Small Talk
  • Series on overcoming shyness
  • Your 4 Social Gifts
  • How to Enter a Room Like a Boss
  • What to Do at an Event Where You Don’t Know Anyone
  • How to Think of Questions to Ask People
  • How to Use Body Language to Create a Dynamite First Impression
  • How to End a Conversation
  • How to Make a Great Last Impression
  • How to Recover from a Bad First Impression
  • How to Ask Better Questions on a First Date
  • How to Give a Compliment
  • Sunday Firesides: Want to Solve Your Social Problems? Get Over Your Self
• Related AoM podcasts on small talk:
  • #317: Why Your First Impression Matters & How to Improve It
  • #406: Why You Need to Embrace Small Talk
• The Rotary’s 4-Way Test

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. If making small talk makes someone anxious, it may just be because they have a fear of such interactions and my guest today Rich Gallagher can help them overcome it through his practice as a therapist or someone’s anxiety around small talk can be based in part on simply not knowing how to do it, and in that case, Rich helps them by teaching them the mechanics of conversation, which he shares in his book Stress-free Small Talk, as well as in today’s show. Rich and I begin our conversation with how small talk is important as an on-ramp to bigger things, how it’s a skill that can be developed like any other, and how learning it’s mechanics can dampen the anxiety you feel about taking part in it.

We then turn to these mechanics of making comfortable and effective small talk, including doing prep work, embracing tried-and-true openers and avoiding talking too much yourself. We also discuss how to join conversations that are already underway, manage committing a faux pas, acknowledge others to build a connection and end a conversation gracefully. We end our conversation with small talk strategies for first dates and job interviews and what to do when you go to a party where you only know the host. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/stressfreesmalltalk.

Rich Gallagher, welcome to the show.

Rich Gallagher: Hi Brett. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a family therapist, but you’ve… Interesting with your work, if… You specialized in helping people with small talk, how did a family therapist end up specializing in that?

Rich Gallagher: Well, that’s a great question. I was a customer service executive before I became a therapist, and then later became an author and speaker on communication skills before I became a therapist in my 50s, so I joke that after years of teaching people how to deal with angry customers, I decided to put myself in the middle of other people’s family conflicts as well, but how this book came about was one summer, I had several clients, all of them were men, interestingly, who were severely disabled by social anxiety, and I noticed for a lot of them it wasn’t just fear, it was a lack of skills, and so I sort of developed a Betty Crocker cookbook for how to have a nourishing 5 to 7-minute conversation, and I used it to coach those clients, and it worked really well, and that’s what eventually led to Rockridge Press inviting me to develop this book Stress-Free Small Talk.

Brett McKay: So something you really emphasize in the book is that small talk is a skill. Why do you think it’s a valuable skill to learn?

Rich Gallagher: For me personally, Brett, almost every good thing has happened in my life, my marriage, my business relationships, my consulting work, all rides in the wings of connections with other people, where in most cases, when I first met them, I simply delighted in their company and small talk is a lubricant that builds those relationships, that makes those connections possible.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, so small talk usually leads to deeper relationships, that’s kind of… It’s the on-ramp to those deeper relationships.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely. Here’s what’s interesting about it if you look at this from a historical context, is that small talk is about transmitting information to another person, and this goes back to when we were cave people, when you’re a cave man and somebody came along, you had no idea if the person you just met was gonna help you or kill you, and… So today, if you’re meeting a new business contact or if you’re on an elevator with somebody or on a first date, small talk transmits very valuable data about who you are, what you have in common, and whether someone else is safe with you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so small talk can provide a lot of benefits, but you help people, often men, who wanna engage in small talk but have an aversion to it. One of it’s lack of skill, we’ll talk about that, but there’s three potential reasons why someone shies away from small talk. One is shyness, the other is social anxiety, and then there’s introversion, and I think these three things are often confused for each other, so let’s talk about the differences. How do you as a therapist define shyness?

Rich Gallagher: These three things are important distinctions. So shyness is something that a lot of us share in common, almost half of us clinically have shyness, which is a normal level of discomfort with dealing with other people, worrying that you’re gonna make a bad impression or worrying how you’re gonna come across to the person. Social anxiety, I’ll jump ahead to that for a moment, that’s shyness on steroids, that’s where it becomes a phobia, and now you’re finding that you’re so uncomfortable being around people that you avoid things you really want in your life. Kind of people who see me for therapy often, they can’t go to school, they can’t go to work, sometimes they can’t even walk out to the mailbox for fear that somebody might speak to them. And introversion is a whole another animal entirely in the sense that introverts can’t be discerned by observation, many introverts are affable and articulate and outgoing, but the difference is they have their energy drained by interaction with other people. 75% of us are extroverts and we gain energy by talking to people, we go to a party for two hours and we feel great. Someone who’s an introvert may go to that same party for two hours and have a good time, but at the end, they need to recharge their batteries.

Brett McKay: And oftentimes, introverts can be very good and skilled at conversation, you’re just saying they might not wanna do it as much as an extrovert.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely correct. You nailed that perfectly.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s say someone is shy or socially anxious, which is shyness taking on steroids, so they have an aversion, they have a fear of taking part in small talk, how do you help these individuals start practicing the skill of small talk in their everyday life?

Rich Gallagher: I’m gonna break this up into two buckets, one of whom I help with the techniques in this book, and one of whom I don’t. The biggest bucket is people who not only are afraid of social interactions, but they also literally don’t know what to say, they don’t understand the skills involved and how to talk to somebody, and I’ve had very good outcomes in teaching them the mechanics of how to have conversations with people, and to me, it is mechanics and not bravery. When they learn and practice these skills and have them in their back pocket, they actually are often better conversationalists than people who haven’t been trained those things, who don’t suffer from the fear. That’s about two-thirds of people with social anxiety, then there’s another third who, they know what to say, they don’t lack social skills, they’re affable, they’re articulate, it’s really uncomfortable for them. In those cases, we treat them the same way we treat any other fear and phobia through things like gradual exposure, desensitization and practice.

Brett McKay: So in this second group, people who have the skill but just have a fear, I guess one of the things you can do to blunt that fear, so you talk about exposure therapy, I guess there might be some cognitive behavioral therapy going on changing the way they think about social interactions, correct?

Rich Gallagher: Correct. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is my jam. That’s the approach that I practice as well. And so, you’re absolutely correct, the first place we start is to get them to put down on paper what they think about a social situation, and we’ll try to reframe those beliefs. For example, I’m gonna make a fool of myself. One thing I’ll tell my clients is, have you ever been booed by hundreds of people? I have… Pro-tip is, if you’re doing a speaking gig in Boston, don’t have the anecdote about the manager of the Yankees, like I did, for example, but I recovered from that, it was actually a great speaking gig, and so we address these scary beliefs and try to make them… We don’t try to sugarcoat them, we try to make them more rational, and then that’s the cognitive part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, then the behavioral part is where we then have them start to gradually comfortably practice and be fully present in those situations, so that they start to seem less scary over time.

Brett McKay: Well, another part of social anxiety that I’ve read, which is counter-intuitive, is that part of the problem with social anxiety is that people are thinking too much about themselves and how they appear to other people, and that just… That’s what mucks things up, ’cause they’re just so self-referential…

Rich Gallagher: Yes, absolutely.

Brett McKay: They ended up causing problems for themselves. One of the solutions to social anxiety is helping those individuals think less about themselves in a social engagement.

Rich Gallagher: That’s correct, and I’m gonna break that down further and put a finer point on it, which is… Good conversation is about mechanics, I’ll make an analogy. When Paul Simon gave a concert after South Africa got rid of apartheid, he was on stage in front of half a million people, they asked him in television, How did you feel about being part of such a momentous event? And if I remember correctly, what he said was something to the effect of, Well I was trying to make sure that I was keeping time with my bass player and I didn’t break a string, so he was focused on the mechanics of his performance. When I’m talking to somebody and I’m very comfortable in conversation, I very much care about the other person, I am very much thinking about myself and them, but I’m also taking out Tape 52 and playing it for how to walk through the mechanics of the good conversation, so moving people from self-absorption to mechanics is part of what makes this a lot more comfortable for them.

Brett McKay: One tip that’s helped me and just to be more present in a conversation is when I’m engaging with somebody, I try to think of myself as a host…

Rich Gallagher: Beautiful.

Brett McKay: I’m here to make that person feel comfortable, and for some reason that that works ’cause it gives me something to do, I don’t know, it’s kind of a weird thing that works for me, though.

Rich Gallagher: I love that framing. I actually do exactly the same thing. I’ve never taken the stage for a speaking engagement without being anxious about it, and one of the things I tell myself is this audience is in my care for the next hour, and that framing helps me a lot too.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you have individuals who have the mechanics down, but they have a fear, so there’s different things you can do to reframe how they think about social interactions or small talk. What about the individuals who… They just don’t know what to do. How do you go about helping them get the mechanics down of small talk?

Rich Gallagher: That’s the audience that this book is aimed at, so what I do is I work through the mechanics of a conversation… I’ll be glad to drill down to the details of those mechanics. For starters, people don’t know how to open a conversation, people don’t know the mechanics of acknowledging other people, and because so many people don’t know how to truly acknowledge other people, learning how to do that well changes everything about how people perceive you. If you learn how to acknowledge people which again, will walk you through discussing the detailed mechanics of that in this interview, that makes you seem like the most interesting person in the world, and then there’s other mechanics like eye contact, body language, having an open posture, and these are all things you’ll learn in practice. I’ll give you another example is, I mentioned that I usually get nervous before I speak, so I don’t walk into the venue where I’m speaking, I stride in with a big smile on my face and shake hands with people, and I transmit confidence to the other person, and at a smaller scale, that’s kind of what you learn to do to be a good conversationalist as well.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, have you seen an uptick in people seeking you out for the mechanics help since the end of… The end of the pandemic, ’cause I guess there’s a period where people just… They didn’t have to do small talk anymore, and they might have gotten rusty with their skills. Have you noticed that?

Rich Gallagher: Yes, I have noticed that. And just since I’m on… I’m not just saying this ’cause I’m in the Art of Manliness podcast, the one thing I find interesting about my consulting clients is they’re all men.

Brett McKay: Yeah, what do you think is going… Men just aren’t invested in that? Or what do you think’s going on?

Rich Gallagher: Well, there’s a cultural context to this. So think back to when we were cave people, when a man could no longer hunt, he died, and when a woman could no longer attract a mate to bring food back to the nest with the kids, she died, and so you fast forward thousands of years later, and that’s partly an explanation why women tend to be really good at relationships, women tend to be good at the conversation, and men tend to be more focused in their careers. So the kind of men that I work with, generally, they’re really talented, really smart people, and ironically, they usually talk really well informally but they realize that if they wanna get a third date with somebody, or if they want to get the position they want, they need to be more comfortable in social settings.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about this skill, the mechanics of a small talk interaction. So you say that it should begin even before you take part in small talk, you need to do some prep work, so what does prep work look like for small talk?

Rich Gallagher: That’s kind of the hidden secret of a good conversation is if you’re going into a social event where you wanna meet people or talk to people, or if you’re going on a date with somebody, or… It’s important to prepare three to five good opening questions, and it’s also important to come up with some credentialing statements, to kinda quickly, and perhaps humorously or pleasantly, define who you are, there’s no one formula for conversations. Here’s a good case in point, I’m very emotional, my wife is very emotional, we kind of bond over that. I have a brother, he’s a scientist with a PhD, he’s incredibly practical, and when he would go on dates with people who’d fallen all over him, he’d kinda shy away, and I’ll never forget when he met a fellow engineering student that was… They just reveled in each other’s practicality and they’ve been married for 40 years now, so defining who he is and defining who I am is part of the objective too, and that’s all prep.

Brett McKay: Something my wife and I do before we go to a couple’s house for dinner or to a social event, we actually come up with a list, like, Here’s the things I’m gonna bring up, I’m gonna talk about.

Rich Gallagher: That’s wonderful.

Brett McKay: And people might think, Well, that’s… Small talk is supposed to be spontaneous, and I don’t think so. I think you should have set topics you wanna bring up in the conversation, if they seem natural to the conversation.

Rich Gallagher: Iggy Pop, the musician once pointed to his drummer and said the drum part is a composed performance, I think a good conversation is the same thing as well. Obviously there’s a certain amount of improvisation, you never know where a conversation is gonna go. There’s techniques you can use to manage the flow of that conversation, but I think preparation is a really important part of having a good conversation, and let’s say you’re interviewing for a job, for example, if you have a statement of credentials, how good you are at what they’re trying to hire you for and it’s a good, humble, informative snippet about who you are, that could land you the job, and so I think you’re right on target by prepping for these conversations, and I’ll bet it makes you a much more interesting person.

Brett McKay: I hope so. And I think too, your prep will vary depending on the social situation you’re in…

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So your prep might be different, so if you know this person is gonna be there, they’re interested in these topics, I’m gonna get some topics fodder for that, or if you’re going to a wedding or a business networking event, you can prep towards that, so you just… So it fits the context and the situation you’re in.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely correct. And there’s a level of appropriate for bringing out that research into your talk, it informs a good conversation, it doesn’t drive it necessarily. For example, I know you’re from Tulsa, for example, [0:15:11.7] ____ your show, and if we were talking informally meeting as friends, I’d be maybe slipping at some point, when I pulled in to 3:00 in the morning at Will Rogers casino and ended up gambling at 3:00 AM, what a cool experience that was.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think what that prep does too, is it can help blunt some of the fears you might have with small talk ’cause you feel like you’re prepared instead of just having to come up with it off the cuff.

Rich Gallagher: Correct, and it gives you a ledge you can climb on to find points of common interest with the other person. Part of it too is of course your prep is a way of testing what the other person is interested in talking about, and then following their lead as well.

Brett McKay: Okay, so do some prep… Let’s talk about first impression, you mentioned that earlier when you go to an event to speak, you don’t just shuffle onto the stage, you stride in.

Rich Gallagher: That’s right.

Brett McKay: So what are some things that people can do in just every day small talk to manage their first impression?

Rich Gallagher: You frame that very well, I think… The mechanics of how you present yourself physically is important, eye contact, body language, having an open posture. One of the things I talk about in the book is having an appropriate distance from the other person, one expert suggests shaking hands with somebody and then taking a step back and see if they follow you or if they keep their distance, different cultures have different norms for how close is appropriate and sometimes people actually [0:16:28.4] ____ backwards around the room, not figuring that out. So that’s important, ’cause that again, helps people feel safe with you and create a spark of interest, but then I think the important thing is what’s the first thing you say when you open your mouth and having a prepared opening, this is good too.

Some of the old standbys are common shared interests, your interests, and the questions, learning about the other person, so what you’re looking for is ledges that you can climb up on to get the other person talking and to delight in their company. I wanna put a finer point on this, ’cause this is very important when you have social anxiety. When you have social anxiety, you’re worried about being on stage in front of another person, that’s very uncomfortable for you, and having good openings and good questions and good acknowledgement, gives you the power to hand the conversation back to the person, take the spotlight off you, and gives you a sense of control if it makes it easier for you.

Brett McKay: So what’s an example of a good tried-and-true opener?

Rich Gallagher: I actually like… If it’s a professional setting, I actually like, What do you do? I’ve seen articles say, Oh, don’t ask What do you do? That’s a tired question. I think it’s a wonderful question, ’cause men especially, we tend to be invested in our livelihoods and our careers, so that’s often a reliable topic. If you’ve got an interest that you wanna brain yourself around, I think it’s perfectly okay to share that impulse if the other person’s interested and finally, I think a good opening is, especially if you’re on a date with somebody, is share a titbit about how you feel and who you are, and see how the other person reacts to that, make it non-threatening, but if you talk about something you really like about other people, like you like it when people open up to you, or you like it when people are practical, not only are you seeking connection with the other person, but this is also a good weed out for whether this is a person you wanna get closer to.

Brett McKay: What are some openers that you think people should avoid?

Rich Gallagher: Well, first of all, the weather, ’cause you don’t wanna advertise how boring you are, unless it’s really really extreme weather. Obvious things to stay away from is politics and religion. I’d also be very careful about criticism, especially things… For example, is you know, I have an Irish surname, Gallagher. If someone was talking to me about their last trip to Europe and they make a snide comment about dealing with Eastern Europeans, they may not realize I’m actually a Czech citizen and I’m very proud of my heritage as a [0:18:49.3] ____. So obviously, because in our marriage, I have a different name, and I guess the other thing I’ll say about openers that you should be careful about avoiding is I would also avoid relationships unless you know somebody really well, you don’t wanna ask somebody how their wife or kids are doing in case they just got divorced or junior just got arrested again. It’s better to be a little generic and say, How are you doing these days.

Brett McKay: And the openers are gonna vary depending on, I guess the context. If they’re strangers, your opening is gonna differ from… That you’d use on an acquaintance.

Rich Gallagher: Correct, and you’re gonna have a context-dependent and cultural-dependent opening that you’re gonna prepare ahead of time.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at an event, you’re at a party, for example, and there’s a group of people chatting and you’re like, “Okay, I wanna join this group.” How do you insert yourself in the conversation, ’cause I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable about that.

Rich Gallagher: That is a great question Brett, because there’s mechanics behind that, a lot of people with social anxiety are really uncomfortable trying to introduce themselves to a group of people, so here’s the way I walk through the mechanics, first of all, get physically close to that group, not too close but close enough that you’re showing interest, read their body language and see if they’re closing ranks when you come by or if they’re not, and then if you’re interested, look for a hook and hooks can take the form of either somebody you know in that group, saying, “Hey, John, good to see you again,” or when they bring up a common topic, you then insert yourself and say, “Oh, I see you’re talking about Quality Management, that’s a big passion of mine, what do you guys think about single customer review.” Or, “I see you’re bass players, what do you think of Geddy Lee? Good stuff, bassist?”

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, there’s a potential to do it gracefully. And again, I don’t think you should worry too much. I think a lot of people, they worry too much about, “Oh, man, it’s gonna be awkward.” Usually it’s not, the conversations where I’ve had someone join me, it seemed completely natural.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely, and I have a brother who’s a world class sales person, and one of the things that he says is, “They’re not gonna take out a gun and shoot me if I go up and talk to somebody.”

Brett McKay: Right, exactly. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, let’s say you got the conversation going, you used an opener, you were getting that chit-chat back and forth, you argue in the book, or you point out in the book that this is the point where a lot of people get nervous and they actually start talking more than they need to and they start dominating the conversation. So how do you avoid that conversational narcissism once you get the conversation going?

Rich Gallagher: I love that term, “Conversational Narcissism,” that’s well put. And I’m gonna put a finer point in that. Narcissism is often a matter of seeking to control other people where this kind of narcissism is kind of a venial sin narcissism of not knowing what else to do and talking. And my answer to that is to circle back to mechanics, again, one of the things I talk about in the book is what I call the three-to-one rule, which is you ask the other person three questions and then after the three questions… So it doesn’t just turn into interrogation, you share one thing about yourself. You can modify that rule, so it’s a three to two rule or a four to one rule, or whatever works for you, but being aware of those mechanics in the back of your mind just like Paul Simon at his concert is the way you avoid that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, for me, I know I got a good conversation going, if it feels like a game of catch, it’s just back and forth and it just… It grooves, it feels good. So what do you do… Okay, so you’re following this three-to-one ratio, what do you do if you’re in a conversation where the other person just talks, and talks and talks. Any tips there?

Rich Gallagher: A lot of the techniques I teach in communication skills, especially through difficult conversations, work about 85% of the time. I have one that works almost 100% of the time that I call The acknowledging close, and the way that that works is you enthusiastically acknowledge the last thing that this person says, and you interrupt them to do that, and then what you do is then you jump in with a binary question, something that has a yes, no or a short statement answer. As as soon as they answer, you jump in with the next binary question and guess what, you’ve just taken control of the conversation.

Brett McKay: Okay, I like that. I’m gonna use that next time that happens. You’ve got the conversation going. It’s great. You need to leave. Exiting a conversation can cause a lot of anxiety for people.

Rich Gallagher: Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay: So how do you leave a conversation smoothly or gracefully?

Rich Gallagher: There’s a very important principle here, which is that psychologists will tell you that people remember the last thing that they hear from you, so let’s say that you’re with somebody and have a knock down, drag out, fight with them all day, that you end by smiling and shaking hands. That goes in your memory banks as a good encounter. If you have a great day with your best friend and then you end with cross words at the end, that goes in your memory banks as a bad encounter. What this has to do with social anxiety is you can recover from a blah or unsatisfying conversation by having a really good closing, so when you say enthusiastically, “I have to run and meet somebody, but wow, it’s been great to meet you, George. Hope we can talk again some time.” That goes in that person’s memory bank as a good encounter and you go in their memory banks as a cool person.

Brett McKay: So what would be an inappropriate way to do it?

Rich Gallagher: I gotta go.

Brett McKay: Or the Irish goodbye. You just kind of slowly fade away, don’t say you left. I’ve done that before at parties, I’ll admit.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely. And sometimes that’s appropriate. These are cockpit decisions you can make depending on how close you wanna be to that other person in the future as well, and sometimes you wanna ghost people and that’s a good skill to have as well.

Brett McKay: Okay, so basically the go-to should be enthusiastically agree with the person and then say it was so great, and then just get out of there and don’t worry about it. Yeah, that’s fine.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely. Absolutely, and that more often than not, will leave a great impression.

Brett McKay: What happens if a conversation goes sideways or a small talk goes sideways? I guess the first question would be, What are some ways that you’ve seen that small talk can go sideways. And then how do you recover from that?

Rich Gallagher: I think, first of all, you have to be careful about criticism of anything unless it’s something universal, like traffic or paying your taxes, because you never know what kind of relationships or life experiences that the other person has had, for example, you may criticize a celebrity and find out this person is related to them, for example. Implicit bias is something you have to be careful of, one example I have in the book is where somebody introduces you to a couple and say, Hi, this is Dr. Smith, and you turn to the husband and say, Hi, Dr. Smith, and it’s actually the wife who’s the doctor, and sometimes just car crashes happen where something comes out and you didn’t realize it was gonna be a problem and it is. One thing that happened to me, for example, was when my sister went to college, she had this scruffy boyfriend, who had a nickname, let’s call him Jojo, and…

So he was… He drove a beat up old car, he was always in a lot of trouble. Years later, my father became President of that university, and often would mention to me that, Boy, Jojo is doing really well in his career, and he’s rising through the corporate ranks. Years later, I’m at my father’s retirement banquet, and now I’m sitting next to Jojo, who’s now the CEO of one of the biggest companies in Canada, and I regale him with stories about all the misadventures that he and my sister got into it, and he’d smile and nod, stiffly. And then later, my sister told me that Jojo is actually a fairly common nickname in Canada, and that that was the wrong Jojo. If he had told me about that, what I would have done, and what I prescribe for everybody is to own it and normalize it to say, Wow, that was a horrible thing I just said. I call this leaning into your mistakes, we instinctively try to minimize what we said or try to explain why we did it or how we didn’t mean it, and I want you to revel in how horrible it was, and that transfers authenticity to the other person and shows respect and more often than not, it will fix the faux pas.

Brett McKay: And I think most people… They’re on your side. They want to have a good interaction with you, so if you do make a mistake…

Rich Gallagher: Exactly.

Brett McKay: They’re not gonna hold it over your head.

Rich Gallagher: Right, exactly, exactly correct.

Brett McKay: And I think this applies to public speaking as well, it’s another tip I use when I remember is like, These people are on my side, they don’t want us…

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: They don’t wanna see me mess up.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely, and for someone like me who used to speak 40 or 50 times a year, you can’t speak that often without truly laying an egg at least two or three times, and so being able to laugh, own that, acknowledge it, that often will bring the audience on your side even if you said something really stupid like, my gaffe in Boston there.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about… What I like about what are you do in the book is you give specific small talk strategies for different situations, let’s talk about first dates. What’s a…

Rich Gallagher: Okay, absolutely.

Brett McKay: What’s a good small talk strategy for a first date.

Rich Gallagher: Here’s the objective with a date, and this is part of the gender and cultural differences about dating. They’ve done surveys of what women value on a first date with people, and they value a good conversation, but the single biggest thing is they wanna feel safe with you, ’cause they don’t know you yet, and so they’re trying to determine whether you’re an axe murderer or not, and so it’s… Whereas men often go into dates thinking it’s their job to convince a date how fantabulous they are, whereas your job is to authentically share who you really are with the other person, because again, they’re weeding you out and you’re weeding them out, and to make them feel safe and at ease with you. So I think it’s good to have a couple of upbeat credentialing examples of how practical you are, how emotional you are, how much you love music, whatever it is that really would connect you with another person that you wanna be closer to.

Brett McKay: And then also just to ask questions, but without it being like an interrogation.

Rich Gallagher: Exactly, and the other thing that I mention in the book is to… Compliments are a good thing as long as you don’t lay them on too thick, and as long as they’re culturally appropriate for men and women.

Brett McKay: And I think as you talk to somebody… You ask a question about like, Oh, tell me about what you do for your career. There’s opportunities for complementing there, it’s like, Wow, it’s really cool that you do that or whatever.

Rich Gallagher: And that gets to something that I wanna share is I think really… The key conversation skill for any conversation, including a first date, which is how to acknowledge people, because that has mechanics behind it. I break it down into what I call the four octane levels of acknowledgement, which is… The first octane level, when somebody says something to you about something in their life is paraphrasing, what you do is… How paraphrasing works is you simply take what they said, gift wrap it in your own words and hand it right back to them. You’re not giving any judgement, you’re not giving any analysis, you’re just playing back what they said to you, so when somebody says, “My son just got into college,” you’re saying, “Wow, so your son got into a good university, congratulations.” It may seem really lame to just play back what another person says, but that’s a technique you can have in your back pocket if you don’t know what else to say.

Once I was on stage in front of hundreds of people, and I had somebody role play with me, and they had an example where there was a snafu and they weren’t gonna graduate, and they came up yelling and screaming at me and all I did was just paraphrase everything they said. Wow, this is really inconveniencing you, this is holding up your job, we gotta figure out a way to help you graduate as soon as possible. And she’s standing there with this look of stun silence on her face. I’m trying to get mad at this guy and I don’t know what to say. So that’s the lowest octane level of acknowledgement. The next octane level is observation, where instead of just playing back what they’re saying, you take a guess at what they’re feeling. You can’t crack open their head and see what they’re feeling, and it’s safe to guess about it. Before I became a crisis counselor… Before I became a therapist, I was a crisis line counselor in the suicide prevention crisis line, and one of the things they train us to do is take a guess at what the other person’s feeling.

So we may say, Okay, you just broke up with your boyfriend and you’re feeling very frightened, they may even come back to say, No, I’m not frightened, I’m angry, but they still appreciate the fact that you’re trying to lock in on how they feel. So on a date an observation phrase could be something like, Wow I can tell by your tone of voice, how proud you are about that, or I’m reading your body language, your… Wow, that must have been really frustrating. The next octane level up, and I like this for men because it’s emotionally a little safer than expressing emotions is validation. So paraphrasing is, here’s your thought, observation is, here’s what I think you’re feeling. Validation is, I see how you feel, and I think your feelings are valid, that’s where the term comes from.

I think you have a right to feel that way. And you can do this even if you violently disagree with the other person. Validation is nothing more than letting somebody know that other people feel the same way, so all you do is just invite a big crowd in your answer and say, Everybody hates to pay their taxes or nobody likes it when somebody goes off on you like that, and then the highest octane level is identification, where you assure that you would feel the same way. “Wow if that happened, that would bother me too.” So if somebody operates on an emotional plane, then the higher the octane level you go, the better the other person tends to feel, so you need to kind of titrate in real time, which octane level that you’re using acknowledge the other person. When you get good at this, you become the most interesting person in the world.

Brett McKay: And again, this is a skill you’ll learn through trial and error how to titrate that.

Rich Gallagher: And when I am in therapy with people or coaching people on small talk, we do incessant role-playing until people get really, really good at it.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we talked about first dates, so the goal there is to let the woman know that you are someone you can trust, etcetera, make that emotional connection. Let’s talk about a small talk on a job interview.

Rich Gallagher: Oh, that’s a great example.

Brett McKay: What should that look like?

Rich Gallagher: And that’s Old Home days for me, one of the things that I did for the last decade was every year I would teach an orientation workshop for those a week long for the incoming engineering graduate students at Cornell. And it was almost all focused around how to do your first job interviews. And one of the things I would tell people is you have two objectives, or I should say the interviewer has two objectives in the interview. One is, can you do the job? The other is, are you an axe murderer. And so your job, just like a date is not to convince the interviewer how fantabulous you are, but so authentically, transfer and transmit information about who you are and what you’re gonna be like to work with. And so here, you mentioned preparation earlier this… Here having good preparation and good credential examples is really important. I’ll give you a really good example of this.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of peoples. I ran customer service call centers in the software industry for a long time, and when you’re hiring somebody to work in a call center, they really have to know computers really well, ’cause of course they’re doing technical support. Once my human resource department set me up with an interview with somebody who’d been a construction worker all his life, then he hurt his back and couldn’t do construction anymore, went back to community college to learn computer programming, and so I wasn’t sure what to make of that and I wasn’t sure if that person would really have the depth of skills that we were looking for. So I went in the interview, the first question I asked was, “So what was it like for you going from construction and contracting to learning how to work with computers?”

And what he said was, he says, “When I learned this programming language, here’s how they taught me. Now, if I were teaching this language, here’s what I would do,” and he just proceed to lay out a curriculum and my jaw was on the floor. I would have given my right arm to hire him, and he actually had plenty of offers and went elsewhere, but that was an example of where a good credential example really changed my perception of whether this was somebody I wanted to hire. Small talk is important in an interview because the interviewer wants to know what you’re like to work with, and so if they’re talking about what’s going on in their lives, or if they’re venting frustrations about what’s happening in the workplace, they’re looking to see how you’re gonna react to that, and they’re also looking to see, what kind of a person are you gonna be like as a co-worker with people who are currently on the team.

Brett McKay: Now, in my experience, it’s been a long time, since I’ve done a job interview, but when I was interviewing for a Law intern jobs, I understood that, okay, my resume has obviously… They thought my credentials were good, they think I’m… The point of this job interview is they like me and they’re gonna get along with me, so I just… Basically, my interviews never talked about my grades, they never talked about my interest in law, it was just like… It was basically a 20-minute small talk conversation about random stuff.

Rich Gallagher: That’s wonderful. They’re trying to get to know who you were and what kind of person you were like. And one thing that’s really important about this is, I think it’s important to also authentically get across who you are, I’ve never seen people blow interviews for the most part. Once in a great great while, I’m interviewing somebody for customer service, they talk about how they hate customers. But for the most part, people don’t blow interviews ’cause they’re too nervous, they don’t blow interviews because they accidentally say the wrong thing. Usually it’s very clear to the interviewer who the right person for the job is among the people they talk to. So your job is just to authentically relax and be who you are. I’ll give you one example of this.

My last corporate job was I was the manager of a 24-hour call center for a large software company, and one of the first questions they asked me is, they said, “Rich, people in this company tend to travel a lot. We have customers all over the country, and we tend to do a lot of traveling. What do you think about traveling?” And what I said is, “Listen carefully, I hate traveling.” I’m good for maybe three or four trips a year, and if you want more than that, you should move on to the next person. Here’s the experience and here’s the benefits I bring to the table if you were to hire me, and so they liked what they heard and they hired me. And more importantly, they hired me on my terms, traveling within my tolerance for travel.

Brett McKay: Right. So don’t give the answer you think they wanna hear, just…

Rich Gallagher: Exactly, correct.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Rich Gallagher: And the reason that’s important is not just boundary setting, but also people have pretty good radar for whether you’re being sincere and authentic. And if you’re comfortable with who you are and transmit that to the other person, that is so much more important than trying to impress the other person.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about a situation that I think makes a lot of people uncomfortable. They’re invited to a party, but the only person they know there is the host, and so what you typically end up doing is just hanging around the host the entire time.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: What’s a good game plan for that?

Rich Gallagher: That’s a great question. And that’s actually a very good situation, a lot of social situations are where you are going to the conference you don’t know anyone, for example, or worse, you go to a conference or a party and you only know, as you mentioned, some people and you only hang out with them. My strategy for that is you ask them to introduce you to other people they know, and also mechanics figure into this too. When somebody is hosting a party with a lot of people, you get a certain slice of their time and that’s the appropriateness you should keep in the back of your mind, but leveraging that relationship to connect with other relationships is the strategy you use there.

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, go to your host be like, “Can you introduce me to some people that you think we can get along”

Rich Gallagher: Exactly. Leverage that relationship.

Brett McKay: What about… And this is another common one, weddings, where you’re assigned a seat and you’re assigned to someone, like I have no clue who this person is. How do you navigate that one?

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely, it’s hard to prep for those, of course, because these are like patients in different rooms of the hospital. I was in exactly that situation not that long ago with the relative getting married where I was with the old people table, of course. And I thought it was wonderful because just going through the basic mechanics of who are you, what do you do, what do you like. Here’s what I’m like, I made some really good friendships that have persisted since then from just getting to know people and getting everyone to open up.

Brett McKay: And again, you gotta be careful, especially at a wedding, let’s say, “Oh, how do you know the groom?” And they’re like… And then you start telling this crazy story from your college days that might be embarrassing to the… You don’t wanna do that.

Rich Gallagher: Right, exactly. Exactly correct. This gets the… What we were talking about earlier about, be careful and anything is potentially critical or incriminating about the guest of honor.

Brett McKay: What’s that thing from the Rotary Club? I think it’s from the Rotary Club, that’s like, don’t say something if it’s like…

Rich Gallagher: Rotary Four-Way…

Brett McKay: What was that?

Rich Gallagher: Rotary Four-Way Test. I actually gave a talk on the Rotary Four-Way Test, on a former Rotarian. And I don’t remember it off the top of my head, but basically, is it kind? Is it true? Is it going to help build good will among people? It’s a good strategy to live by.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s a good way to navigate what to say.

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Rich, this has been a great conversation.

Rich Gallagher: Likewise.

Brett McKay: Is there some place quiet people can go to learn more about your work?

Rich Gallagher: Absolutely, so yeah, the book is called Stress-Free Small Talk, it’s available where fine books are sold and also available online, most… It’s actually one of the best selling books on conversation skills for social anxiety, which is not the biggest niche in the world. And I have a website, smalltalkcoach.com that tells more about that, and also this is my hub for coaching services, and I also have a very informative blog on topics on how to have good small talk, which is all free.

Brett McKay: Well, Rich Gallagher, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Rich Gallagher: Thank you Brett, you too.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Rich Gallagher, he’s the author of the book Stress-Free Small Talk, it’s available on amazon. You can find more information about his work at his website, smalltalkcoach.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/stressfreesmalltalk, where you find links to resources, and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to Stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on android, ios, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #802: Stress-Free Small Talk appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

How not to comfort someone. For how to do it, see the tips below.

With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2016.

Have you ever had someone come to you crying?

Maybe your wife had a brutal day at work and fell apart when she came through the door.

Or your mom lost it while reminiscing about your deceased dad.

Or your usually stoic buddy broke down about his girlfriend dumping him.

Interacting with someone who’s sad and hurting can be awkward; you want to be there for them, show your empathy, and strengthen your relationship, but it’s hard to know how to act and what to say. A lot of us end up sitting there uncomfortably, offering some awkward back pats, while saying, “There, there, it’s okay.”

I know a lot of guys out there struggle with this scenario, because I’ve gotten more requests to cover this topic than any other.

I held off on doing so, because while I thought I did a pretty good job in this area myself, I wanted to see if there was real research out there concerning best practices. Fortunately, I recently came across some great tips from Dr. John Gottman, a professor of psychology and arguably the foremost relationship expert in the country. Today I’ll share his advice, as well as the tips I’ve gleaned from personal experience, on how to comfort someone who’s sad, so you can help them in their time of need and be a better son, friend, and husband/boyfriend.

How to Comfort Someone Who’s Sad/Crying

“Witness” their feelings. One of the most difficult things about trying to comfort someone who’s hurting is feeling like you don’t know what to say. Fortunately, most of the time people aren’t actually looking for you to offer specific advice or pearls of wisdom; the most comforting thing in the world isn’t an inspiring platitude, but feeling like someone else gets what you’re going through, and that you’re not alone in the world. The thing people want most when they’re hurting is for you to act as a sounding board and to show understanding and empathy. Gottman calls this “witnessing” your loved one’s distress.

So to start off comforting someone, simply describe what you’re seeing/sensing. Say something like, “I know you’re having such a hard time with this,” or “I’m sorry you’re hurting so much.”

Also affirm that you hear what they’re saying by saying it back to them in your own words.

So if your wife, who’s in tears, says:

“My boss told me I wasn’t cut out for my job, and that if I make one more mistake he’s going to fire me.”

You would say back:

“It sounds like you’re upset because you haven’t been doing as well as you’d like at work, and you’re worried that you’re going to lose your job. Is that right?”

Affirm that their feelings make sense. You want to not only acknowledge that you hear the person’s feelings, but that they make sense to you. It’s lonely to feel like you’re coming at something from out of left field.

So you might say to your friend who’s going through a bad break-up: “Of course you’re devastated. I honestly was depressed for months after Emily and I ended things.”

Keep in mind that while sharing your similar experiences shows empathy, you want to be careful not to pivot the focus of the conversation onto you. Don’t try to one-up the person by sharing a story of how you’ve had it worse, and don’t go on and on about your own experience. Instead, briefly share how you’ve been through something similar, and then return the focus to the other person by asking them questions and eliciting more details (see the next point). Even if you haven’t experienced the same thing, you can still say, “That’s never happened to me, but I can really get why you’re feeling that way.”

If the person’s feelings don’t make sense to you, that makes the next step all the more important.

Show the person you understand their feelings, and facilitate the deepening of his or her own understanding of them. Sometimes people do want advice or a proposed solution to their problem, but even then, they usually first simply want to vent their feelings; as has often been observed, this is especially true of women. So hold off on going into problem-solving mode at first, and just listen. See your job not as talking, but as getting the other person to talk, so that they can sort through their feelings themselves; they may not even be able to articulate why they’re feeling down, unless you draw it out of them.

In getting your friend/partner/relative to open up, you demonstrate your genuine support and interest, enhance your understanding of their suffering, and let them know that you know why they’re sad; as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (he the advocate for indirect communication) advises, that last part is important even if you think you already understand, and already know how to solve their problem:

“If real success is to attend the effort to bring another person to a definite position, one must first of all take the pains to find that person where he or she is and begin there. This is the secret of the art of helping others. Anyone who has not mastered this is himself deluded when he proposes to help others. In order to help another effectively, I must understand more than he — yet first of all surely I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him. If, however, I am disposed to plume myself on my greater understanding, it is because I am vain or proud, so that at the bottom, instead of benefiting him, I want to be admired . . . To help does not mean to be a sovereign but a servant . . . not to be ambitious but to be patient.”

Or as the minister Fred B. Craddock puts it so well:

“To understand what is understood and how it is understood means not only that you understand but that the listener understands that you do.”

To facilitate this drawing out process, Gottman recommends using “exploratory statements and open-ended questions” like:

• Tell me what happened.
• Tell me everything that’s bothering/worrying you.
• Tell me all of your concerns.
• Tell me everything that’s led up to this.
• Help me understand more about what you’re feeling.
• What set off these feelings?
• What’s the thing that’s worrying you the most?
• What’s the worst that could happen? (If you feel like someone is catastrophizing — believing something is much worse than it is — try working through this exercise with them)

Gottman recommends against asking any “why” questions since, no matter how well-intended, they tend to come off as criticism:

“When you ask, ‘Why do you think like that?’ the other person is likely to hear, ‘Stop thinking that, you’re wrong!’ A more successful approach would be, ‘What leads you to think that?’ or, ‘Help me understand how you decided that.’”

By working through these exploratory statements and questions, you’ll hopefully not only get a better understanding of the person’s suffering, but help them come to understand it better themselves too. They may come up with their own solution, realize that things really aren’t so bad, or simply feel better having gotten their worries or grief off their chest.

Don’t minimize their pain or try to cheer them up. When faced with tears, it’s natural to want to try to snap the person out of it with smiles and jokes, or by insisting that whatever they’re upset about is “no big deal.” But someone who’s upset wants to take you on a tour of their melancholic landscape, pointing out the blue-tinged landmarks they’re seeing; it doesn’t help to say, “Nope, there’s nothing out there!” or “Look, there’s a dog riding a unicycle!” Something may not feel like a big deal to you, but it does feel like a big deal to them. Don’t trivialize their experience, but walk through it with them.

But what if someone’s reason for feeling sad really is no big deal? If you don’t think their deprecating feelings about an event, or themselves, are justified, ask, “Can you think of any evidence that’s contrary to the conclusion you’ve reached?” If they can’t, ask if you can suggest your own and share an alternative way of seeing things (it’s nice to ask permission here, because offering a contrarian view, unsolicited, tends to come off as critical and antagonistic).

If someone’s feelings are habitually irrational and grossly disproportionate to their cause, or they’re constant complainers who get upset about everything, that’s probably someone you simply want to minimize contact with if possible.

Offer physical affection if appropriate. Sometimes people don’t want to talk, and don’t want you to talk either — they just want to be held in silence. But one of the things I think guys struggle with when trying to comfort someone is knowing how much physical affection to offer. The gestures you make should generally match whatever you give the person on a normal basis. If you’ve never hugged the person you’re comforting, then don’t go beyond putting a hand on their shoulder, or an arm around it. If they’re someone you hug regularly, then give them an embrace. If you’re intimate partners, offer a snuggle.

Now this just goes for gestures you initiate; in gauging the level of needed physical affection, you should really let the other person take the lead — they may lean in to that arm you drape over their shoulder, and if they do, you should reciprocate.

Just be careful about the messages you send; if a girl is crying because you’re breaking up with her, or she just confessed feelings that aren’t requited, physical affection could send a mixed message. Also, if you make your affection towards your significant other too sensual, rather than comforting, they could be offended that you’re trying to make a play for sex, when they’re trying to work through a tough issue.

Suggest action steps. As mentioned above, there are times when people just want to be heard and comforted, and don’t want a solution to their feelings of sadness (often there is no solution; you can’t bring your dead dad back — grief is just grief). In such cases, after going through the above steps, the person typically feels better for having shared the burden on their heart, and the sadness runs its course. Ask if there’s anything else they want to tell you. If it’s nighttime, when these feelings tend to come out, suggest they go to bed; everyone feels better in the morning.

Other times, the upset person still feels unresolved, and wants advice on what to do. First, ask them if they have any ideas as to steps they could take to improve the situation — solutions are more likely to be adopted if the person comes up with them on their own. If they’ve got big, macro ideas, help break those down into next-action steps. If they’re at a loss as to how to proceed, offer your suggestions.

With someone who’s sad not because of an isolated event, but because they suffer from depression, pivot as quickly as possible to talking about an action step, or just inviting them to do something else besides talking — e.g., take a walk or go for a drive together. Excess rumination is not only ineffective in alleviating depressed feelings, it can actually make them worse.

Affirm your support and commitment. As a comfort-driven conversation winds down, let the person know that you understand what they’re going through, that you’re sorry they’re going through it, and that your shoulder is always available for crying on.

The post How to Comfort Someone Who’s Sad/Crying appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Most everyone struggles with saying no.

It’s hard to say no to the dinner invitation from the perfectly-nice-but-deathly-boring acquaintance; to the looks-good-on-paper-but-is-sure-to-fail proposal from a boss; to the request that you serve in an entirely-worthy-but-wholly-unsuited-to-your-talents role at church.

Saying no feels awkward. It feels impolite. It makes you feel bad that maybe you’re not as nice or as helpful a person as you’d like to think, and it makes the asker feel bad that you’re somehow rejecting them personally.

But there’s a way to decline invitations and requests that allows both you and the asker to remember that saying no doesn’t make you a bad person.

It’s called the “positive no.”

Why It Feels Unpleasant to Tell People No and to Get a No

According to negotiation professor William Ury, the way most people say no to requests typically creates tension, hurt feelings, and resentment all around.

Think about how you might typically start off declining a request:

“I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to . . .”

You’re starting off with a negative, which triggers the other person’s brain in a defensive direction.

Human brains are highly sensitive to the negative. When you begin your no with a negative, it subconsciously puts its recipient on red alert. When you decline someone’s invitation or request, you’re knocking them down a peg in status; they feel less liked/important/appreciated. And, even if they cognitively know that your decline may not be personal, womp-womp neurochemicals kick in and it viscerally stings.

And then you feel bad, for making them feel bad. No one likes to disappoint.

The Positive No

Instead of starting off your no with a negative and thus causing its recipient to shift into defensive mode, Ury recommends offering a “positive no.”

A positive no allows you to convey to the asker (and to yourself) that the reason you’re saying no is not because you’re a bad person, but because you have positive priorities that you’re working on and saying yes to, which don’t allow you the time or bandwidth to take on another commitment. It’s a way of telling people that you’re not saying no to them, but saying yes to other things that are important in your life.

The positive no doesn’t completely take the dejection out of rejection (you are, after all, still saying that your own priorities take precedence over whatever it is the other person is asking of you), but it does significantly dampen it, making your decline feel less personal, less jerky, and less apt to be received as a status defeat.

How to Give a Positive No

Giving a positive no is pretty dang easy. Not only does it make the interaction less fraught, but it also allows you to provide a firm no without being wishy-washy about it.

Here’s your outline for a positive no:

Start with warmth. Show appreciation for the ask. The person wouldn’t be making the request to you if they didn’t think you’re a cool and/or competent dude. By making the request, they’re showing some deference. Appreciate that!

Tell the person what you’re saying yes to right now. This is where the “positive” part of the “positive no” comes in. Briefly and enthusiastically share your positive priorities with the requester. This could be a project at work, your family, or a community service commitment. Let the recipient know what you’re saying yes to.

Give your no. Explain that, because you’re saying yes to _____, unfortunately, you can’t do the thing they asked you to do.

Don’t say you’re “sorry” for having to decline; apologies are for when you do something wrong, and not being desirous or able to fulfill a request doesn’t fall into that category. An “unfortunately” or an “I wish I could” (if that’s sincerely the case) express your regret that it’s not possible for you to do everything in life, without confessing to an offense or failure.

End with warmth. Wish the person well with their endeavor (if you sincerely support it). If you have a contact in your network that could help the requester, offer to put him or her in touch with that contact. This isn’t necessary though; well-wishes can suffice.

Comparing a Typical No With a Positive No

To see the difference this request-declining methodology can make, let’s contrast an example of a typical no with a positive one.

Let’s say your boss asks you to head up the firm’s softball team. You just don’t have the bandwidth for it because you’re coaching your kid’s baseball team in the spring, and you’ve got a lot of projects you’re tackling at work.

Here’s what a typical no would look like:

Thanks for asking me, but unfortunately I won’t be able to run the firm’s softball team this spring. I’ve got a lot of projects at work that I’m working on, and I’m coaching my son’s baseball team this spring. I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. Sorry I couldn’t help.

It’s not a terrible decline. It’s short and to the point. You give your reasons for saying no. But, because you start off with a negative, the whole thing just feels like a downer and that you’re disappointing the other person. The recipient will be so focused on the no, that they’ll ignore or downplay your explanation for it.

Let’s see what a positive no would look like:

Hey! Thanks for asking me to head up the firm’s softball team. I’ve really enjoyed playing on it over the years.

As you might know, I’m working with some big clients for the firm, and we’re making some important pushes that will allow us to hit our quarterly goals next month. I’m really enjoying the work and am spending time after office hours refining our pitches. I’ve also committed to coaching my son’s baseball team this year. I’m really excited about it since I love baseball, and it gives me the opportunity to hang out with my son.

To do a good job on these projects at work and as a baseball coach, I unfortunately have to say no to other commitments, like heading up the firm’s softball team.

I wish you all the best with it!

While the content in these two responses was pretty much the same, their structure differs; the second is bookended with warmth, and, most importantly, starts off with what you’re saying yes to. The no which follows is firm, but its reception will be softened by the more positive lead-in.

Here’s another example of offering a positive no, this time in regards to a social situation:

Thanks very much for the invitation to the party! It sounds like a lot of fun. I’ve just come off a crazy season at work where I didn’t get to see my family very much and I’ve committed to devoting my weekends for the next while to hanging out with them. So I unfortunately won’t be able to come on Saturday. Hope you guys have a blast!

If you’ve had trouble saying no in the past, try framing your nos as positive nos. You might be surprised by the difference it makes.

In conjunction with this technique, continue to work on being more assertive and less of a reflexive people pleaser in general. A big reason people feel bad about saying no to others is the fear of letting them down and making them feel bad. But, remember, while you are responsible for being a respectful and polite person, you are not responsible for other people’s feelings.

The post A Better Way to Say No appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2016.

Are you a senior in high school running for student council president?

Are you an entrepreneur looking to make a successful pitch and attract investors?

Are you a military officer working to win your men’s loyalty?

Are you a salesman trying to land some new clients?

Are you a college professor wanting to get through to your students?

Are you a single guy looking for love?

No matter your situation in life and your individual aims, one of the most important tools for success is your personal charisma. Charisma is what allows you to command a room, draw others to you, and convince people of your ideas. It’s an essential part of being the kind of leader who wins devoted followers willing to go to the ends of the earth for him. Charismatic men are perceived as both likeable and powerful — a dynamic, irresistible combination that opens endless doors to them.

Charisma may seem like a mysterious quality — something that some men are born with and some are not. But this is happily not the case. You don’t need to have hit the genetic charisma lottery in order to develop yourself into a man with powerful magnetism.

Far from being a magical and inexplicable trait, charisma can be broken down into a set of concrete, largely nonverbal behaviors that can be learned, practiced, and made natural. Olivia Fox Cabane, author of The Charisma Myth, places these behaviors into three categories: Presence, Power, and Warmth. When deftly combined, these three components produce strong personal magnetism.

We will be devoting an entire article to each of these three components of charisma. Each will provide an overview of the component, as well as practical tips for developing and implementing it. Later on, we will cover charismatic body language, and, because not every “style” of charisma is appropriate for every situation, we’ll discuss what behaviors to use or de-emphasize in different situations.

For today, we’ll start off by talking about the first component of charisma: Presence.

Charisma Component #1: Presence

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and you could tell you didn’t have their complete attention?

How did it make you feel?

Probably a bit annoyed.

Sadly, it seems fewer and fewer people are fully present and engaged with the individuals they’re interacting with. Being completely engaged in a conversation has likely always been a challenge, as we all have a bit of the conversational narcissist in us.

Now that smartphones have saturated modern life, being fully present is even harder. People today try to (unsuccessfully) switch their attention between two worlds — the real world populated by the people they are physically present with and the cyber world which sends them dispatches through their phone. Go to any restaurant in America and you’re bound to see tables of people staring blankly at their smartphones and hardly engaging with each other. This video that circulated the intertubes a few weeks ago perfectly captures the way in which technology has created a society of non-present screen gawkers. Pretty poignant.

The good news about all this is that it’s now incredibly easy to set yourself apart from the pack simply by being fully present with people and giving them your complete attention.

When you think of charisma, you might think of trying to make yourself seem super awesome to others. But the paradoxical secret of charisma is that it’s not about trumpeting your good qualities, but making the other person feel good about himself. Real charisma makes the other person feel important; when they finish an interaction with you, they feel better about themselves than they did before.

Focusing your mental and emotional energy on someone as you interact is how you create that feeling of importance. People fundamentally want attention — they want to be recognized and acknowledged.

And you don’t have to be an outgoing, uber-social extrovert in order to have and display charisma. There have been plenty of magnetic individuals throughout history who have successfully counterbalanced their introverted inclinations with a charismatically intense focus and presence: Instead of being the life of the party, chatting everybody up, and offering a little of themselves to a lot of people, they concentrate on giving their full attention to a few; in so doing, they make others feel incredibly special. Charisma isn’t necessarily about quantity, but quality.

Conveying presence is a simple concept, but oftentimes difficult to actually achieve. You can’t just fake it. People are surprisingly adept at deciphering your feigned interest. To truly convey presence, you must actually be present. It takes a significant amount of willpower to focus all your attention on the person you’re with at the moment. But like all things, with practice, it becomes significantly easier.

Below are some tips on developing your charismatic presence:

Bring yourself to the here and now. Presence begins in your mind. If you feel like your mind is off somewhere else while engaging with someone, try this little exercise to bring yourself back to the here and now: Focus on physical sensations in your body that you often ignore. It could be your breath or it could be the sensation of your feet touching the ground. You don’t have to spend very long meditating on these sensations. Just a second or two will bring you back into the moment you’re sharing with this person.

Make sure you’re physically comfortable. It’s hard to be fully present with someone when all you’re thinking about is how uncomfortably tight your pants are or how hot it is. To that end, do what you can to ensure you’re as comfortable as possible. That doesn’t necessarily mean wearing a sweatsuit; being stylish, and feeling attractive, makes you feel significantly more confident, and the more confident you feel, the more charismatic you’ll come off. But it does mean wearing clothes that fit. Wearing well-fitted duds will make you both look and feel better. Other things you can do to increase your physical comfort include getting enough sleep, laying off the caffeine (be calm instead of jittery), and adjusting the thermostat (when you can) to a more agreeable temperature.

Set your devices on silent and put them out of sight. This serves two purposes. First, it reduces the temptation for you to check them while you’re engaging with someone. Second, it sends a strong message to the person you’re with that they have your complete attention and they’re not sharing it with the smartphone placed on the table. (Here’s a complete guide to shaking your smartphone habit.)

Look the person in the eye when they’re talking. Numerous studies have shown that people who make higher levels of eye contact with others are perceived as possessing a load of desirable traits, including warmth, honesty, sincerity, competency, confidence, and emotional stability. And not only does increased eye contact make you seem more appealing in pretty much every way to those you interact with, it also improves the quality of that interaction. Eye contact imparts a sense of intimacy to your exchanges, and leaves the receiver of your gaze feeling more positive about your interaction and also more connected to you.

To learn more about the importance of eye contact, click here. To learn how to make eye contact the right way, click here.

Nod to show that you’re listening. Besides eye contact, an easy way to convey presence is through body language, and more specifically, nodding your head. But be judicious with the noggin nods. An overabundance can indicate you’re trying too hard to please and agree with the person, which decreases their perception of your power. Also, only nod at appropriate times; you’ll need to be truly listening to know when a nod makes sense.

Ask clarifying questions. An easy way to show someone that you’re completely there with them is to ask clarifying questions after he or she has spoken. For example, you could say, “Tell me more about why you feel that way.”

A great clarifying question to ask comes to us from Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Basically, you paraphrase what the person just said and add, “Am I understanding you correctly?”

In more casual conversations, ask people questions like, “What was your favorite part of that?” or “What was the hardest part of that for you?” People really enjoy reflecting on and answering such questions.

For more info on how to ask questions that show you’re really listening, click here.

Avoid fidgeting. Fidgeting signals to the other person that you’re not comfortable or content and that there’s somewhere else you’d rather be. So don’t twiddle your thumbs or your phone. And avoid looking around for what else is going on, which signals to the other person that you’re searching for a better opportunity than your current one. Master the art of poise.

Don’t think about how you’re going to respond while the person is still talking. We all have a tendency to do this. Our inner conversational narcissist wants to be ready to jump in and start talking as soon as there’s an opening. But if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say, you’re obviously not fully listening to what the other person is saying. It’s natural to want to have an idea of what you’re going to say before you say it, but it’s okay to work through your response as you’re giving it; embrace the pause. As we’ll discuss in the article on Power, it’s low-status individuals that talk the most and feel the need to fill every silence.

Wait two seconds before responding. Breaking in the very instant a person pauses or stops talking signals to them that you were doing the above — thinking about what you were going to say instead of fully listening to them. Nonverbal behaviors are more powerful than verbal ones, so use this trick from Cabane to show you’re really tuned in:

When someone has spoken, see if you can let your facial expression react first, showing that you’re absorbing what they’ve just said and giving their brilliant statement the consideration it deserves. Only then, after about two seconds, do you answer.

The sequence goes like this:

• They finish their sentence
• Your face absorbs
• Your face reacts
• Then, and only then, you answer

Bone up on your other listening skills. Make sure to check out our article on active listening for more tips on improving this vital skill. Follow them and you’ll make vast improvements in your charismatic presence.

Dive Deeper Into Charisma

Read the entire series:

• The 3 Elements of Charisma: Power
• The 3 Elements of Charisma: Warmth
• A Case Study in Charisma From Tender Is the Night

Read the article series offline as a professionally-formatted, distraction-free ebook: 

• Click here to buy

Listen to our podcast with Olivia Fox Cabane:

The post The 3 Elements of Charisma: Presence appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

There are lots of bits of advice you probably weren’t given growing up. How to budget your money. How to know if you should marry the person you’re dating. How to make or break a habit.

Also assuredly on that list: How to make friends in adulthood.

Not only is it not part of any school curriculum, but you probably didn’t receive any guidance from your parents, either verbally or by way of example, as there’s a good chance they didn’t have any real friends themselves.

If, as a result, you’re struggling to find pals as a grown-up, here are three lessons on the subject, found through our own process of trial and error. Better late than never. Hopefully they’ll keep you from groping about quite as blindly.

You’ll Have to Be Proactive

You likely never even gave any thought to the idea of making friends in general until you graduated from college and plopped out into the wider world. Why would you have? Making and having friends during your school years is practically as natural as breathing. You’re interacting with peers, probably of similar backgrounds and ages, for six or more hours a day. You further subsect this peer group into segments of the even more like-minded by sorting into various extracurricular activities. It’s hard not to make friends during your school years.

And then, post college, cue that record scratch. You may see fellow humans at your workplace, but the pool of potential candidates in the friend department — folks who are in a similar stage in life, share your interests, and possess a personality with which you connect — may nevertheless be rather shallow. And if you work from home, as more and more people do, you can go days without seeing other human beings, of any stripe, at all.

In adulthood there are few built-in structures that automatically push you into forming friendships. And most freshly-minted grown-ups, who have little experience in environments that aren’t set up with those structures, try to continue the friendship-making method they’ve always employed — which is to say, doing nothing — and then feel befuddled at their anemic social circle.

So the biggest lesson to learn about making friends in adulthood is that it’s going to take real, proactive effort. It won’t just happen; you’ll have to work to make it happen.

That means intentionally increasing your contact with other humans, i.e., possible future friends. That can be accomplished by attending a church, joining a gym or dojo, finding a meet-up group in your area that centers on some interest of yours, etc.

Being proactive also means deepening the more superficial bonds you’ll form in such situations by inviting someone to hang out outside of them. For example, if you find yourself chatting each Sunday with someone at your church, eventually you invite them over for dinner. (For tips on how to make these invitations in a non-awkward way, read this article.)

One of the best ways to turn acquaintances into real friends is to start some kind of group — whether that’s an informal men’s fraternity or a discussion circle like a book club — that meets weekly/monthly. With starting a group, you invest more effort upfront to get it going, but then have to put in less effort later in sustaining it; having a set day/time that you meet with your friends will help “automate” your relationships and prevent the endless back and forth of deciding on a time to hang out, every time you hang out.

It Will Take Time (A Lot More Than You Think)

A research study surveyed both college students and adults to figure out how much time it takes to make friends and deepen these bonds.

It found that turning an acquaintance into a casual friend requires spending 40-60 hours together.

Turning a casual friend into a regular friend takes about 80-100 hours.

And turning a regular friend into a close, best friend requires over 200 hours.

In accumulating these needed hours of together-time, adults are at a distinct disadvantage. 

In high school, you may have had two hours of classes, plus two hours of extracurriculars with a friend each day. Then, you hung out with them for eight hours on the weekend. That meant you could meet someone one day, and feel like you were best friends with them just two months later. (And that probably matches up with your lived experience).

As a grown-up, on the other hand, you may spend time with a friend for two hours a week at the gym, and hang out with him once a month, for two hours at a time, outside it. At that rate, it would take three years for a new acquaintance to become a good friend. And in lived experience, this is indeed about how long it takes to feel like you’re really close to a friend you make in adulthood.

If you go into making friends in adulthood with the same expectations that you had in your youth — that you’ll become bosom buddies with folks in a matter of months — you’ll end up frustrated, wondering why things don’t seem to be coming along. They are; you just have to realize that the timeline for relational progress is going to be much, much longer than it was back in your school days. Be patient and keep consistently investing in the friendship.

Some People Are Initiators and Some People Are Not

When you’re young, hang-out plans just kind of materialize. You’re always with your friends, who throw out different ideas of things to do, and your good times just kind of emerge from the hive.

In adulthood, as previously mentioned, making plans takes some real intentionality. In the midst of busy lives, weighted with familial and professional responsibilities, someone’s got to think, “So-and-so and I should hang out,” and then turn that abstract thought into a concrete invitation.

Thus as an adult, a fact emerges that you never glimpsed growing up: not everyone is equally inclined to do this.

People can instead roughly be broken into two groups we’ll call “hosts” and “guests.”

Hosts, as the name suggests, like to host things, whether literally in terms of a dinner party, or more metaphorically, in being the person who makes social plans, initiates activities amongst friends, and corrals folks into doing stuff. If in high school, you were the one with the house at which your friends typically gathered, you’re likely the host type.

Guests enjoy hanging out and attending events, but don’t like to host themselves, whether in the literal or metaphorical sense.

Not understanding this difference can cause confusion and conflict for the hosts of the world.

A host-type couple will invite another couple for dinner. But this couple, the guest type, won’t reciprocate. So the host couple extends another invitation. But the guest-type couple still doesn’t reciprocate. The host couple then wonders if the guest couple doesn’t like them.

If you’re the host type, don’t equate reciprocation of your invitations with interest in being friends. They’re not necessarily correlated. If people keep on readily accepting your invites, they probably like you; if they don’t, and don’t suggest getting together at another time, then they probably don’t like you (the Brad Pitt Rule not only applies to romantic relationships but to platonic ones as well). People likely really appreciate the way you initiate things. They’re just not inclined to do likewise.

If you’re the host type, it can be tempting to fall into a sort of spiteful dejection: “Why do I have to always be the one who initiates things?! If no else cares, then I’m not going to care either!” It’s helpful to realize that the host/guest distinction doesn’t come down to a difference in character but a difference in personality. Some people just aren’t disposed to be social initiators, and while guest types may be disinclined to throw a party, they tend to have their own strength in being the life of one.

It’s also helpful to consider your hosting proclivities as part of your vocation in life. You can play a vital role in bringing folks together, and creating fun, meaning, and memories in people’s lives. Embrace it as a calling.

If you’re the guest type, assuage your host-friends’ uncertainty about your feelings towards them by enthusiastically expressing your appreciation for the ways they initiate good times. If you’re unable to accept an invitation of theirs, communicate that the need to decline is a matter of circumstance and not desire by conveying your regrets and suggesting another time to reschedule. And while guest types are especially disinclined to host in the literal sense of throwing a shindig at their house, they’re usually more open to going out together for a dinner, concert, etc., so when an idea for such an outing crosses your mind, do show some initiatory reciprocation by being the one to propose the hangout from time to time.

Make sure to check out our podcast interview with Professor Jeffery Hall about how long it takes to make friends in adulthood.

The post 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood appeared first on The Art of Manliness.