The World’s Greatest Expert on Lying Unburdens Himself

If Paul Ekman had met the Dalai Lama earlier, this book might have been a chapter shorter.

They met in 2000: the world’s greatest expert on lying and the spiritual leader of millions. Ekman sat next to the Dalai Lama during a break in a multiday seminar in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama took Ekman’s hand and held it without saying anything for about eight minutes. In those moments, Ekman found himself changed forever.¹

The seminar provided regular bio breaks for the participants, but the Dalai Lama took none himself and instead offered the forty-five-minute interludes for individual consultation. Ekman, a scientist and religious skeptic, was attending the seminar at the behest of his daughter, who had become interested in the Tibetan cause and was somewhat in awe of the Dalai Lama. Taking the opportunity provided by one of the breaks, Ekman was persuaded by his daughter to approach His Holiness.

Ekman tries to explain what changed in him: “I think that what I experienced was—a nonscientific term—‘goodness’ … I have no idea what it is or how it happens, but it is not in my imagination. Though we do not have the tools to understand it, that does not mean it does not exist.” He says that he felt a kind of warmth emanating from the Dalai Lama—a psychological, not a physical, warmth. He goes on, “The change that occurred in me was very dramatic. When I left Dharamsala, I met my wife in New Delhi so that we could spend two weeks traveling in India. My wife said, ‘You are not the man I married.’” He continues, “I now believe that this experience was involved in the end of my hatred; the platform for my too-ready anger was no longer in place, and so the anger itself receded.”²

The Dalai Lama’s charisma has helped him touch thousands of lives in this way and made him a powerful symbol of peace. But in a way it’s lucky for us that he didn’t heal Ekman any earlier than he did. Ekman’s hatred—that emotion that so mysteriously vanished when the Dalai Lama took his hand and held it for about eight minutes—is important to us all because it had long provided the fuel for a career that led to an enormous advance in the understanding of human body language and deception. Not to mention Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policies that affect anyone who flies in the United States and indeed worldwide, and an American TV show, Lie to Me, that ran on Fox from 2009 to 2011. The show featured an Ekman-like consultant fighting crime and stopping terrorists with body language expertise. Ekman himself was a consultant to the show.

Ekman had grown up under the shadow of an abusive father prone to sudden, terrifying rages. That had given Ekman a powerful incentive to learn to read other people’s body language in an effort to anticipate his father’s fury and protect himself. As a result, Ekman devoted his professional career to the study of facial expressions, lying, and body language. He developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), now widely used to label and study human facial variation, that allows researchers to label precisely the entire variety of facial expressions. Along the way, he discovered something about our faces and emotions that no one had ever noticed before: micro-expressions.³

Your Micro-expressions Reveal Your Hidden Emotions

When humans have a strong emotion and try to conceal it, it’s liable to leak out in very quick facial expressions that are contrary to the predominant facial expression the person is maintaining. For example, if someone is pretending that he or she likes another person, but actually despises that individual, a quick sneer will leak out for one-twentieth of a second and then be gone. The person is typically unaware of the leak, as are the people around him, except perhaps as a vague sense of discomfort or unease.

Ekman developed a training system that enables people to learn to spot these micro-expressions, and you can teach yourself to be quite accurate in detecting their presence and their specific emotional meaning.

Ekman has worked with the FBI and CIA extensively to train their officers in deception detection, and micro-expressions are of course an important part of that training. Ekman is quick to point out, however, that the ability to detect a micro-expression underneath a different, dominant expression doesn’t necessarily tell you what the person is thinking or even what the expression means.

In other words, if you spot a flash of anger across the table during an important negotiation, does that tell you something about the other party’s negotiating position? Not necessarily. It may only tell you that the negotiator is tired and the day has been long. Or that she just realized that she’s going to miss her plane home.

Knowing the suppressed emotion doesn’t necessarily tell you the meaning the person attaches to that emotion. And that’s important. Ekman’s work with the TSA, the FBI, and the CIA regularly bumps up against this problem. For instance, if you’re watching a stream of people walking through a security line at the airport and one of them registers nervousness, is that person nervous because he’s planning to blow up a plane, or nervous because he’s afraid he might miss one and be late for his daughter’s birthday party?

There are limits to what this kind of conscious training can tell you.

The further problem that Ekman and security people face every day is one that is much less important for you. They’re trying to read the emotional secrets of strangers, and a large number of strangers at that. Most of us deal only with a few people whom we know quite well and see over and over. There are some exceptions to that—as, for example, when you meet a new client or customer at work, or negotiate with someone new—but I’ll deal with that issue later.

Use Your Unconscious Expertise the Way It Should Be Used

The good news is that you are already an unconscious expert, for the most part, in reading some of the body language cues and the concomitant underlying emotions of most of those familiar people. For example, arriving home, you can tell in an instant if your significant other is in a bad mood, right? Or at work, you know instinctively if your boss is in a really good mood for some reason or another. Or you can tell when a colleague is stressed out and unlikely to help you with something.

In other words, when one of your circle of friends, colleagues, and family is experiencing a strong mood, good or bad, you most likely can pick it up with relative ease. You pick it up unconsciously, and if the emotion is strong enough, it gets to the level of your conscious mind and you think, He’s in a good mood! Or, She’s a bit tense tonight. Then you may vary your tactics accordingly.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that where you need the help is in the subtler moments when the emotion isn’t so obvious, the stakes are very high, or that person you know well is making a surprising claim and you want to know whether or not she is lying. Or the person isn’t part of your intimate circle; it’s someone you know or have met professionally, and whose motivations and intents matter to you at certain specific times. At those times, being able to accurately read other people’s emotions can be extremely important and helpful for your work life or your life in general.

We need a system that will tell us more, however, than Ekman’s micro-expressions, and without the complicated training. We need a system that will reliably help us out in a certain set of work and personal settings and situations. We need a system that will allow us to continue to participate in one of those situations, talking and listening, without having to take time out to study the body language in isolation. And we need a system that will have a high degree of reliability. You’ll learn just such a system in this chapter, inspired by Ekman’s insights, but more broadly applicable to work and home life—unless of course you work in the CIA. This method is one I’ve developed over many years of working with clients and reading other people’s intentions through their body language. It’s simple and effective.

The third step in the power cue process involves learning how to read the body language of others around you, accurately and easily, through questions you ask yourself.

A couple of years ago, I flew down to an undisclosed location in the southeastern United States to train a group of Air Force Special Ops folks who were going to be deployed to a trouble spot in a Middle Eastern country. Their job was to parachute into the country, quickly establish relationships with the locals, and start building things. That, at least, was what they were willing to share with me.

Their question, sensibly enough, was how to ascertain the friendliness or hostility of the local people—fast. Lives depended on getting that right. So I taught them the two-step technique I’m going to share with you in this chapter.

First, I need to clear away some common misunderstandings about body language. There is a huge mass of misinformation that has built up around reading body language over the past half-century. The research approach widely followed since World War II studied gestures as if they had specific meaning. In other words, if you put your hand to your chin, you’re thinking—in all circumstances—and so on.

Don’t Be Fooled by Those Obvious Emblems

As I indicated in the introduction, research began with the specific gestures, like the peace sign and the upraised middle finger, that do have particular meanings, what the researchers called “emblems.” Each culture may have only a handful of such gestures, but the approach then colored thinking about all the other gestures we make. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 2, the hand-waving gestures we make when we’re talking were dismissed as meaningless and largely ignored.⁴

Now, researchers have made some headway. The problem with the previous approach is not that such a reading of a particular gesture isn’t sometimes correct. The problem is that gestures are ambiguous, fluid, and multidetermined. So focusing on a particular gesture and insisting that it has a specific, singular meaning will get you into trouble. That hand on the chin may mean you’re thinking, or it may mean you’re tired and resting your head in your hands. Or it may mean you’re scratching an itch surreptitiously and trying to look wise while doing so.

If focusing on particular gestures isn’t reliable, what can you use to decode body language?

Your unconscious mind. It’s already hard at work, practically 24/7, reading the body language of everyone who comes into your field of ken. What it looks for is intent. It checks people to see if they’re powerful or subservient, friend or foe, on your team or somebody else’s, and liable to tell the truth or lie—basic, simple intents like that. Intents that are very important for how you might interact with them.

For the most part, you’re only vaguely aware consciously of all this unconscious mental activity. You typically only notice the really powerful emotions people bring into the room with them—fury, wild excitement, huge relief—in your conscious mind. Or, you may be more closely attuned to a wider variety of emotions from people you’re particularly close to. As in Ekman’s case, for example, if a parent is prone to sudden and alarming fits of rage, you may be on the lookout for that, so those warnings may leap to your conscious mind more easily.

Or again, if you’re particularly interested in getting something out of another person—a favor, a deal, permission—then you may pay closer attention to his or her mood. In effect, you ask yourself, what are my chances to get Jane to agree to moving that deadline? Otherwise, you leave your awareness of other people’s moods to your unconscious mind. Then, you’ll most likely pick up a vague feeling about mood, or you may think to yourself after a conversation, Henry seemed a little out of sorts.

All That Unconscious Data Is Mostly That—Unconscious

Most of the time, then, your conscious awareness of your unconscious data gathering is limited and often comes after the fact. It has to be that way, actually, because the problem with the unconscious mind is that it gathers far too much information, rather than too little. It’s noticing everything, and there’s far too much data coming in, so you have to ignore the stream of information with your conscious mind or you’d rapidly be overwhelmed with mostly unimportant information.⁵

Think about all the tiny adjustments people make every second to the way they gesture, sit, stand, and walk. Each of those thousands of adjustments carries meaning about the intent of the people in question. I’m tired of sitting here. I’m thirsty; where’s that water? She’s pretty. He’s good-looking. What a bore! It’s warm in here. I wonder when this is over. And so on. Our physical bodies exist to carry out our intents, attitudes, and emotions. It’s not that we don’t get any information about other people. The problem is that we get too much. Your unconscious mind is constantly taking it all in, noticing that twitch, that stretch, that blink, and so on. Your conscious mind can’t possibly keep up and still do all the things it has to do. And most of that data isn’t terribly useful or interesting.

You’re probably picking up Ekman’s micro-expressions unconsciously, along with everything else. Because you haven’t been trained, that information just adds to general impressions about other people you have developed and may think about consciously from time to time. He’s making me uneasy. I don’t believe her. I don’t trust him.

How much more useful would it be if you could tap into that unconscious expertise when you wanted and needed to, in real time, to gauge the intents and attitudes of the people around you in specific ways? How much more useful would it be if you could anticipate their thoughts by realizing their decisions even before they were consciously aware of them themselves? How much more useful would it be if you could quickly ascertain important insights like that person is lying to me?

Let’s Put Our Minds Together

What you’re going to do is to strengthen the relationship between your conscious and unconscious minds in reading other people, so that you can read people swiftly and accurately. That’s what the two-step process is for—ask yourself the specific question, listen for the answer. To do that, you’re first going to establish some basic categories of clues to look for to begin to solve the problem of too much information. I’m going to give you clues to look for in each of those basic categories. Then, with that grounding, you’re going to tune your unconscious mind to look for the answers to particular questions you have about people in real time.

All of this is going to take some initial work, and for the long term, it will mean some mental preparation before any key meeting or negotiation or conversation when you want to be attuned to body language. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll find that your body-language expertise becomes quite strong and adaptable.

Let’s get started. I’m not going to point you to specific meanings of specific gestures. Instead, you’re going to think about four basic areas of interest and the constellations of body language that are indicative in each of the four areas. The idea here is to narrow down what you’re looking for. That will train both your conscious and unconscious minds to begin to develop the expertise you need.

The four basic areas where it’s commonly helpful to be body-language smart are: power, friendship, alignment, and lying. In terms of power, you often want to know, in both work and life, who’s in power here? Who’s the top dog, the decision maker, and who are the underlings? And who’s in power at this moment?

For friendship, you are hardwired from caveperson days to want to know the answer to the question, friend or foe? for obvious reasons. Is this individual a threat? Does this cute person like me? Is this person someone I can count on, or is she betraying me behind my back? And so on.

With alignment, we’re looking for signs of fundamental agreement or its absence. Is this person on my team? When she says she’ll vote for me, does she mean it? Can I depend on Jim when the budget numbers start to shrink? Will he come through for me?

Finally, with lying, the reasons we care about this are once again obvious. We are all of us liars, every day, for the best of reasons. We tell her she looks great in that dress. We tell him he’s still got what it takes. We say, I really had a good time. So we often want to know if someone is telling us the truth or not. Because we know that everyone is quite capable of lying, and as grownups, we learn to manage our faces reasonably well to disguise our contrary feelings when we say, Thanks, that was great. Beyond the social niceties, of course, the stakes are often much higher, and much—money, career, life choices—can hinge on knowing the truth or the lie.

Watch for That Telling Change

Before I dive into the four areas I’m going to focus on, let’s go over a few general principles. For all body language reading, you want to first establish a baseline reading and then note differences. In other words, first check out the other person’s or people’s general orientation toward you and the others in the room and then notice whenever there’s a significant change. That can indicate a change of heart, mood, decision, or simply a desire to discontinue the conversation. Think in terms of baseline and change. Keep it simple.

In this regard, remember to always consider the context. A person who suddenly closes down, for example, may not be indicating hostility, but rather thinks it’s time to go. We often signal the end of a meeting with a change in body language that involves retreating, closing off, or disconnecting. That’s not necessarily hostile; it just means it’s time to go.

Overall, when we move closer to someone else, we’re showing friendliness, trust, or connection. When we increase the distance, we show the opposite. Hand gestures tell a similar story. When people reach toward us with open gestures, they’re usually signaling openness. Only rarely is it something else, like a left hook to the jaw. Reaching can indicate aggression, control, or an attempt to dominate. An embrace, the ultimate open gesture, after all, is a combination of open hand gestures and open torso, where we reduce the space between ourselves and someone else to zero.

Hands speak a constant language; learn to watch them for what they’ll tell you. Are they placed placidly in the lap? Do they gesture elegantly and smoothly, or do they jerk and clench? Are they nervously kneading one another? Are the hands twitching constantly, or attempting to conceal themselves in pockets or behind the back? Hands are marvelous little weather vanes signaling the state of the soul within. You get regular updates from other people’s hands about the state of their nerves, defensiveness, confidence, anger, happiness, sorrow, interest, or boredom, in addition to their openness or lack thereof. A recent study found that hands are a more reliable indicator of poker players’ cards than their faces, which of course are proverbially poker-faced.

Finally, start to watch people’s legs and feet. Most of the adults you’ll meet are reasonably good at assuming bland expressions on their faces, but their legs and feet will likely tell a more revealing story. Look for overall orientation. Are those legs near you, pointed toward you, or not? Are those feet close to yours or pointing toward the door? Look for signs of discomfort or nervous energy, such as bouncing or fidgeting. That’s a more reliable giveaway than that carefully neutral face.

How to Spot the Person in Power

Now let’s dig into the four key areas of body language, starting with a look at powerful people and their body language.

Powerful people take up more space than other people. Their unconscious goal is control, so they control the room and the people by using more of it. They sprawl, splay, and extend their arms and legs. They take a bigger piece of the room, and they take bigger rooms—hotel rooms, for example. Tall people have a natural advantage in this way, because we unconsciously equate height with power. Our unconscious minds seem to like that sort of analogy. That’s why tall people are statistically more likely to get paid more and rise higher in their professions than short people.⁶ Of course, you can no doubt think of many short exceptions to that rule, but we’re talking averages and the unconscious mind.

Powerful people talk differently than weaker people, interrupting more, taking more conversational time, and using longer pauses. They get to control the tempo of the exchange with other people, deciding whether to make more or less eye contact, employ more or less touch, and take more or less time.

Powerful people may withdraw temporarily from a conversation, leaving the rest of the conversation and the details to underlings, for example. In subtler ways, powerful people may show their ability to come and go by leaning back during a meeting and putting their hands behind their heads to show temporary withdrawal or superiority over everyone else. It’s arrogant but effective. You will know when you are in the presence of someone who believes she is powerful because of the signals I’ve described as well as others, such as your own tendency to be obeisant in front of the person.

How do you assume authority when you want to manage it consciously? Stand as tall as you can, holding your head high and throwing your shoulders back. But keep your chin level; if you raise your chin, you’ll look like a punk, or worse, like Don Corleone in The Godfather. Make sure you are the tallest person in the room if you can. Give yourself a taller chair if you’re sitting. Fans of The Daily Show will know that the host, Jon Stewart, is quite short, and does his best to maximize his height by making his guests come to him. He’s standing on a platform surrounding his desk, so the guests have to climb up to get to him; the visual the audience gets in this way maximizes Stewart’s stature.

Finally, move less—in fact, as little as possible. Like Stewart, get everyone else to come to you if you can. Stay still and say less. Let other people come onto your turf.

Those, broadly speaking, are some of the ways that power plays out in body language in daily organizational life worldwide. That is one example of a meaningful cluster of body language signals that you can learn to decode with reasonable reliability.

Let’s move on to the other three basic areas. Besides power, you want to know if people are truly friendly or faking it. You want to know if people are truly aligned with you or not. And you want to know if they’re telling the truth or lying. Those are the basics.

How to Tell Who’s Friend or Foe

Let’s go next to that most fundamental question, friend or foe? Here, it’s useful to start with the face, even though, as we’ve learned, part of being adult is to learn to manage your face with reasonable success. We’re going to look for openness.

Open faces tend to have four particular characteristics, in contrast with faces that are more closed. First, open eyes are—open. Wide open. Narrowed eyes are the opposite indicator. If you’re close enough, check out the pupils. Pupils dilate when we like what we see and they close down when we don’t.⁷

Second, if we’re feeling open, we often raise our eyebrows. When we do that, we’re really asking the question, what do you think? Or, what’s your response? I always look at people’s foreheads once they’ve reached a certain age. If they have wrinkles, good. That means that they’ve been open and receptive a good deal in their lives up to that point. A smooth forehead sets off alarm bells in my mind because it suggests the opposite. That it doesn’t tell me why that person has been habitually closed down. There may be very good reasons: growing up in an abusive household or a repressive country, for example.

Third, look for smiling and nodding—or their opposites. Most adults, of course, can control their smiles and nods with some conscious success, but if you look for a pattern over a couple of hours, you’ll get a reasonable idea. You need to beware of gender, cultural, and status differences here; each of these can affect how much a person smiles or nods.

Now look at the rest of the body. Here’s where the nonverbal fun really begins. Basically, friendliness means closeness. Friendly people get closer to you, they keep their torsos pointed toward you, and they don’t block their torsos off with their arms or hands. The opposite of any of these large motions can indicate closed intent or outright hostility—moving away, blocking off the torso, or pointing it away from you.

How to Tell Who’s Aligned with You

Third, let’s consider alignment. By that I mean the age-old question, is this person on my side or not?

Back in the days when I was working in politics, I learned quickly that whose side are you on? was the main—and often the only—question that politicians cared about. Because politics is all about the trading of favors and influence, trust is enormously important to the players. They’re always scanning the troops for signs of incipient betrayal, and the best ones rely enormously on their gut sense of whether or not the person in front of them is aligned with them or not.⁸

So you look for overall orientation. People who are in agreement with one another tend to mirror each other. One leads, the other follows in a matter of a few seconds. It’s especially revealing and easy to spot when there are three people talking; typically two will align and mirror and the third will not. All of this makes for entertaining people watching. Once you’re sensitized to this aspect of behavior, you’ll find it’s easy to spot.

When you’re trying to get a read on who in the group is for you and who is against you, start by looking to see who has the same basic body orientation as you. To test agreement, move and see if the other person mirrors you in the next thirty seconds or less. Spouses, partners, and lovers usually mirror one another’s physical orientation when they’re together or with others and they’re in basic agreement. It’s interesting to watch couples for signs of mirroring—and its opposite. You can often detect trouble in the relationship before the couple is aware of it.

People who are profoundly sympathetic to one another—lovers, siblings who are close, even business partners—are fun to watch because they will move together virtually as one. When you see this kind of unconscious dance, it’s a strong signal that the two people are in intimate agreement, either mentally or physically or both.

What happens in mirroring is more profound than just agreement or even connection, however. Because persuasion is an emotional as well as an intellectual activity, it comes from deep within the brain. When we are strongly aligned with someone, we do so with our whole bodies. You can use this to drive agreement and create persuasion. Adopt a posture, and watch for others to adopt it. Once they have, change it slightly. If the others go along, you’re well on your way to persuading the room. I’ll talk more about how to use unconscious signals of alignment in the field notes for this chapter.

For now, know that our minds say to ourselves, I’m aligned physically with this person, so I must agree with her; mirroring in fact builds agreement and is itself persuasive—unconsciously. It’s the more powerful because it’s unconscious.

The unconscious mind knows all about alignment. We learn early on, in the cradle, when we watch our parents (the ones who love and care for us) mimic our behavior, just as we learn to mimic theirs. Mother will tip her head so that it mirrors ours, and we’ll coo madly at each other. That’s where it all begins.

How to Tell Truth from Lie

We all want to know, at key moments, whether that person who’s looking us in the eyes with apparent sincerity is telling the truth or not. You can trust me. I wouldn’t lie to you. I really mean it this time. When you want to believe someone, it’s even trickier, because people have a tendency to grasp at the signs of honesty and suppress the warning signals of fibbing.

Ekman says that we can’t ever be sure whether someone is lying or telling the truth, but I don’t agree. He’s focusing on a different situation and a different standard, looking at strangers, enemy agents, the FBI, and so on. He’s particularly concerned about pathological liars, who are expert at concealing the traditional signs of lying, because of course law enforcement officials have to deal with those monsters far more often than the rest of us.⁹

Beyond that, our situation is different in another way. We care about people who are mostly well-known to us. We know a great deal about their normal behavior much of the time, so we can determine with high reliability when they are lying. The good news is that the traditionally described clues for lying are reasonably accurate.

Start with the eyes. If you see the clichéd clues to lying—rapidly darting eyes, lack of eye contact—you’ve got a good likelihood of deception. Most of us deal with normal, decent people most of the time, and lying for them is an uncomfortable activity. None of us likes to do it, so we signal our moral discomfort with obvious physical discomfort.

But also look for the opposite taken to an unusual extreme. If you know the person well, look for an attempt to control the eyes (and the rest of behavior) with unnatural stillness. If you’re suddenly getting wide-eyed, frozen innocence from a teen who hasn’t looked you full in the face for weeks, then she’s probably lying about where she went with the car last night.

Beyond the eyes, look at the way the person holds his or her head. When a person lies, he turns his head away or tips it up or down so as to move it away from the other person. We love to get out of intimate space when we lie, because most of us don’t like to lie to our intimates. So watch for the eighteen-inch barrier. If someone close to you, an intimate, suddenly pulls out beyond the intimate-personal barrier of eighteen inches, then that may be a sign that he or she is lying. At the very least, something is making him or her uncomfortable. Let’s hope it isn’t simply what you had for lunch.

Look also for that overall sense of feeling, the most reliable way to tell that your unconscious is talking to you. Look to see if the torso is turned away or toward you. See if there are defensive gestures from the hands and arms and signs of agitation from the hands and fingers. Look for contradictory behavior from the legs and feet.

Finally, listen for signs of strain in the other person’s voice. If your loved one carefully controls her voice or it comes out a little higher pitched than usual, she or he may be attempting to conceal something. Ekman has found that people who are lying slow down their speaking and even their facial gestures and other mannerisms. But ordinary people can also rush to get through an awkward-feeling moment. So the main thing to look for is different behavior from what you usually see. You’ll soon pick it up if you pay close attention!

How to Tell If Someone’s Listening to You

Real listening is not one of the four key questions, but it is important to predicting success in any meeting—and unfortunately, it is becoming a rare commodity. We’re living through a disconnected era in our nanosecond-based, 24/7, ADD, mostly virtual world. Our colleagues and fellow workers nod and smile a lot to show that they’re listening, but it’s not really happening. Real connection is rare. Their internal monologues are too intense, too scared, and too focused on their own survival—Will I still have my job? How can I pay my mortgage? Are my kids staying out of trouble?—for us to compete in the attention stakes.

In short, we have an epidemic of fake listening. It’s the kind of listening that really means the other parties are just thinking up what they’re going to say next, if they’re on the same conversational planet at all.

What are the body language signs of fake listening? The eye contact is too fixed and too still. A person holds his head very still, as if to show that he’s really focused on you. Or she smiles too brightly, holding the smile too long. But a real conversation is full of anticipatory nods and handoffs of eye contact in order to allow smooth conversational ping-pong. It’s relaxed and synchronized. Fake listening feels very different from that. It’s tense rather than fluid, abrupt rather than smooth, hyped rather than natural.

And that’s just the face. Watch the rest of the body. Is it turning away from you? Is he tapping his fingers? Is she pointing her feet toward the door? Is the other party in constant motion, never quite coming to rest during the conversation? These are all signs of connection deficit syndrome.

Don’t do it. Take the time to connect with other people by being truly present. Let your own mind go quiet and instead of chattering away to yourself—or planning your escape—focus on the other person with the intent to connect. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn. When everyone else is moving at a hundred miles per hour, start your own slow connection movement.

How to Read a Handshake

Want to start the process of reading someone’s body language from the moment you meet him or her? You can learn a good deal about someone by watching the other hand—the unshaken one. At the same time, if you don’t want to commit a social solecism, you still have to shake hands properly. So it’s a lot to do, sure, but it’s not impossible.

Grab the person’s hand, give it a firm squeeze (but not too firm), and look him or her in the eye. For about two or three seconds. Then, check out the other hand. A quick glance should suffice. Let’s not make this too difficult. It’s not.

What can you learn from the other hand? A surprising amount. It can be either closed or open, hidden or visible. Look for the more extreme forms of behavior for more significant clues. And remember that all body language is multidetermined, so it needs to be checked against other sources of information, other impressions, and subsequent messages given and taken.

An open hand is good; a clenched hand may be a warning sign of some tension or a hidden agenda. If the other hand is hidden, that may be a sign of concealment of some issue or feeling—or it may just indicate shyness. Again, you need to check any hints you get against other sources of information about the person.

The most neutral position—and the one you should adopt yourself if you want to show up in the best possible light—is open, relaxed, and at your side. If you want to be particularly welcoming, point your palm toward the other person, while keeping your hand open, relaxed, and at your side. Sound complicated? It’s not; try it. It’s surprisingly easy to make automatic.

The point is that your hands talk, as does your whole body, even while you’re engaged in routine behavior like shaking someone’s hand. Keep an eye out for telltale clues away from the shaking hand, and you’ll be surprised at how often you learn something interesting.

Now That You’re an Expert, Your Education Really Begins

That’s a crash course in reading other people’s body language consciously, in terms of groupings of suggestive physical behaviors. Remember that you should always establish a baseline first, and that variation from the baseline is the most reliable indicator of a strong body language signal. Remember, too, to look for lots of evidence, not one gesture or even two. Finally, remember to look for the answers to one of the four basic questions, not just random body language in general. Ask yourself, for example, what am I seeing, truth telling or lying? You’ll have a better chance to get a reliable answer.

That’s the first step in learning to read other people’s unconscious messages. But it’s only the first step, and you’re only armed with four basic questions. You need to go deeper than this if you’re to arrive at a reliable way to read a broad range of body language in a wide range of situations with the possibilities of a near-infinite number of questions, without spending a lifetime studying it constellation by constellation, like body language astronomers with endless time and a universe of stars to study.

We Need to Involve Our Unconscious Abilities

How are we going to reach this higher level of body language awareness? We’ve begun to train our (conscious) minds in body language awareness through groupings of body language and basic questions of intent. Now, we need to focus less on the visual clues and more on the underlying intents. We need to use our conscious minds less and our unconscious minds more. We need to leave Ekman behind and develop a new way of harnessing his insights with greater applicability. We’re not all CIA agents or moles, and we don’t have their specialized training. We need to start harnessing our unconscious emotional expertise to tell us what we want to know.

That’s going to take a little more training.

Here’s how it works. Think about gestures as an early warning system for mood. We gesture because our unconscious minds push us to do so with an emotion, an intent, or a desire that our conscious minds are unaware of until after the gesture has started. Our bodies know what we want before our conscious minds do.

That means that any given gesture is a physical embodiment of an intent. We just have to ask ourselves what that intent is. The body in question already knows. Our bodies most likely already know, because they’ve performed similar gestures in similar circumstances. The unconscious mind knows; it directed the gesture. It’s just a matter of bringing all that knowledge up to the conscious mind.

So bring the power of your unconscious mind to bear on the problem. Get it to speak to you. Learn to listen to your unconscious mind. It is there, all the time, keeping you alive and monitoring your surroundings and the people around you for threats and opportunities. It’s telling you that you’re hungry, angry, bored, or happy and content. It’s running your life for you, and you’re largely unaware of its existence, except in unusual moments when your gut speaks powerfully to you—I don’t trust that person!—or you duck when a shoe is thrown at you.

How to Use Your Intuition

If you’ve ever had the experience of déjà vu or a sudden, strong intuition about a person or something that was going to happen, then you’ve heard your unconscious mind trying hard to get in touch with you. If you’ve ever had a gnawing sensation in your gut that things just aren’t going right, despite the fact that on the surface, the day seems fine, then you’ve heard your unconscious mind at work, picking up on cues you’re not consciously aware of, warning you about them. Or if you’ve ever been made uncomfortable by someone you’ve just met, someone who seems friendly enough, then you’ve heard alarm signals coming from your unconscious mind about contradictions in that person’s superficial friendliness masking perhaps some deeper anger or angst.

You should listen to your unconscious mind carefully in those moments, but you should also make friends with it and listen to it much more routinely whenever you want to figure out what someone is intending to do or thinking about doing, whether it’s in a meeting or a negotiation or simply a conversation with a friend. You’ll find, as you practice your listening skills, that your ability to hear your unconscious quickly and accurately will steadily improve, until it’s a regular companion at your side keeping you abreast of what’s going on around you with very little (conscious) effort. What you need to do is start deliberate conversations with your unconscious mind. Talk to it. More specifically, ask it questions.

Two key steps make this work, so that you’re not just standing around listening for voices in your head and wondering if they’re the right ones.

First, there are a limited number of situations where you’re in the dark about someone else’s true feelings and it’s important that you know. So, you can plan those questions in advance. Second, you’re going to phrase those questions as polarities, simple yes or no questions, and thus the answers will be clear and simple.

Ask the Right Questions, Get Useful Answers

Start with the basic four I’ve discussed already:

• Is this person friend or foe?

• Is this person truth telling or lying?

• Is this person on my side or not?

• Is this person powerful or not?

These four questions will cover a great many of the situations where there is some mystery of intent or emotion that needs to be cleared up with a strong reading of body language, because you can’t ask directly, you fear some sort of deception, or you want to be sure of the promises or offers being made.

Once you become comfortable asking your unconscious mind these questions, you’ll be able to branch out with others. So, for example, let’s say you’re in the middle of a job interview, and you want to know what the likelihood of getting the job is—at least as far as the interviewer is concerned. You ask yourself, Is Elizabeth going to hire me or not? Yes or no? And wait for the answer. It’s a combination of friend or foe and alignment, and with your work on both basic questions, you should be able to get a reliable answer without too much trouble.

Let’s get comfortable with the technique. It’s quite straightforward. You simply need to pose the question within your mind to yourself, looking at the person and feeling the full weight of the question. So, for example, if your boss promises you a raise if you’ll just hang in there a few more months of eighteen-hour days, look at her and ask yourself, is _______ telling me the truth or lying? Then wait. Keep your mind as blank as possible, and wait for the answer to show up.

If you have any experience with meditation or the Zen Buddhist idea of the empty mind, that will be very helpful.¹⁰ You will know something about having an open, quiet, receptive mind. The idea is most emphatically not to chase after an answer at this point, but to let it come to you. That’s important.

Understand that your unconscious mind has already picked up a thousand clues for the right answer. You’re simply posing the question to that part of you that already knows the answer. That gut feeling you had that for some reason the conversation isn’t going well? Or that you’re knocking the presentation out of the park? Or that the negotiation is about to tip your way? That’s your unconscious mind speaking. You’re just not used to listening to it, and you haven’t asked it the right questions in the right way.

So be patient, wait, and listen for your mind to give you the answer. After a bit, you’ll just know. You won’t hear voices in your head; rather, you’ll just have the new attitude in your mind. When you have that knowledge, then your unconscious mind has spoken, and you can trust it.

Now, this sort of listening takes some honest, clear self-knowledge. If you know about yourself that you are prone to want to believe a boss, a spouse, or a friend, then you have to be very careful not to let wish fulfillment speak before your unconscious mind does. And you have to be prepared to get an answer that you don’t want.

Learn to Listen to Your Unconscious Mind

You must wait, quieting your conscious mind as much as you can, to allow the whisper from your unconscious mind to inform your thinking. At first, the connection will seem very tenuous, but with practice you’ll find yourself hearing your unconscious mind more and more easily and with more and more confidence.

What’s happening is that Ekman’s micro-expressions and a host of other tiny, constant signals from the other person’s body language are coming together to give you a clear reading of what that other person’s unconscious mind is telling his or her body to do as a result of an emotion, an attitude, an intent, or a feeling. While most adults, as I’ve said, are reasonably good at keeping a bland, polite expression on their faces while they’re actually thinking something else, they’re not very good at controlling the rest of their bodies. Emotions will seep out, in micro-expressions on the face, but more consistently, reliably, and directly, from the rest of the body.

If that other person is concealing some anger, she may be able to compose her face in a neutral or smiling expression, but the tension will get expressed in her shoulders, posture, or hands, and your unconscious mind has already picked that up. You’ve evolved to be very quick at that kind of unconscious reading of other people; you’re just going to train your conscious mind to get better and quicker at interpreting the unconscious messages.

Remember the four basic questions:

• Is this person friend or foe?

• Is this person truth telling or lying?

• Is this person on my side or not?

• Is this person powerful or not?

Once you’ve practiced and mastered those, then you can branch out to pose additional questions to your unconscious mind. You must always pose them in the form of a yes-or-no choice, because your connection to your unconscious mind is tenuous enough that you can only rely on binary, either/or kinds of readings. But your unconscious mind is awash in the data that you need. It has already taken it all in. You just need to learn to interrogate your own mind in a new way.

Let me stress, once again, that the key is posing a binary question, clearly and simply, and then waiting for the answer. It helps to really want to know. It’s as if you were saying to yourself, Come on, tell me! Is ___ lying or telling the truth? Which is it? I gotta know! Then, you turn off that conscious mind and just look and wait as powerfully as you can. Be radically open. Let the answer seep into your conscious mind. Take time. Be patient. You already know. Your mirror neurons have already fired in response to the other person inside your head. It’s just a matter of seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing what your unconscious already knows.

Human Emotions Are Contagious

Remember, we humans are an empathetic species. Our emotions are contagious. We share them. That means that if you’re on edge, excited, angry, happy, sad, or thrilled, or you’re suddenly seeing the ridiculous side of the situation, very quickly everyone around will share in that emotion, if it’s a strong one.

That’s the natural human state, to share emotions with one another. We’re most comfortable when we’re all on the same wavelength, all in the same mood. It’s hard for us to keep secrets from each other.

Perfect sharing doesn’t happen as often as it should, because much of the time we’re not focused in our emotions or feeling one strongly. So we carry with us a mishmash of conscious and unconscious thoughts, emotions, attitudes, fears, and hopes. None predominate much of the time. As such, the day goes by in a blur, lacking that sense of solidarity or emotional connected or flow state that we only occasionally experience.

That’s why strong, focused people and people who are feeling a powerful emotion tend to dominate a discussion, meeting, or situation. Others are swept up because of the human facility for alignment, emotional confluence, and harmony.

We call this groupthink when it causes us to move in lockstep in a certain direction that later proves to be unwise. But, in fact, sharing emotions and intents is the natural extension of our humanity, and most of the time it’s not a bad thing at all.

Emotion plays a much more essential role in communication than most of us realize or want to acknowledge. The messiness and unpredictability of emotions make them tricky to handle and contain, especially in professional settings like business presentations, hence, the tendency of (especially) business communicators to shy away from dealing in emotions. Yet research shows that without emotion, it is impossible to remember, let alone listen and act on a communication. Emotion is the glue that holds humans and human communications together.

Emotion is what determines authenticity. More than ever, we demand authenticity of our leaders—the ones we haven’t already given up on. So, of course, authenticity is essential in communications.

If you show up unprepared and nervous, even if you mean well, the odds are good that your body language will signal nervousness to the other bodies in the room. People will read you as insincere, unprepared, incompetent, and so on. The unconscious dialogue will already be signaling trouble long before you’re consciously ready to try to make a good impression.

The unconscious doesn’t make exceptions or give you a break. It doesn’t think, He’s just probably a little nervous because it’s the beginning of a meeting. It just thinks, Oh-oh. Trouble ahead. One of the pack is nervous. In fact, the one who’s supposed to be the alpha in charge. You’ll have failed to seem authentic, the fundamental test of leadership, before you’ve started.

That’s why it’s so important to prepare adequately for an important speech, meeting, or even conversation. That’s why it’s so important to be clear about the story you’re telling and your emotional attitude toward it. That’s why it’s so important to be consistent in what I call the two conversations—content and body language.

“Is body language really necessary?” a frustrated executive once asked me. He had his hands full with learning his talk, coping with the technology, and, well, picking out his tie. His question was really, “Do I have to think consciously about my audience’s body language—and my own—with everything else I have to do to deliver a great speech to that audience? It’s just too much to worry about!”

I was happy to be able to tell him that you shouldn’t think consciously about other people’s body language or your own, under most circumstances; it’s a very inefficient way to use your conscious mind. You should think unconsciously about body language, however. In fact, you can’t help it. Your mind will do that anyway. You might as well make use of it.

Besides, thinking consciously about your body language will slow you down, causing your body language to look fake or insincere to the unconscious minds of the people in your audience, which are faster to pick up information than conscious minds.

Of course, because the conscious mind is so limited in its capacity, trying to drive body language with it will cause it to overload quickly, as my executive did. So, instead, turn over your body language chores—monitoring your own and everyone else’s—to your unconscious mind, which is up to the task.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of this technique, as I indicated, you can move on to other questions and indeed more sophisticated polling of your unconscious mind.

Here’s a quick review of the method:

1. Learn the basic body language constellations. The four basic issues are: power, friendship, alignment, and lying. Take time to learn the kinds of body language that typically go with each of these issues. Observe each issue at play in turn. Study different people you know well to get a sense of the variety and range of expressions of these various intents. Practice watching people you know well and people you’ve just met to see the differences.

2. Decide what you want to know. This step is critically important, because it’s the way you start tapping into your unconscious expertise. What is it that you want to understand about someone else’s body language? Is she lying? Is she the real decision maker? Is he going to offer you the job? Is he a threat to your career? Formulate the question in a simple yes-or-no format, a choice between two poles. Friend or foe? Telling the truth or lying? On my side or not? Powerful or not? Those are the basic four. As soon as you’ve worked with those enough to feel comfortable with them you can branch out.

   Figure out the question you want to study before you go into the meeting, the interview, or whatever the situation is, because you’re under too much pressure to pay attention and take part once you’re actually in the moment. This little step—of thinking ahead, figuring out how the meeting will go, and deciding the question you want to answer—will pay huge dividends in awareness as you get the hang of it over time.

3. Pose the question to your unconscious. Once you’ve figured out what you want to know, then sit still for a moment and pose the question to your unconscious mind. Say something like, “In this interview, I want to know if Bob is telling me the truth or not?” Focus your mind on that and push out other concerns, nerves, and distractions.

4. As the meeting takes place, wait for your unconscious to let you know what the answer is. At first, your unconscious will only whisper its information to you, and it will do that slowly. You’ll be uncertain about what it’s telling you. But as you practice, the answers will come faster and more clearly.

People who say they have a strong “gut instinct” or “good intuition” are already listening to the messages that their unconscious minds are sending them. The point is that anyone can learn to develop this sense, just like a muscle. It takes practice, and you must go through each of the steps.

With time, you’ll develop this ability to pose questions to your unconscious mind and get the answers back more and more clearly and quickly. Until you have the expertise, don’t bet on an inside straight.