Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: Confidence Can Be Taught! Use These Body Language Cues To Your Advantage! About this episode Joe Navarro is a former FBI agent and one of the world’s leading experts in body language and nonverbal communication. In this Moment, Joe reveals the hidden signals behind body language and how to use nonverbal cues, such as posture and eye contact, to your advantage in business, relationships, and beyond.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Steven Bartlett? What about posture? Because that's kind of one way to make yourself taller.
0:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:09 Steven Bartlett? Are there any clues in someone's posture? And how important is sort of playing with our posture to create a different impression?
0:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. Not just posture, but territory. So I look at posture as, you know, when we look confident, shoulders back, our breathing. To me, posture starts with the brain, how calm we are in our breathing. I was, again, in Valencia at this event and a lady came up to me and she says, "You're getting ready to go on the stage. How can you not be nervous?" And I said, "Well, I am nervous. I'm just hiding it. I'm acting like I'm in control." But I've learned to do that because you don't want to look like a nervous FBI agent. Trust me.
1:01 Speaker 01 You want to look cool, calm and collected. In negotiations, you don't want to look needy. You don't want to look desperate. And at the same time, you don't want to come across as you're indifferent. And sometimes that demeanor, that posture, those gestures, the totality of it has a lot of meaning. Now, you have to keep in mind, a lot of successful businessmen I'm running into are actually on the spectrum, right? So the autism spectrum. And so they don't make as much eye contact. They may have behaviors that are irregular.
1:44 Speaker 01 I have one I deal with who has Asperger's. And so he sometimes jerks. And so there's a lot of discomfort I find from others in reading him. I don't have any problem. I just see it, okay, this is his normal behavior and we get around. But you can tell a lot about a person. When you've invested in things, you're doing your diligence and you're talking to people. Yeah, you can look at the numbers all day long, but you also are looking at the nonverbals and saying, you know, are they communicating confidence? Or are they communicating desire or need? Or or any kind of frailty?
2:28 Steven Bartlett? I was just reflecting on a few of the interviews I've had recently. We've been interviewing for one particular, very, very senior role. And there were two final stage candidates. And I was just reflecting, as you were saying, how one of the final stage candidates was extremely calm and sat back in their chair. And the other one was very much leaning forward. And upon reflection, the second candidate wanted the job a lot more. But the first candidate was probably more experienced, more confident and had higher self-worth. And their ability to be so relaxed in that environment and kind of own the chair in my boardroom was actually, it actually made me kind of want them more. Because they were signaling to me that they had lots of options. They weren't intimidated.
3:13 Steven Bartlett? They weren't scared. They weren't nervous about this opportunity.
3:16 Speaker 01 You know, that's an interesting observation, Stephen. And it's very good that you observe the discrepancy. One of the things that I look for is what is their role going to be? I don't mind that somebody is nervous.
3:35 Speaker 01 I, myself, early on, coming from a humble background, was often nervous. I tend to focus on the things that most organizations don't put into their plan to look for. One of them is problem solving.
3:58 Speaker 01 Give me a list of the problems you have solved.
4:02 Speaker 01 Most people, when they hire, they never ask that question. They tell, you know, "I can do Excel, I know Microsoft, that's great. Please tell me what problems you have solved at your last job? And, you know, how efficiently did you do it?"
4:23 Steven Bartlett? How do you know if they solved the problem, or they were on a team where someone else solved the problem?
4:28 Speaker 01 Because one of the things that I look for is, is how many instances they tell, and how they describe it, because here's what's interesting. The person who solves the problem goes into the detail and feels the emotion of the person that's telling the story only conveys it, but doesn't know the emotion that is attached to solving it. So when that little child finally figures out how to, you know, you give them a trick lock where would things have to go this way or this way? And then the little thing opens.
5:09 Speaker 01 When they come back and tell you that, you see the gravity-defying behavior, the arching of the eyebrows, the bright eyes, and say, "And I solved it. I solved it. I got in there." Yeah, right? The person that's just telling you this story doesn't know the emotion that goes with it. The other thing that, you know, I look for is, and they may be nervous or whatever, is how good are they at observing? This is the one question that has actually saved a lot of companies. When I say, "Make sure that from now on, you ask, 'How good are you observing?'"
5:53 Speaker 01 And they'll say, "Well, observing what?" "Everything that matters. People? Events? Opportunities?" Right? If you come to me and say, "Well, I can code this." Okay, that's great. But in the position that you're going to be in, you're going to be managing people. How good are you at observing people? The great thing about companies that seek this is, "All right, so when you go and you business, you go see your subsidiary, what are you looking for? What are you observing?" "Well, when I look at the books..." How about the attitude of the people? Are people content? Are they happy? Or do they all look like they're constipated?
6:38 Speaker 01 I mean, I've been into companies that the minute I walk in, I go, oh geez, you've got management problems here. And the guy goes, who, did somebody tell you? I said, well, you know, I'd have to be clinically stupid not to recognize that all these people are walking around with their heads hung low, that they make no eye contact, nobody, they pass each other in the subway and they don't talk to each other? You've got management issues here. And, you know, and it's like, they hired for this skill, but is that really what you need? When you actually need somebody that is a great observer?
7:18 Steven Bartlett? What about confidence? Is this something that you're born with? Or do you think confidence can be trained into somebody?
7:25 Speaker 01 I think confidence can absolutely be trained. Coming from Cuba, where we lost everything, arriving as a refugee, having nothing, and then all of a sudden, the FBI asked me to become, and I didn't apply to the FBI. The FBI actually came to me and asked me to apply. And then all of a sudden, I said, are you guys serious? It's like, you know, I'm 23 years old, you know? I'm barely learning how to shave. And with no confidence whatsoever. And they teach you to be confident. You can teach confidence.
8:04 Speaker 01 And what I tell people is, the easiest way to learn confidence is to be confident about one thing. I don't care if it's you stack papers better than anybody else. I don't care if it's the way you make your bed, any small thing.
8:33 Speaker 01 Show me that you're confident. Show me that that's better than anybody else's. And the minute you can be confident about one thing, now you can be confident about two things. And then you can be confident about three things. This nonsense that I often see people say, "Well, just come in and be confident." I think that's nonsense. I think you have to learn, and your physiology has to learn, to be confident about one thing. You know, with me, I was confident in playing football. Okay, I was fast, I could do certain things. I was confident about that.
9:14 Speaker 01 I knew that in basketball, I could shoot a three-pointer. Okay, confident about that, but not confident about a host of other things. To be in a room full of executives, I remember when I had no confidence. So how do I work on that? You cannot, unless you're a world-class actor, you cannot walk into a place and all of a sudden pretend you're confident. I tell people, learn to be confident about one thing. And sometimes it's knowledge. I always, there is no meeting I go into
9:56 Speaker 01 that I am not well-read on that subject. If you want to achieve confidence, know everything that you can about a particular subject, and that gives you so much great confidence. And I've seen young people come right out of college, and they're sitting there, you know, their elbows are in, they're almost mousy-looking. They're nervous, they're looking about constantly. They don't know where to look. And, you know, and I tell them, know your subject. Know your subject. Because the minute they begin to talk about that, they begin to flower and change, so.
10:36 Steven Bartlett? So competence in a particular area or vertical creates confidence, which then kind of permeates.
10:44 Speaker 01 Yes, and that's what the military, you know, the military, like the British military, that's what they take young people, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and they say, you know, we're gonna change you into a warrior. Well, how's that? By running, by getting you to climb up that rope, by doing any number of things where you can come away and feel that confidence.
11:11 Steven Bartlett? You talked in a video that I watched for Wired about a variety of different ways we can exhibit and be more confident and show confidence. One of them is really looking at the leaders in your life who are confident and trying to sort of replicate some of those confident behaviors.
11:26 Speaker 01 Right.
11:27 Steven Bartlett? The other one was about your voice. Use a deeper voice and do not rise at the end of the sentence as if it's a question.
11:35 Speaker 01 Right. So let me talk about those. Don't try to reinvent what's successful. A confident person doesn't have to talk fast and doesn't talk high. Right? I remember the first arrest I made and I said, "Stop, this is the FBI." My voice was, nobody was gonna stop, nobody, nobody. And the guys that were with me said, "Joe, you gotta work on your voice. You have to have a command voice." Well, a command voice is down.
12:05 Steven Bartlett? Like?
12:06 Speaker 01 Like, stop right there. I'll give you an example. You talk to most executives and you say, "No, that's not acceptable. It's too high." "No" is always said down. "No." "Are we gonna..." "No." That sounds like a complete sentence.
12:28 Steven Bartlett? You get them to practice saying "no."
12:30 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I did it for ten years. Every February, the guy that, Brian Hall, who encouraged me to write one of my books called Louder Than Words. Invited me to go to Harvard and I'll never forget, I had a complete Harvard class. I think there was 76 students and I had them all saying the word, "No, no, no." Going down lower. He had stepped out of the room to take a call. When he came back, he thought I had a cult going on. I said, "No, Brian, I'm teaching them the right way." Because these are going to be future executives.
13:12 Speaker 01 You don't say, "No, no, no, no, no, no." Now that sounds like a complete sentence. No. No. That's not how it's going to work. And it's always lower. So, we work on the words, more importantly, we work on the gestures. How much territory you occupy? Because the territory that you occupy, if you're here... Sort of like shriveled and tight. You're shriveled. You don't want to be excessive. You don't want to look like a clown. But you want to have the space that you're entitled to. And then, I think it's very important to learn to speak in cadence.
13:53 Speaker 01 When you speak in cadence, and I do it, is people listen. They have time to process what you're saying. But they can also attach the emotion that goes with it. Who spoke in cadence? Churchill. Martin Luther King. "I have a dream that one..."
14:15 Speaker 02 "That one day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
14:31 Speaker 01 Powerful. Can you imagine if he stood up there and said, "I have one dream that one day might..." It's like, who would listen to that? But he was a preacher. And he knew how to command an audience. And when Churchill said, "We will fight them in the air." "We will fight them on the..."
14:47 Speaker 03 "We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."
14:59 Speaker 01 The cadence is not just seductive, it is powerful. And a lot of executives don't know how to use it. They just, I've been to presentations where
15:15 Speaker 01 people just let go, they're not even listening to what's being said. And yet, somebody begins to talk to them in cadence and says, "This is our offer. It is not final. But for the moment, it is our best offer." Now, you're paying attention. You're paying attention not just to what I said, but the emotion behind it. That's a lot better to say, "Well, this is not our last offer, but you know."
15:47 Steven Bartlett? There's a real authority when you slow things down just that little bit and provide the gaps.
15:51 Speaker 01 Which goes back to what I said, who controls time, controls.
16:00 Speaker 01 You're establishing control over the theater of the negotiations. They don't teach that.
16:07 Steven Bartlett? Your hand gestures as well. You've got very complimentary hand gestures to what you're saying. Even as you're speaking to me, you just went, "Who controls time?"
16:17 Speaker 01 Controls.
16:18 Steven Bartlett? And so it's, I'm wondering how.
16:20 Speaker 01 And my fingers are spread out, establishing how much we care about something. When we fear, our fingers come together. And when we fear a lot, our thumbs tuck in. I've seen people in negotiations give up a lot of information because all of a sudden, they tuck their thumbs in. I say, "Okay, they're scared." Because dogs tuck their ears in, humans tuck their... The hands, no matter how dark you are, your hands, the palm of the hands are very visible.
16:55 Speaker 01 That evolved with us because they're expressive. So even in low light, we can use our hands to communicate. The more confident we are, the further our fingers are. I care. Imagine if I said, I care about you versus I care about you. There's a big difference.
17:18 Steven Bartlett? So in the first example, you kind of had your fingers together and the second you spread them out.
17:22 Speaker 01 This, I care about this. And so they potentiate the message. And the human brain evolved also to look for the hands. Because the hands, number one, can be used as a weapon. But number two, they are also emblematic of the emotions that we feel.
17:47 Steven Bartlett? And eye contact.
17:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
17:49 Steven Bartlett? Lots been said about eye contact and the importance of it. What should I understand about eye contact confidence?
17:55 Speaker 01 Eye contact in some ways is, I mean, we could spend about 40 minutes on it. Because, and as a teacher, I can tell you because you want to have good eye contact. For instance, if you're dealing with a woman, you don't want it to go, you know, normal eye contact is here. You don't want it going down to here, to the breasts.
18:16 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so you must stay looking at the face, right?
18:18 Speaker 01 So you want to keep it in the face. But you also don't want to intimidate, unless you want to intimidate. So you have to employ things like eye gaze behavior. You have to employ things such as looking away. Now, you and I both look away as we're thinking about examples and different things. You can use eye contact for emphasizing.
18:45 Speaker 01 Look how often we use eye contact or our eyes to communicate opinions. Maybe with your partner, you said, "What do you think?" And immediately, they'll look, he or she may look at your partner, not yours specifically, but somebody you live with, and they go, "Hmm, no." So with our eyes, with our eyes, we often give our opinions. So in negotiations, it's an important area.
19:14 Steven Bartlett? One of the things I think a lot about is about rapport building, very, very quickly. You know, someone that does this podcast a lot, I, sometimes I overthink it a little bit, especially when I'm meeting people like you, because I'm like, "Oh, my God, this guy's gonna be reading everything about me and da, da, da, da, da."
19:29 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:29 Steven Bartlett? So sometimes I'm like, I think I overthink it when I meet someone like your body language expert, someone who's good at behavioral science. And I want to talk about rapport building. We actually videoed our interaction today. So when I walked in.
19:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:42 Steven Bartlett? And I've got the video here. Let me have a look at this, see if there's, I'll put it on the screen for anyone that's watching. But I just want you to analyze my interaction with you when I met you and tell me how it could have been better.
19:52 Speaker 01 All right.
19:53 Speaker 02 Hello, Joe.
19:54 Speaker 01 So first of all, you were waiting for me with arms akimbo, which is, "I'm in charge, I'm the big guy." And so your arms were here. Yeah, I got it.
20:03 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
20:04 Speaker 01 But, you know.
20:05 Steven Bartlett? I actually do remember that. I remember thinking, "Get your hands off your fucking hips."
20:08 Speaker 01 No, no, no. But it's fine. This is your domain. I expect this from you in your domain. But one of the things you immediately did was, you immediately went around the table and you went forward to shake my hand, right? So one of the things that I say is, how much people matter to us is determined by how fast we act.
20:33 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
20:34 Speaker 01 So the fact that you actually went from there to here and you did it immediately, it demonstrates that you care. As early as 11 months, a baby will recognize individuals or even inanimate objects that care, just based on how quickly they move.
20:56 Steven Bartlett? Towards them.
20:57 Speaker 01 Towards them to do something for them. It's called a pro-social act and babies as young as 11 months recognize that. So this is something that I it doesn't surprise me because you've been successful. It you know, the the success is for me is measured on how well people get along with others.
21:19 Steven Bartlett? Thank you for the wait. Appreciate it. Thank you. You're very, very smart. You look like someone who who worked in the FBI.
21:25 Speaker 01 I it's the FBI uniform.
21:29 Steven Bartlett? This is the.
21:29 Speaker 01 Well, will I be mic'd or it's just this?
21:32 Steven Bartlett? Just that one.
21:33 Speaker 01 Just that one. Perfect. Okay. You said something charming about how I was dressed, which I appreciated. Uh, this is always a good reminder to me of how old I look now. And and the only note that I would I would add is I would have remained standing a little longer.
21:57 Steven Bartlett? Ah, okay.
21:58 Speaker 01 And then make sure that, you know, as I'm sitting, then you sit at the same time.
22:05 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so invite you to sit and sit with you.
22:07 Speaker 01 At the same at the same time, rather than allow me to all now. If you can see in that instance, I'm actually still over you while you're already seated. That is in negotiations, that would be, as we say, contra-indicated.
22:26 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
22:27 Speaker 01 It is. It's a no-no. It's a big word. It's a big word for Steve. Don't do that.
22:35 Steven Bartlett? What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
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