The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion - Vanessa Van Edwards - #917

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Talk to me about where we should put our hands.

**Vanessa Van Edwards** (0:02)
Oh my goodness. They should be first things visible. In fact, every time you say hello, you should be, hi, I'm Vanessa. So good to see you. We love a gesture. It's funny because there's a primal part of our brain that knows that our hands are our deadliest weapons. So even though we think, we look at the face, like when I ask people, where do you look when you first see someone? People always say, same, eyes or face, sometimes mouth. And that is the second place we look. But the first place we always look, especially when we're seeing someone for the first time or in a meeting or for the first interaction, is we want to see what is your intention. And so as humans, we will do anything to avoid the most awkward thing in humanity, which is, are we going to hug? Are we going to handshake? Are we going to high five? Are we withholding anything? And so part of our brain is always just looking to see if you're going to handshake high five. And on Zoom, it's even more confusing because our brain knows that we should see hands, but when it can't, it worries.
And that is because part of our brain and our amygdala begins to fire when we can't see someone's hands, especially when we're trying to understand them. And so the best thing you can do is have your hands visible. That helps with trust. And the second, if you want to get fancy, is to actually have them be explanatory, which we can talk about if you want to.

**Chris Williamson** (1:14)
Yes, tell me.

**Vanessa Van Edwards** (1:15)
Okay, let's do it. So really, really good speakers, they know their content so well that they can speak to you with two different modes. They can speak to you with their words, but they can also use their gestures to emphasize, underline and outline. So the best TED Talks, you know, I love, I love TED Talks. And my team and I analyzed thousands of hours of TED Talks looking for patterns. I didn't understand why everyone who gives a TED Talk is good, right? You're not invited to give a TED Talk if you're not good. And I wondered, why do some go viral, like millions and millions of views, and others by relatively unknown people, they get thousands. And we looked for all these variables, gender and color and smiling. We clocked the amount of time they smiled. The biggest differentiator was gestures.
The TED Talks that had the most views used an average of 465 gestures in 18 minutes. We coded all a chunk of TED Talks. The least popular-viewed TED Talks used an average of 272 gestures in 18 minutes. What's happening is a really good speaker is making themselves easy to understand by saying if they have three ideas, they hold up three. If they have a really big idea, they don't show that it's small, they say that it's big. In fact, if I were to say, I have a really big idea, but hold up my finger is really small, you're more likely to believe my gesture over my words. So in this way, we have to speak to people on two levels. We have to show them what we're saying with our verbal content. We also have to say, I'm going to emphasize and underline my content for you so that you can actually comprehend and outline while I'm speaking. So it's almost like we're giving pictures to our words.

**Chris Williamson** (2:50)
Yeah. It's fascinating that the physical language comes second to the spoken language, even though that's the thing that is usually most front and center.

**Vanessa Van Edwards** (2:59)
I think this is why we love emojis. We are actually quite pictorial. We like to have images. So if I send a text message, I'm fine. My friends are, is she fine? I don't know. That doesn't sound fine. But if I were to have a little smiley crying face, I guess I'm very millennial because I use that crying side face that shows, look, I'm fine. But if I were to use, I'm fine with the emoji with the circle crazy eyes, you'd be like, oh no, she not fine. That's because we tend to give more weight to the visual. That is I think why we're speaking in more and more images as we go. Hand gestures in person is like adding pictures to your book, which we all like.

**Chris Williamson** (3:40)
What if someone's not speaking? What if somebody is supposed to be just receiving? Why should our hands go then?