IDL61 Season 2: Non-Verbal Communication: Demonstrate Your Trustworthiness, with Abbie Maroño

How can leaders utilize non-verbal communication to create and maintain trust? Why must leaders resolve emotional conflict whenever it occurs? Why should leaders drop the stiff-upper-lip approach to become more influential and trusted?

Today’s guest, Abbie Maroño, has her Ph.D. in behavior analysis; specifically, non-verbal communication. Part of Abbie’s focus is on the relationship between non-verbal communication and trustworthiness, and in today’s episode, Tyler and Abbie look at how leaders can non-verbally communicate that they are approachable, empathetic, and above all, trustworthy.

Meet Abbie Maroño

Abbie Maroño is a nonverbal communication and social influence coach, the director of BRINC, and a social psychology lecturer.

Abbie published her first academic paper on nonverbal communication at 19 years old, and went on to do her PhD in behaviour analysis and cooperation before founding a research network, BRINC.

BRINC teaches professionals how to affect non-verbal communication by examing what nonverbal behaviours and the sequence in which they occur tell us about an individual’s internal state.

Visit Abbie Maroño’s website and see also BRINC.

Connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Non-verbal communication (24:56)

• Creating a perception of trustworthiness through non-verbal communication (28:30)

• Why you should address emotional issues sooner rather than later? (38:38)

• A stiff upper lip is not beneficial (43:30)

Non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication is everything that people do besides speaking to get information and ideas across to one another.

Paintings, art, music, and body language are all some examples of non-verbal communication.

The visual ability that people have is one of the most complex systems that we can use, both consciously and subconsciously. Our body and brain pick up on the non-verbal signals someone else is using even when we are blatantly unaware.

Creating a perception of trustworthiness through non-verbal communication

What happens when you (subtly) mimic a person’s body posture? They may begin to trust and like you more.

Mimicry evolved as an original way to communicate. Over time, it developed from communication to being a tool to create harmonious relationships. It binds people together.

Why should you address emotional issues sooner rather than later?

If someone has an emotionally strenuous interaction with someone and it is not resolved soon for either one of them, that negativity can “leak”.

People remember mostly how you made them feel, not what you said. If that negative feeling was prominent and not resolved, that will become a defining feature of what they remember about interacting with you.

If someone does not recognize another person’s non-verbal display of emotional strain, they feel invalidated, perhaps consciously but always subconsciously.

As a leader who wants to create an empathetic and compassionate environment, address negativity when and where it occurs. 

A stiff upper lip is not beneficial

The human brain is only wired for “threat” or “no threat”. If you want to be a great leader, be willing to express emotional vulnerability.

Smile, speak, show emotions and be interactive. Your emotional expressiveness is a key to empathy and compassion.

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Joe Navarro – What Every BODY is Saying

BOOK | Peter Collett – The Book of Tells: How to Read People's Minds by Their Actions

Visit Abbie Maroño’s website and see also BRINC

Connect with Abbie on Twitter and LinkedIn

Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn

Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com

About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast

The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.

Rate, review and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or subscribe on Stitcher and Spotify.

I showed you how I feel, and you ignored it and carried on, so it [creates] this negative feeling. As a leader, you need to be attuned to these things.

Abbie Maroño

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER] Welcome to Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host Tyler Dickerhoof. Whether you're listening wherever you're listen to podcasts or you're watching on YouTube, glad you're joining it. I'm excited to share today's guest, Abbie Marono with you. Abbie is like, she's just finishing her dissertation and she's looking into everything, non-verbal communication. She really, as a real topic, I guess, I don't know exact dissertation, I'll come up with it is about nonverbal communication and building trustworthiness. Now she's gone down the path of looking from everything from a lies point of view. You'll hear about that in this interview. We'll talk about a little bit about my experience, my background in animal nutrition, how that ties into this idea of nonverbal communication. We'll dig through a little bit about the six Vs of influence but then we'll touch on that, but then we'll dig deep. We'll dig deep into Abbie's research. I can't wait for you to hear about that because for about the first 20 minutes, we set up everything that is about trustworthiness and how your body moves and everything you do as a leader that can build trustworthiness. You'll want to hear all this stuff. You'll want to make sure you take notes because as I learn, as I reflect back those opportunities of when I wasn't real comfortable or what happened in a conversation or interaction where I became more comfortable on how pivotal. It's pretty amazing under stress to hear how pivotal, not your upper body, but your lower body is to develop trustworthiness. So stick around, listen to that stuff. I know you're going to get value added today's episode. I want to make sure I kick this off of, if you're watching on YouTube I'd love for you to subscribe to the channel. Wherever you're listening to this podcast I'd love for you to subscribe as well and leave a review, a rating, a comment. Let me know what value you got out of today's episode, all this information for Abbie Marono. She's referral from our previous guest, Joe Navarro. Make sure you check out that interview as well. They've done some collaboration, some work together, and her interest really in this nonverbal communication came from one of Joe's books. So I'll see you at the end. We'll recap and glad you're here today, listening in. [ABBIE MARONO] So I started as any student, I wanted to learn how to detect lies. I was obsessed with Lie to Me. I think I just watched so much CSI and Lie to Me that I just wanted to do that as my career. Then I started my degree in psychology as an undergraduate. Within the first week I had a lecture on sequence analysis, so looking at why we do one thing, followed by the next by the next. Something just clicked with me, understanding why we do things as certain patterns. Then I thought, well, why do we do our behaviors in certain patterns? I was reading Joe Navarro's book, What Every BODY is Saying and they talk about, or he talks about clusters of behaviors, how it's not just one behavior that means something. It's when you get multiple behaviors at once. I was thinking, well, what about the sequence that they occur in? What does that tell you? So if I have one behavior followed by the next followed by the next, does that tell me something different than if it's one behavior followed by a different behavior than followed by that behavior again? I started speaking to my lecturer at that point, David Keeley, and he just said to me don't tell anybody what you have just said. Don't tell anybody that idea, if you want to do it, we'll do it. Then we just started working on this project called behavior sequence analysis of nonverbal communication. It was just like, everything clicked for me. I started working in nonverbal communication. I published my first paper at 19. I published my second paper at 19. I published my third paper at 19, I think still. Then I just continued and I was just obsessed with understanding why are non-verbals are the way they are, what they tell us but I was still in the field of lie detection. So my first papers were focused on lie detection like that attractive field that everybody loves. I went in and I got a scholarship for my Ph.D. at Lancaster focused on lie detection. Then within the first month or so, I dived into the literature and I just realized that the focus is wrong, that there really aren't any behaviors that mean you're lying. You cannot detect lies. There's no Pinocchio effect. It's just high stress and high arousal detection. I realized that the focus shouldn't be on how we create lies to get information it's how do we make people feel comfortable because we want to talk to people that we're comfortable with. Then everything changed for me. I just started working in cooperation, trustworthiness, trust, cohesion, and I fell in love with the field. That's exactly where I have been since finished my Ph.D. Always have papers on the go now having multiple projects in different universities, all on cooperation and trust. It's exactly where I want to be. [TYLER] So I'm very intrigued about you pre-university. What brought you to that place? Why did you all of a sudden get to university? And it's like, I know you said watch the shows, but e, tell me about your family, like how you got, again, I'm just trying to get a feel for Abbie to understand why, one everything's clicking. I want to get to know you as a friend. [ABBIE] Yep. I am an avid reader. I have always got a book in my hands. I'm not really like a party girl. I never really had that much of a social element all through university. It was always just books. It really was the books of Peter Collet, The Book of Tells and I lived and breathed Desmond Morris. I really don't know what it was, but they just, it was like, there was just something in me that just was so focused on nonverbal communication. It just felt exactly like that was where I was supposed to be. It sounds very silly, but I was in A level doing a level psychology and then Lincoln, the university, I went to it, my family lived there or my mom's family. So it just seemed like a perfect fit. Then everything almost just fell into place. I did some conferences and then I met some amazing people there and all these opportunities just kept falling into place. The first paper that I published had the exact title as the scholarship that I got for my Ph.D., other than it was cooperation rather than lie detection. Then the job that I got as lecturer it was offered, the woman that had the job before she left, as I was looking for it. This one job opened up and the market was completely empty. Other than that, and again, it just sort of fell into place and everything has just almost been so fluidly, easy to get here. Not easy in terms of I didn't put the work in, but I think when you put the work in and you're so focused yes on what you want to do, it feels like everything is just completely flowing. It's like, there was never a break for me. There was never a struggle of what am I going to do now? It was always nonverbal communication I want to be in academia. I want to be a research. I want to do this. So it just just happened. But I think when you are passionate about something, it seems to just happen, but it is just hard work. [TYLER] Yes. Well, that to me is something I really want to now I guess focus on is that idea of when you do the work in preparation and all of a sudden the doors open up and the path provides itself, you're like, well, is this easy? It's like, well, I did all the hard work and or once it does get hard, I'm prepared enough to where it doesn't really seem hard because I'm like, oh, I know what's going on. Like there's these elements, and especially in sport, like they say athletes, when this sport slows down and it's all of a sudden to me that's because your preparation level has come to a point to where your psychological analysis pace is at the pace of what information is coming in. So to me, it's just like, oh, okay. So as you were preparing, you're just like, oh, okay, I get this there's, I imagine there's going to be roadblocks at some point, but it's like, what do you do to prepare yourself before that and, or look at those roadblocks as an exciting factor rather than debilitating. [ABBIE] Yes. In research, there's always many roadblocks. Through my Ph.D., there were many roadblocks including a pandemic, which was very difficult because my research, even the title was nonverbal communication, using motion capture in face to face communication. So using motion capture, I had to put suits on multiple people, bring them into small rooms where everyone was very close together and everything was face to face. I had equipment from person to person. So I mean, everything I couldn't do. So that makes it difficult but at first I saw it as this is rubbish. What am I going to do? I can't do what I want to do. Then I saw it as an opportunity because every drawback is an opportunity. I thought, okay, well what about virtual interactions? What about nonverbal communication when we're having virtual interactions because that's more important than ever now? The way that my thesis looks isn't how it would look before if I did it, how I wanted to do it. But because I had to do some of the studies online, it's worth a lot more because it's more diverse. And it's the same, I've had so many failed experiments. I mean, in academia, they don't tend to publish failed results. So you run loads of experiments, you get rubbish data, everything fails, you can't publish it. So other people don't know and you spend, I mean, some of my research, it's taken three years to get the publication. You spend a long time on these studies and they fail. It's so easy to see that as it's rubbish, it failed, just leave it rather than I started seeing it as, okay, well, why did it fail? Because this tells me something. If I'm going in with this idea of what I want to find, and I'm not finding it, why am I not finding it? So that gives me something else to investigate. I think with science, especially with human beings, with chemistry, something is what it is. With physics. gravity is gravity. With human beings you never know. You can never say something is exactly something. I think that is so exciting because there's so much to always discover. If we stopped, like if we stopped at the atom and just said, oh that's the smallest thing. Fair enough. Now we wouldn't have blasted open and seen how much was in sight. It's the same with studies. Like it fails. If you think, oh, it just failed, but you think, okay, well, why did it fail, what's behind that, you blast it open and there's so much behind it. [TYLER] Oh, that's good. I love that. That's fun. It's fun to think about, well, I think it lends to all the work that you're doing and to me, so much of it is emotional management. What you just described is each one of those elements have no emotion attached and the moment that you attach emotion to it is not linear. It's not even exponential. It is beyond that, to where we can't even comprehend the amount of interactions and the mysterious interactions of those emotions and how that cascade of sequences change. I love it. So my background, I don't know how much you know about me, but I'd love to share this. I was a nutritionist for dairy cows. So that's what I went to university for. [ABBIE] Wow. [TYLER] Animal science. I was going to be a veterinarian. I'm like one I did not want to stay in pre-med bio. So then I just moved along and realized my dad had, I grew up on a dairy farm, my dad had done nutrition. I'm like, oh, I can do this. As I talk to people now is I've gotten more into human nutrition stuff, partner with a health and wellness network marketing company, Isogenix is the name of it. As I've talked to a lot of researchers in the human nutrition side, they're just now starting to think about studying what animal nutritionist figured out 30 years ago. It's amazing to me that as humans, we're so far behind, but there's two reasons; there's been a profit generation component to everything studied in animals, production animals. So it makes sense, hey, we want them to be healthy and productive, but then the other thing too, is animals have emotions. Yet we, as humans do not cater to their emotions. So therefore when you're studying things of behavior and when we're talking about nutritionist specifically, we don't feed an animal based upon their emotions they like it or not. They get it. They don't have a choice. They may choose themselves, but we as humans controlling that study and it's really, really, really, really hard to then do that for humans. [ABBIE] Yes. Ethical practice is, I don't want to say the pain of my life, but the pain is nice. I absolutely, obviously I'm kidding. I agree with ethics. [TYLER] No, no, no, but there's reality in it. Well, it comes down to, it's like, not that you're trying to hurt someone. But as we talked about that idea of emotions being such a magnifier, that it's, how can I limit the variables in that equation so that way I can understand better? I mean, that's research and science. [ABBIE] It's so interesting because this is a point that I was making recently. A lot of the studies that I do are in the lab because I use motion capture for stuff. But recently I've been moving away from that because I just don't think you can get true behaviors that way. The difficulty is if you want to see stress and real psychological discomfort, and you want to see real pain in people, how they react go to a hospital. But it becomes unethical if I just say, Hey, can I please record you during your darkest moments in life just so I can look at what your arms are doing and what your hands are doing and what your legs are doing just to study your nonverbal, like you can't do that. So it does make it very difficult. The studies that I did for my PhD it was looking at mock terrorist investigations and how we can create cooperation using nonverbal mimicry. It was fun. I did it all in a lab. It was all as realistic as possible to set up, but there's a big thing between bringing students in and saying, okay, pretend you're a terrorist and actually analyzing real behaviors. So a study I did recently was looking at real life behaviors. What we did was we got live interviews of people who had been interviewed by an interviewer who was either really comfortable or asked a really uncomfortable question because we made sure it was live and it was on iPlay or BBC or something where it had not been edited. So there was no way to edit it. It was true behaviors. Then we looked at the sequence of the lower body behaviors, what they did after the uncomfortable question was asked, how they reacted to that, whether it was overly personal, sometimes it was overly sexual and just the person, the interviewee had reported, like that made me uncomfortable later on. So we knew that that question was a trigger question, but if we do that in the lab, if I say, "Hey, come into my lab I'm going to study you," they know that you are looking at their behaviors even if you lie to them and say, I'm looking at something different. The first thing that all of my students say to me when they leave my lab is what were you really looking at? Because they know that you are lying to them, and then they're trying to figure it out. So you are completely right about it being so difficult to study them this way. It's not even just our emotions, it's their emotions too, when they know they're being studied. But I have tried to get away from that, with these live interviews because I just think it's such a better way to do things. [TYLER] One of the things that I was thinking about, you alluded to it is going back to some of the raw footage of TV shows like Big Brother, those live TV shows that were like hidden cameras in a house and just analyzing their interactions because you know what happens after that and like at the chess game. So it's like watching a, I don't know if you're a football soccer fan or you think about it's like, as commentators watch those things, they're watching it live they're making interpretations of it live. If we can do that as humans, just like players do that in sport to go back and say, oh, I need to alter how I go through the play, go through the interaction in order to get a different response, if we can do that in a true form, as opposed to a laboratory, how much more valuable that is. [ABBIE] Yes, a lot more valuable, but I do think lab studies are a good foundation because it's like this stuff with motion capture that I use. I've discovered a lot that I can then apply to real life. If I didn't have the motion capture, I wouldn't have been able to realize it. Like we nonverbally mimic each other when we are feeling rapport. So two people that feel close to each other or have high positive interactions, they engage in nonverbal mimicry. They tend to adopt the same postures or same gestures. We know that but what we don't know is are there parts of the body that mimicry is most effective and can we manipulate that to create higher cooperation? I couldn't have done that really in a real life setting, because if I say to someone, okay, could you mimic that person but I want you to do it at this exact time in this exact muscle movement and things like that, it's just not possible to do. It's really difficult to measure that. If I recorded an interaction, I can't really measure their muscle movements or did they move their foot, their hand. It's much harder to see, but when I bring them into the lab, I can measure that with the motion capture suits. What we found is there are different levels of mimicry across the body. So if you mimic the arms, it creates less cooperation than if I mimic the lower body, and that is really, really important. Because if you are training people in nonverbal mimicry as a means of creating corporation, and you're saying, okay I touch my hair, you touch your hair. You --- [TYLER] I don't have any, come on. I don't have --- [ABBIE] You'd touch your head. [TYLER] Okay, I scratch my head. [ABBIE] But that's not as effective as adopting each other's postures or moving the legs. So it is important, but I'd say lab studies is a foundation and then we move to real life. [TYLER] Well, to me, what would be exciting there? We haven't even got to the interview stuff. This is just my brain scratching is you take all that laboratory information, you model that out and then you go to those real live recordings, and then you verify what happens when they do this. To see the reaction to point to me, that's awesome because we have the technology to do it today, but it's also, you can establish and, or verify a thesis from that. [ABBIE] Yes, absolutely. It works both ways too. So I work with Joe a lot. He seems to, I mean, he observes everything and then he comes to me and says I've seen this, can you validate it in the lab? Or I will see something in the lab and say, have you seen this in practice? So it works both ways when you see something and then want to see actually, is this a real scientific concept? Is this actually how things work? Then when you do it in the lab, you can say, okay, well, how does it look in practice? So there's this view that you are either an academic or you are a practitioner. And academics and practitioners don't tend to mix so much. I think that's a shame because I think that they need each other. I love working with practitioners because I'm surrounded by academics. I think it's amazing to hear their points of views, their theories, but if we are doing the science to provide it for practitioners, should we not be asking the practitioners if ones that's useful if they see it and should they not be feeding back to us what they would like to see. I think when you work in practice and science, that way, I think you can do some amazing things. [TYLER] I think what's funny to me about that is, again, my experience in animals. It's the only way it works. It's like, you can have the greatest theory in the world, oh, this makes sense. But then you go apply it to again, my background animal agriculture. You're like, oh, this is the way I should do. It's like, sorry, it's not going to work. No one wants to do that. That may seem great in practice but then we have to come to a middle ground to say, what is effective and good enough. So it's that point of maximum effect through minimum action. To me, I think if you do that on anything it's more viable. I think is just the word because you're going to see it replicated over time. [ABBIE] Yep. It's so difficult to do things the way that we want to do them because there are a lot of barriers in science in terms of facilities and grants and time. It does make people, a lot of the time rush through things. We want instant results and like I said, they don't publish results. So a lot of the time you're doing studies that have already even proven to fail, but no one's publishing them. So there are so many hurdles when you step into these things. But again, like you said, at the beginning you can see it as a challenge or you can see it as something to get excited about, something new to discover. [TYLER] So let's take a hard turn. I appreciate that time. One, that stuff intrigues me and excites me and it's like the signs of it and it's just fun. But let's talk about one influence, let's really talk about it in regard to leadership. Because you've alluded to it already in how we mimic, how we interact, reading some of the information and the six Vs of influence. A couple notes in there. One of the things I was, I would love to, and you're the perfect person to ask is I was talking to a friend within the last couple weeks and we were talking about imagery and this idea of media and how toxic it can be to a lot of social groups and yet understanding why do we have imagery? Really the place of imagery, and we think about images that we see in social media, on print or whatever else or acting out in like theater and why do we have that in our society as humans? What does that convey first and foremost? So when you have one of the Vs is the visual there's a couple notes there that just really intrigued me, as you mentioned, cave paintings to, the wonder and splendor of plants and how this actually creates a psychological change in us because it actually is meaningful to be able to utilize our eyes to process it. That's a lot to set up, but I'd love to dig into that. [ABBIE] I mean, before we had language, all we had was non-verbals. So we had to communicate some way and the way we do it is through images. It's through art, it's through nonverbal behaviors. When I say non-verbals, non-verbals is everything that communicates. So me painting on a wall, that's communicating, that's some non-verbals, the colors I choose. That's a nonverbal. Am I painting in red to show danger? Am I painting in blue to make you calm? It's interesting what you said about plants, because we say these images that we have, things that calm us down, like we're calmed by the sea. We calm by plants. That isn't arbitrary. When we see plants and this is why I always have plants in my background. It actually slows our heart rate down. When we see the color blue, it also slows our heart rate down. But when we see the color red, it speeds our heart rate up. So these colors through our evolutionary history, they've meant something. We have greenery, it's calm. It's where we live. It's the forest. We have blue, it's the sea, it's the sky. Then we have red, it's blood and it's danger. We have these evolved physiological responses. Now in our modern day society, we use that through art, through painting, through all these incredible things, through dress. We really use these non-verbals, but they have got an evolved function and we are obsessed with visual stimulus because why wouldn't we be? We've evolved to be that way. We've evolved to go through our environment by seeing. I mean, the visual system is so complex. It's the most complex system of the human being, is that we've made artificial intelligence robot. The one thing that we have not been able to create is the human visual system. I mean, we've created robots that are lifelike, humanlike, almost human brains. They can mimic emotions, but they cannot mimic the visual system because it's so complicated. It's evolved to be that way because non-verbals, it's non-verbals are everything. [TYLER] All right, Abbie. So let's take a little bit of a tangent, but not really because it's all the same stuff. I want to talk really about the areas that you've done research, obviously you've written some articles done those things, but you have a tremendous amount of research in this area of trust, cooperation, trustworthiness. So I'm just let you start there and then we'll see where the path goes and weave it all together. [ABBIE] Thank you. My area of research mostly lies around how we can use nonverbal communication to create a perception of trustworthiness. So we look at small things you can make from sort of having your hand code together to your fingers far apart. So tiny changes in behavior to then the opposite. There are really big changes in behavior. So instead of being closed off, really open up. But one main area that I think is really essential that I look at is nonverbal mimicry. This is what my whole PhD is focused on and how we can use nonverbal mimicry to create cooperation through this facilitation of familiarity and liking and trustworthiness. What happens when you mimic somebody's body posture, obviously, you have to do it quite subtly because if you are scratching and I'm copying or something, it has the opposite effect. You think, why is that person copying me? If I mimic your subtle gestures and I mimic how you're sat, I mimic sort of your leg positioning, it does create this automatic unconscious feeling of familiarity. Then what it does is it makes you feel closer. When we feel closer to somebody, we feel more comfortable sharing information with them. One of the studies that I did was I trained three Confederates, which are people that are involved in the study in nonverbal mimicry, and they mimicked participants. During this mock interview, the participants would give them more information, more personal information, more sensitive information. So literally just this simple behavior can create so much comfort and trustworthiness that people feel comfortable telling you really personal and private things. [TYLER] So is this derived around, I imagine listeners are familiar with mere neurons and that bit of science and what we do in humanity. Is that what this is derived from, or is this from that, but yet it's so much more? [ABBIE] That is such a fantastic question. Because there is a lot of misconceptions around mirror neurons. We understand them and we don't and the thing is in the literature, there's a lot of really, really robust supporting evidence, but then there's also a lot of really robust, contradictory evidence. So it's really difficult to know what role they play, but we can assume that at least they do play some role, whether they are the reason probably not, but they do seem to play some role. But from my understanding of it, and the research that I've done is mimicry originally evolved as a way to communicate. So if somebody in, as our ancestors were, they were in a very dangerous society. So if there was a threat, they needed to communicate with the others as a threat so they used their body language to do so or if they communicated that they wanted to be friends or anything like that, they did it through their body language. So people that had this automatic tendency to perceive their behaviors and do it themselves, had a better communication ability. So it evolved that way but then as our social world evolved, there were less threats and more a need to be social with each other. So the function of mimicry actually changed from communication to facilitating harmonious relationships. There's so much evidence. It's why we called it the social glue theory or the social glue function, because simply mimicking people has this ability to bind people together. [TYLER] That's awesome. So a question I had there, and this is, I think some of your work revolved around this, is there a difference between upper body gestures and movements compared to lower body? Let me take that a little bit further. I've read some work, Vanessa Van Edwards, she's done work where it's like when you're throwing your hands in the air, it's like, hey, I have a weapon I'm going to throw at you, is one of her perceptions. So I'd love to hear what your research, what you found the difference between upper body lower body. [ABBIE] Again, fantastic question, because this is something that I'm really, really passionate about because there doesn't seem to be a lot of research on the lower body because we spend so much time focusing on the face and the hands, because we know that our hands have a huge impact on how we're perceived. Obviously, so does our face. But what that does do is it means that this part of our body is socially constricted. So I know that if I don't like what you're saying, I can't scale at you because it's not socially appropriate. I can't put my finger up and I can't curl my fist or something. But what I can do is show it with my lower body because when we feel something and we're trying to push it down as Paul Eckman called it emotional leakage. If it's not leaking out on my face, it's going to leak out somewhere. And what Joan Novara calls, you can have a poker face, but you can't have a poker body because it will come out somewhere. What it usually does is come out in the lower body. So I've done a lot of research looking at sort of the honesty of the lower body and particularly the feet. We did some really interesting research on how you can tell discomfort from the lower body and how you can see if somebody is feeling really, almost attacked or just like personally very uncomfortable. We looked at live interviews, so people that had in real time being interviewed by an interviewer where there was no editing of the videos. It was shown as it was. The interviewer either asked normal questions, no discomfort, or they asked something really, really uncomfortable, something really, really personal and the interviewee reported that it was very uncomfortable. And we looked at the sequence of behaviors that the lower body showed, so what behavior started and then what behaviors followed and what we found was in the uncomfortable condition, they tend to get really small. So all of the behaviors were exactly the same with the lower body, within the two conditions. Other than in the uncomfortable condition, they bring their knees together and they tuck their feet under their chair whereas when they're comfortable, they bring their knees out and spread their feet out and make themselves really open. So if you see someone and you see them really, really closed off and you see these knees together and maybe you ask them a question and then you see them bring their needs together and tuck their feet under their chair, there's a good probability that whatever you've said for any reason has made them uncomfortable. Maybe they don't like it. Maybe you're talking about financial figures and they really don't like it and they tuck their feet. But if you see them sort of bring their news apart and spread their feet, it's the opposite. That sounds really simple, sort of this open versus closed, but it is really, really telling, especially with the lower body. [TYLER] Okay, so is there anything then with crossing of the legs, anything there, or I just wonder? [ABBIE] Again, that's interesting because things like crossing of the arms, crossing of the legs and these blocking displays and a blocking display is when you put something in front of you, maybe you cross your arms and blocking, or maybe using --- [TYLER] A pillow, put a pillow on your lap. [ABBIE] Yes, you've seen --- [TYLER] I have a sister-in-law who did that. Whenever we are in a family conversation, she always put a pillow on her lap. [ABBIE] Yep. It's called a blocking display. What they do, the arms is not a blocking display. That's a myth. But with objects and people can do it with their hands, they put their hands on their groin or sometimes they cross their legs really tight. Those are blocking displays. However, with these, you need to be cautious because a lot of the time we don't take into consideration the context. So in an interview context, you are likely to see blocking displays regardless of whether you are making them uncomfortable or not, because it's an uncomfortable situation. This is what we found in the interview setting. In the comfortable versus uncomfortable condition blocking displays, just as much as each other, there was no difference at all. It was actually the interview contact that was causing that display. If you are in an interview and you see your interviewee blocking displays, there is this tendency to think either they're hiding something or they're uncomfortable, but that's something you need to take with a pinch of salt because it could just be the interview context just making them uncomfortable. In a general conversation, say, you're talking with a colleague and you see it, it's less likely to do with the context itself. It's more likely to be, to do with how they're actually feeling. [TYLER] I think about this from a leadership perspective. If I'm sitting down, say you and I are having a conversation, there's an relationship there. If I start to see those things, I guess what I want to be attuned to is, okay, how can I create a situation to create more comfort? If we already have a relationship with each other, we're working through something, if I recognize your lower body, you're crushed, you're tucking in, my initial reaction would be okay, I recognize what's going on with Abbie. I need to backtrack, create, find common ground, find things that we can just appreciate and accept. Maybe there's a point of recognition, affirmations, whatever it may be. So then we can proceed forward knowing that there's safety there. Would you say that's appropriate? [ABBIE] Yes, absolutely. The thing is, as you said, if you see these displays, you want to figure out what's causing them. It's important to address them as soon as they occur because I think of it as like, if you have say a white carpet and then you spill a glass of wine on it and that glass of wine is that negative feeling, if I just leave it and say, I'll clean it up later, it's going to be 10 times harder to clean up and it's going to stain. It's the same with negative feelings. If you're having an interaction and you make them feel negative about something and you don't address it, then it leaks. A lot of the time they don't actually know what it is that made them feel negative. At the end of the conversation, all they remember is how you made them feel not what it is that you did that made them feel that way. So when you see this display, there's this tendency to try and push onto the end but what we should do is, as you said, address it then and there. Notice when it occurred, were you talking through a contract from say 0.1, 2, 3, 4, and did it occur at 0.3 or 0.2? What was it you were talking about? Go back to that point, say do you want to go over this? Is there anything you want to ask at this point? Is everything okay? When you see these displays, if you, like I said, if you address them there you are validating what they're showing you because when we express our non-verbals and we express discomfort with our non-verbals, what we are saying is notice how I'm feeling. We're saying, please notice how I'm feeling. I'm not telling you, but I'm showing you. When someone doesn't recognize these displays and they continue, we feel invalidated. Even if we don't consciously feel it unconsciously we feel like I showed you how I feel. You ignored it and carried on. So it has this really negative feeling. As a leader, you really need to be attuned to these things. [TYLER] So let me ask you, I guess there's two more thoughts that I have here. One, is there a gender difference? In other words, if there's a relationship male to female, female, to female, male to male, however that may be, is there a mimicry difference to where maybe some of the cues are a little bit jaded? [ABBIE] Yes. So what we tend to see with mimicry and with a lot of non-verbals in general is women tend to be more uncomfortable around men, not necessarily really uncomfortable, but they just show more discomfort displays whereas men don't. Women, when they're together, they tend to mimic more. They're more expressive, all of these behaviors. We can talk through what some of the behaviors for trustworthiness are, but all of these they're more overt in women and they're more common because women tend to be warmer. They tend to perceived as warmer. They tend to perceive other people as warmer whereas men are a lot less expressive. If you think about how much we rate women as more trustworthy than we do men, a lot of it probably is because naturally we do these more trustworthy displays. Not that we are more trustworthy, but trustworthiness is subjective. It's how we perceive someone. If men are constrained with how they're expressing themselves so much, they do tend to be perceived as less trustworthy. [TYLER] So what are some of the displays of trustworthiness? You alluded to that a little bit there. [ABBIE] As I said with emotional expressiveness, what we've found is people that are more emotionally expressive. So if I'm happy, I'm smiling and the smile is so important because when we see a smile, our brain releases oxytocin and oxytocin suppresses this fight for flight response and it brings our blood pressure down our heart rate down. So we feel more relaxed. That's why when you see a genuine smile and it can't be smiling, but my eyes are just so help me, but everything, the cheeks have to be up and that's what really raises the oxytocin. That's the start, but it's also the same if I feel really negative and I'm saying oh I'm really sorry to hear that, but I have this really neutral I don't care expression on my face. That has a really negative effect because emotional expressivity shows that I'm in tuned to how you feel. So if you feel negative I want to say, I'm so sorry to hear that. I bring my brows down. I widen my eyes. I slow my speech. When I'm excited, I show that I'm excited. That emotional expressivity has evolved. Like I said, we evolve, communicate with our facial expressions. So people that are more expressive are perceived as more trustworthy because we are communicating our true emotional states. Research has shown as well that this neutral expression, so we first see each other if I said, oh, hi, nice to see you, just stay neutral. I think I'm not scowling at you, nothing. Just stay neutral. It's fine. Our brain only registers trust, distrust because it's based on safety or threat. So although we have this, yes, no, maybe threat, not threat, might be, our brain doesn't. It doesn't really have time to think about, oh, it could be a threat. It just has. It is or it isn't. So this neutral expression, I'm not sending you any cues that I'm trustworthy. Therefore, you have no evidence that I am. So I am not. So just being neutral to have a really negative effect. There is a really common misconception that in corporate, you have to be very stiff up a little, very straight faced, no emotions. That's doing yourself a disservice because you're saying to people I'm less trustworthy. [TYLER] Well, one of the things that I think about as you play that out is if someone's very neutral, well then by inclination, I'm going to try to fish more to figure it out. So I'm going to try to dig and if I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere, I'll just talk and run, just forget about it. I think that could be how I would go through that situation. It's like, if I'm not getting either some response at all, well then is this even worth going through the conversation? [ABBIE] Yes, exactly. It goes back to that validation because if someone's just being neutral and unexpressive, whether it's verbally or nonverbally, usually nonverbally they might be saying all the right things. "I'm so sorry to hear that this, this, this," but if we are not getting anything back. We don't get that validation and we just think, well, you don't care anyway so what's the point? We'll just leave it. [TYLER] Okay. Well, I appreciate, I mean, this is great information. I love the ideology and the the study understanding that here we talk about upper body movements, but we don't consider how simple a lower body movement can be in a situation where we're sitting in a room together. It's, I think as I look forward as we spend time on face, that's normal. We can sense with hands, but as simple as, hey, I need to just make sure, and I'm aware of what their legs are doing. There's the kid that is just there, their legs are constantly bouncing around fidgeting. There's that one thing as opposed to someone that chooses to be closed off. So it's great information that I appreciate you sharing. Again, it's exciting work. I think this idea of leaders and in relationships, how can we be more empathetic? That's something that's near and dear to me. One of the things that I picked up here is our emotional expressiveness, is a tremendous key to use to being more empathetic and recognizing the emotional cues. These cues could really help us along that path. [ABBIE] Yep. Another thing nonverbally is openness and orientation and it fits really well with empathy because studies and doctors have actually looked at this and seem that, doctors who talk to their patients and turn to their patients and have an open body language. So I'm not crossing my arms and I've not got my arms, my side, my arms, and out. I'm sort of broader. They're perceived as more empathetic by not only the patient, but by the patient's family, too, than doctors that talk to the patient, but face away. I've recently done a study looking at approachability because approachability is the first thing. Do I want to have a conversation with someone and then figure them out? But I first have to make that decision to go up and have a conversation. Literally just orientating the body towards someone is perceived as much more approachable than orientating the body away. And we did it as well with just the lower body. So these tiny movements, this openness versus closed off facing away and facing towards have a huge, real life impact on how empathetic we are. If we think about that one from a leadership perspective, but a clinical perspective too, we know that how patients perceive their doctors, if they think they had good care, if they think their doctors are more empathetic. It has effects on the outcomes of their treatment. They're more likely to have better treatment, say they feel better quickly, stick to recommendations by the doctor if they think the doctor's more empathetic. So this closed versus open, so simple to do when you're talking to someone. Turn around and talk to them. If someone walks in the room, get up out of your seat and greet them and open your arm to them say, have a seat. Don't just point to the seat, lift your arm up and really gesture to them. Take a seat. Tiny changes, but a big impact. [TYLER] The one thing that is just rattling through my brain that I'm thinking about, and this is done a lot of times in a speaking nature where, how can you be more trusting and empathetic as a speaker? But I go back to this doctor comment. I think about that, you just talked about the openness of the doctor being willing to stand open to the patient. I wonder the difference between a doctor standing or if it's appropriate to sit and which is viewed as more trusting or empathetic or comforting? There's a part of me as I process through that myself is the ability for someone to mimic by sitting. If you're sitting and they're sitting how much more aligned that may be, as opposed to I'm sitting, you're standing, you're across the room from me. You give me this information where it's a little colder. Maybe you don't seem to care as much. I just wonder is that ever been studied? [ABBIE] No. So that's again, a really good question. It gets complicated when it comes to self sitting and standing because of power dynamics. We want to be perceived as empathetic, but people who are, say doctors or have a higher position, they need to be stood because we know that whoever is highest, whether they're sat in the highest chair or they're stood up it comes down to this height whoever's height is more powerful. We know that people are perceived as more competent when they're more powerful. So if we sit down as a doctor, yes, it might be getting more on their level, but you need to come from a position of power. So it is actually doing yourself a disservice again, to get down on their level when you are the doctor. You are actually perceived as more empathetic when you show that confidence, show that power, but show empathy through other roots than getting down on their level that way. [TYLER] Okay. So what about a person who is deemed as very powerful, say a man that's big and strong and powerful, and yet they could be overpowering. Is that something --- yes, go ahead. [ABBIE] Well then I would suggest, it depends on what your goal is. Someone that's sort of a medical professional, you need to have that power of authority, but if you're a leader you don't necessarily need to have that power of authority in terms of, I have the information you listen to me because a lot of the time it is more we are equals. I just run this. I give you instructions but as you are equal. In those cases, I would suggest get down on their level because it's not a power play. So if you do find yourself being overpowering, like you said, this big overpowering leader, it might be really useful for them to say, okay, am I purposely showing these displays to cut other people off and to bring myself higher? Because people that make us feel good are perceived as more trustworthy. If all the behaviors they're showing are confidence, arrogance maybe, power, everything here, top hierarchy that can be really overpowering. We want them more to get down on our level and be perceived as more trustworthy. [TYLER] It's, I wouldn't say, I mean, it's fascinating, but I wouldn't say again, as you process through it, it's not revolutionary, like I would've never thought that it. It seems very natural, but yet sometimes the things that we recognize until we point them out, we don't even realize we're there because we're so used to seeing it. It's, the abnormal becomes normal. It's what we recognize that we don't process and really stand out. So again, from a leadership trustworthiness, I think is phenomenal and it's awesome. I think the more that we study it to be able to implement it and build that trustworthiness and recognize where it's like, oh man, I don't understand why they don't trust me, but yet they're displaying every reason why and we just need to pick up on, well, what point was it that I made? What item of the contract, as you said earlier, made them uncomfortable? How am I sitting? How am I reflecting to them? Am I overpowering this situation where I just need to like, okay, let me address that. Be more open I think from a leadership perspective is something I've recognized. I asked that about overpowering, because I've had to tame that down a little bit and I've had to say, okay because I am a little bit bolder and stronger, I've had to realize, okay, how can I shrink this not to make less, but make sure that I don't overpower people? [ABBIE] I think because I mean, we're told as leaders, you need to be confident and powerful in these that we forget, obviously confidence is really important. But as we spoke about before, trustworthiness is decided within 33 milliseconds. Confidence takes a lot longer. So confidence is great but the thing that we should be focusing on is trustworthiness and trustworthiness is all about making someone else feel good. It's not about yourself. It's not about how can I be the best leader? How can I be the best this? It's, how can I make sure that they are led properly? So the focus isn't on myself, it's on them. That is the issue that we have. We get so just focused on, I need to be my best, my best, my best, as competent as I can be, rather than I need to be good for them. I need them to be their best. That's really what separates a great leader from an exceptional leader. [TYLER] Ah, love it. Good stuff. Well, thank you, Abbie. Appreciate you sharing all that. [ABBIE] Thank you so much for having me. [TYLER] All right. I hope you got a lot of value out of that conversation with Abbie. We actually had to do two different recordings, partly because we got a little bit cut off on some of the information. Wanted to make sure that we got really into the nuts and bolts and really that idea of the nonverbal communication building trustworthiness. I mean, I think those are some of the topics, the idea of how you hold your legs, if your legs are closed, if your legs are tucked underneath you, if your legs are open, what that says about your trustworthiness. To me as a leader, I think we have all these different barriers in our leadership. I've shared that before, the insecurity, insensitivity, inactivity and intensity. I'll reflect back to that conversation I had with Thomas Williams a couple months ago, but I really want to share this. As a leader, we need to be constantly looking to say, how can I build trust and not degrade trust? I think this conversation about nonverbal communication, everything our body is saying and our words aren't, and I think it's important. We can't undervalue what our body is saying and how people react to it. And learning, as I talked to Abby about clueing into it, oh, you're responding. Let me read these cues for what they are and respond to it as opposed to just bull those through and not be attuned to it. I hope in your leadership, in your growth and development that you can take value from today's episode. I thank you for being here. Just to let as part of this podcast, there is the Impact Driven Leader book club. You can read books with us each month, share information about those books and thought of the day questions. But as well, we do have a roundtable. We have that going on right now. There's going to be another opportunity to join that roundtable here in the next month or so. I'd love for you, if you're looking at a way to grow, to grow deeper in this idea, conversation of leadership subjects, let me spit this out, and understand that iron sharpens iron, there I know I bring some value of perspective, but every single person brings a different perspective. To me, that's, what's great about a roundtable; is how we all layer and learn together. If that's something interest of you, I'd love for you to send me an email, let me know what your interest is and we'll make sure we'll put you on the list for when the next group opens here later this year in 2022. Thanks for joining in. As always appreciate you being a part of the audience and I hope you got value out it today. Until next time have a good one.