In this video, I'm going to teach you how to read anyone and specifically, what I want
to do is give you six things that if you implement and think about these, you're going to know
what people are thinking and feeling, without them even having to tell you, and that skill
is amazing.
You can apply it in tons and tons of different circumstances and that's the last piece. I want to
help you learn how to apply it, because a very, very common question that I see in the comments,
and I appreciate those, but very, very common one is, "Charlie, how do you make this charisma
breakdowns? How do you see the frameworks that you see and how did you learn this stuff?"
The answer is that I started by learning how to read people. That's so closely tied to
the question of the Charisma Breakdown. So, I figured, why not knock them both out in one video.
Let's go ahead and get started though.
The first thing, if you're interested in learning how to read other people, you have to get
better at reading yourself. You need to develop a level of self-awareness that is far, far
above most other people. But the good news is it's a very specific kind of self-awareness.
And that is, you have to notice when you are forming opinions about other people, when
you're changing opinions about other people. Because if you think about it, there's 7 billion
people in the world, and you don't have opinions on most of them, right?
You don't trust them or distrust them, or like them, or hate them. It's just neutral
to you. But at some point, between seeing someone who is a stranger, and then, having them
walk up to you, start a conversation, speaking for, maybe, 5 minutes, you're going to form
a very strong opinion in most times. And that's gonna be, "You know what? I just don't trust this
guy. There's something about him that tipped me off," or "This guy's awesome. I would definitely
hang out and spend time with him." Or, maybe, it's you know, this person, "How sharp are they.
I would love to work with them."
The truth is, only a few minutes have gone by. You haven't seen their resume. You don't
know anything about them. Everything they're saying could be true, false, or otherwise.
What you're picking up on are very, very subtle cues. And if you get good at noticing when
you feel these things, you're going to get better at picking up those cues and identifying
what they are.
So, Step 1: Self-awareness. You need to know when you are having opinions about other people.
Second piece. Now we're gonna bring the focus to others. We'll start with the easiest and
that is where is their attention, right? Attention is very typically easy to identify. Most of
us can do it intuitively, but just to cover the basic things, eye contact, right? You
know when someone's paying attention to you or rather they're talking to you but they
kind of looking over, they're looking down at their watch, right? They're trying to get out of there.
You can tell that and sense that intuitively. The other thing that people--some people have
a hard time sensing is where their body is, right? So, when you're trying to get out of
a conversation, you might start to angle out, "Yeah, okay. Cool. Sounds good, all right.
See you tomorrow," and then, you're gone, right?
Similarly, if you're in a room, and there's someone you'd like to be talking to over this
direction, but you're in a conversation with the person here, you might find yourself opening
up without even thinking about it. So where your hips, where your feet, where your torso,
people would say, the truth is this is the whole darn thing where different elements
of your body are facing, is indicative of where your attention is. And then, the last
thing for attention that is going to be important is, is the person that is talking to you or
that, maybe, you're talking to, are you answering and asking engaged questions? A non-engaged
question is "Uh-huh, uh-huh, cool. Uh, interesting. Yup, okay." That's not engaged.
An engaged question relates to the thing that you're saying. It's an add-on. It doesn't
have to be a question. It can be a comment that is related to the story you told. That
is gonna be very indicative of if you have someone's attention or don't. So that's the
first step of cold reading. Second thing, overall, is going to be, okay, are they giving
me attention? Are they interested or disinterested in what is going on in front of them. Then
we want to hone down a little bit, right? Because all we know now is interested or disinterested.
We need to get to some emotions. And the truth about emotions is that they are very, very
focused up here.
The easiest place to find an emotion--there are other tells elsewhere--but 80 to 90% of
them are occurring here, and I include the voice box in this because tonality is going
to be huge.
Specifically, the first thing you should start to do is identifying your expressions. We
all know, you know happiness, right? We know these things. That's not a problem. What becomes
difficult for people are micro expressions, right? So, when someone is feeling a feeling,
but they're trying to hide it. Say for instance, we just saw happiness on my face. Say that
I'm in a job interview and I just got a job offer that is way higher than I expected,
but I want to keep it on the down low. I don't want them to know. At this point, what I might
do is they say, "Okay, you just got XYZ amount of money." "Okay, sounds interesting." And
what you'll do is you'll see people lose momentary control and flash briefly and less big--right
now it's much teeth--the emotions that they're feeling. And this is true for tons of different
emotions.
I, personally, got my experience learning how to read this in the real world, right?
I wasn't necessarily looking for them, but what I would do is go out and see, "Okay,
what's going on with people's faces." This was unconscious at the time, and then, how
do they behave immediately after that?
If you want a crash course on that, I haven't done it myself, but I do see that there's
micro expression tests online. And they're fine, it will give you a start, and, maybe,
then, you take it into the world. So, if you're interested in those, I'm gonna link in the
description to that, but don't go just yet, because the truth is, micro expressions and
identifying them consciously is really not a huge part of how the best people who read
others do it. The best way that they do it is by identifying patterns.
So, job interview again, right? Say you're in a job interview and the person across the
table from you goes, "Okay, I see your resume. We'll, uh, we'll call you back." Pattern.
You know that. They're never gonna call you back, right? You go out into a bar, and I've
seen this one. There's a guy who's leering and looming over a girl, right? Pattern right
there. She's about to get the heck out of there. You see these very, very consistent
patterns, and I could list off a ton for you.
While there's a finite number, there is a large finite number, so it's not necessarily
worth it for me to do all of the patterns that will take forever. What I can do is teach
you to start identifying them better. And the way that you do that is by making predictions.
This is going to really, really hone your pattern recognition skills.
So, for instance, when I was about, I think I was 21 because I was just starting to go
to bars, spending a lot of time going out is really new and exciting. But one of the
things that I would do is I would go and I would make guesses, predictions about who
knew who, how a conversation was going, if that girl like that guy. So I'd walk in and
I'd go, "You know, that group, I think that they came here together because that girl
just grabbed the drink and handed it to that guy as if it was no big deal." So there's
clearly some trust there.
On the other hand, there's a group over here--two guys and two girls--and they're standing with
this like invisible line between them. Nobody's touching. The guys are on one side, the girls
on the other. I think they just met, and then, there's the situation with a buddy of mine,
I remember, and I started to get good at seeing this, and he said, "You know, there's this
girl. I met her and it's going really well; looked like it was going well." And then I
would watch as he rolled up and stood against the wall like this and leered over her, and
all of a sudden, pattern, she's about to bolt, and what do you know, 30 seconds later, she
leaves.
So start making predictions. That is going to help you really, really good at this pattern
recognition stuff, and I cannot recommend that enough. I really think, for me, that
was the biggest thing that enabled me to start seeing the stuff that was going on. I think
this is gonna happen next, and then see if I was right or wrong.
But the truth of all of this is you have to go out and you got to be scientific about
it, because your predicting pattern, you're seeing all these things, but if you don't
start to apply it to your own life, and to experiment with it, it's all gonna fall flat
and it's not gonna stick. And the interesting about experiments is that they prove you right
or wrong. This is the science part of it, because I remember, I would go out and I would
try to pick up different things and friends of mine who did other things as well.
So, for instance, Ben, my co-founder, who you might have seen in other videos, had this
buddy, who's very gregarious, outgoing, but who's also a big dude, and people really liked
him. So Ben, when he first got to college, when the first thing he did, he saw this guy,
he want to be more like him, get the reactions that he got, and he thought, "Okay, he's 220
pounds of muscle; must be the muscle." So he went to the gym, worked out really hard,
and a year later, he's put on 40 pounds. He's the same height, same size, same weight, and
nothing really changed, right?
It didn't go the direction that he wanted. Then he goes, "Okay, so it's not necessarily
the size, I think what it is is that he's very loud and gregarious and outgoing, and
so he started speaking more loudly, and being more outgoing, and all of a sudden you see,
okay, that is the pattern that is making it work. In my own life, there was a friend of
mine who I thought had great eye contact, and I thought, "You know what? He's got big
eyes, so it's probably because of his big eyes that he's got such great eye contact.
And, for the next week, on and off, when I was in conversation and I thought about it,
I'd go, "All right, I want to see what happens, how people respond if I'd do the "big eye"
eye contact.
So you'd be talking to me and I'd go, "Uh-hmm. Awesome. That was so cool, right?" And I'm
doing this bug-eyed, insane, mad person look until Ben, my friend, goes, "Dude, what the
hell are you doing?" And, okay, I learned that that pattern was completely wrong. The
point of this is you can start to learn how to cold read people. If you can identify the
emotions you have, you're gonna get some hypothesis about what's driving emotions. If you can
start to predict and see them in other people, you're gonna get good at knowing, okay, this
conversation is about to tip. It's gonna go well or it's gonna go bad, they're about to
really make friends or they're gonna split. And then, the way that I make the breakdowns
is I just go back and say, "What happened before that?" So I saw my buddy go out with
this girl who is about to split, but what did he do? I didn't know it at the time, and
I only put this together later that it was, "Oh, my gosh, he leans up against the wall,
looms over her." Of course, that triggers a feeling of "I need to get out of here."
So, sometimes, when I'm out, I'll notice. I go out to dinner, right? And I'd see that
one friend of mine will start to tell a story and we'll be in a little circular table, and
every single person there will pay attention. I'll go, "This is an interesting story," but,
honestly, what interests me more is how the heck did he do that? What did he preface it
with? What went right before he started talking?
And similarly, same night, somebody on the other side of the circular table tell a story,
and it will just fall flat. It will either go three sentences in, and nobody will listen.
So, that's how I do it. That, I think, is how you can become much, much better at not
only reading people, but in how to learn what these triggers are, so that you can be more
captivating, more interesting, more of the ways that you would like to be in your own
life. And, I guess, I should say this last thing.
A huge, huge underpinning of this channel and everything that we do is the idea that
you were not born charismatic or uncharismatic, confident or unconfident. All of those things
are an aggregate of your mindsets and actions. So, I just have to say that if you don't believe
that, go watch more of our videos, but that is a fundamental piece that is going to make
all of this possible.
So, that's it for this video. I hope that you've enjoyed it. If you have, and you'd
like to see more, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. If you do, you're gonna get
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and in that way, you will not miss anything that we do.
If you have comments, questions, things that you'd like to see in the channel, go ahead,
write them down in the comments. I know a lot of you have asked for more Game of Thrones.
I'm gonna keep that on, but let me know, do you want more Charisma Breakdowns, or are
you interested in more Q and A style like this? I'm game for whatever. These are nice
because I can film them quickly, but I love the Charisma Breakdowns as well. So, let me
know. I'll try to do a good balance.
I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one.