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 our videos on your homepage. You're gonna
get an email whenever I put a new one up, 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.
