The Most Critical Social Skill

People can say anything they want to with words. So we don't ever really say exactly what we feel. But our body language does not lie. It's very difficult to lie with your body language. Even the finest actors in the world find it very difficult to lie with their voice because the voice reveals people's feelings. You want to be observant. The most important skill that you can have in the work world, in the business world and in life is knowing how to observe people and not be so wrapped up in yourself and be outer directed. So when you're in a situation like you've entered a job for the first time, your tendency is to be all insecure and think, did I say the wrong thing? Am I doing, am I dressing correctly? Am I fitting in? And you're not observing. You're thinking about yourself, right? And the whole game is to be observing. You're observing the world, the different games that are going on, what people are doing, what they're like, what their tastes are like, what the boss is like. There are all these levels of power going on. You want to get outside of yourself and simply observe, right? And not be thinking about yourself as much. And if you become a really good observer of people, which is something that I developed over all of these different jobs that I had. I wasn't necessarily the best person figuring out the game, but I was very observant about people and their nature and their flaws and such. If you become an astute observer of the people around you, you will have this, the game will be much easier to manage, right? You will know this is a person who is insecure. I cannot offend them. I cannot say the right, the wrong thing to them. This is a person who's strong and secure. I want to be with them. I want them to mentor me. You want to be able to take criticism from other people. In other words, be less insecure and be more kind of outer motivated and paying attention to the people around you. So it sounds like sort of half the battle is sort of naming what other people are. So saying like, oh, this happened. Robert did this thing, which tells me he cares about how he's perceived. Perception and relevance is important to Robert. So I'm going to name a person like that. And so often when you're young, you're just thinking, I, I, I, me, me, me. You don't even know to name another. Right. Interesting. Well, the thing also that you want to understand is everything is a sign. So when you're observing, another thing is enjoy this aspect of it because it's actually a lot of fun. It's like watching a movie and observing people and understanding them. But everything people do is a sign. So if they're showing up late at meetings or they're not returning your phone calls, it's not some innocent event. It means something. It's coming from some place within them. They're telling you something about themselves indirectly. If their desk is a mess, right, they can't organize their desk. It's a sign of something else going on inside them. Right. If they're not returning your phone calls on and on and on. Every little thing that people do. I sometimes when I read an email, I can sense that there's a little bit of anger as an undertone. You can sense people's tone, not just in what they say, but in how they write something. Right. There's a lack. There's not this usual kind of polite tone. There's a little bit of a sharpness. There's a word or two that indicates that they're upset. They're angry. Every little thing that people do is a sign. You're not paranoid because it's actually a lot of fun. And you're decoding what's going on because people wear masks. They smile and they say, I love your ideas, Cody. You're brilliant. You're wonderful. But inside they're thinking something else. And you have to be able to pick up all of these signs. Yeah. It seems like a lot of us have lost a lot of that gut intuition. Like we don't, we're told to not trust your first instinct. Yeah. We're told to not cross the street when we feel a certain way, because that could be rude to somebody else. We're sort of continuously being told to mask this feeling we get in our gut. How do you reopen that again? Like if you're sitting in a room with a bunch of people in the workplace and you're trying to figure out how to play this game, what is the mental game Robert plays to sort of pick up these undercurrents that somebody might not be able to see? Well, I wrote a book called The Laws of Human Nature, sort of my last book. And I have a very long chapter in there about nonverbal communication. And it's extremely important skill to develop. And what that means is people can say anything they want to with words. In fact, they generally do. They never really exactly say what's on their mind. That's how it is in the social world. Because if you said what was exactly on your mind, you would be offending a lot of people. Right? So we don't ever really say exactly what we feel. But our body language does not lie. It's very difficult to lie with your body language. Even the finest actors in the world find it very difficult to lie with their voice because the voice reveals people's feelings. Right? So you want to be observant. We're very good at picking these kind of cues up. So you may not realize it, but you sense that something is wrong about this person that you've just met. This is something that I talk a lot about in The Art of Seduction. I've dealt with women who've written me back. They had a gut feeling that this man that they met was wrong. There was something bad about him. They got a bad feeling from it. But what happens is you don't trust that feeling. And then because you're not, as you say in our culture, it's not something that we value. And then we go on. We have a relationship. And then we find the hard way out that our original gut instinct was the correct one. So you want to trust these feelings. They're very valuable. We are animals. We think we're all so intellectual. We've got our frontal cortex that governs everything. But inside we operate on emotions, on instincts, on feelings, on sensations. It's a nonverbal form of communication. It comes out in people's gestures and how they move, how they stand, right? They're at a party. You're talking to them, but their feet are pointing in a different direction. They're not so interested in you. Their eyes reveal if they're really listening to you or not. A real smile lights up the whole face. A fake smile's all kind of tight. That's wonderful. I really like it. Right? Yeah. On and on and on. It's this insane language. You can understand exactly what people are thinking, but you have to do this to be able to reach this kind of level of understanding. You have to shut off your own mind. You have to shut off all your internal chatter. You have to observe and you have to see exactly what, try and read and detect what that particular sign means. And you won't believe how often you are very accurate with it. You can detect people's resentment, people's envy. And as I said, I wrote a whole chapter about signs that you can look at tomorrow and learn about this language. It's just that you're not paying attention and you don't value this form because we're so verbal. We think everything has to do with words, but it doesn't.