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Modern WisdomHow To Know How Someone Feels About You - Vanessa Van Edwards
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Unlocking Everyday Charisma: Hands, Voice, and Purposeful Connection
- Vanessa Van Edwards explains how charisma is less about being loud and extroverted and more about specific, learnable nonverbal and verbal behaviors that signal warmth and competence.
- She details how visible, explanatory hand gestures, open body language, and vocal control dramatically increase trust, clarity, and perceived charisma, drawing on research from TED Talks, lie detection, and social psychology.
- The conversation covers priming rituals for confidence, reframing anxiety as excitement, improving small talk and dating dynamics, and using warmth/competence cues both in person and over email.
- Throughout, she emphasizes that smart, socially overthinking or introverted people often underestimate their natural charisma and can transform interactions by shifting from perfectionism to purposeful communication.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasKeep your hands visible and use them to ‘draw’ your ideas.
Visible hands immediately reduce subconscious threat responses and increase trust; speakers who use frequent, congruent gestures (showing size, number, importance) are easier to understand and are more likely to have talks go viral.
Separate ‘speaking charisma’ from ‘listening charisma’ and use different cues for each.
When speaking, animated gestures and clear emphasis help; when listening, still visible hands, slow triple nods, head tilts, and a lower-lid flex signal deep engagement and encourage others to open up and keep talking.
Open, expansive posture and breath-driven voice prime you to perform like a ‘winner.’
Broad body positions, laughter, and pump-up routines (music, achievement words, positive small talk) boost testosterone and dopamine, while speaking on the out-breath in your lower natural register projects calm confidence instead of nervousness.
Avoid blocking and self-soothing behaviors that read as closed or untrustworthy.
Crossed arms, face-touching, rubbing hands/torso, and heavy mouth/eye blocking are instinctively read as defensiveness or possible deception and also literally reduce your own creativity and openness.
Use baselines and clusters, not single cues, to interpret nervousness or lying.
Everyone has personal ‘nervous’ and ‘lying’ tells; by recording yourself telling truths, embarrassing stories, and fabricated stories, you can identify your patterns and then watch for shifts plus verbal distancing (e.g., dropped pronouns) and micro-expressions like disgust.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesClosed body equals closed mind.
— Vanessa Van Edwards
No cues is bad cues. The wrong cues are even worse.
— Vanessa Van Edwards
There is no such thing as perfect, but there is purposeful.
— Vanessa Van Edwards
We don’t like perfect people because we know that it’s not real.
— Vanessa Van Edwards
Highly charismatic people are making other people feel more charismatic.
— Vanessa Van Edwards
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
