How To Know How Someone Feels About You - Vanessa Van Edwards
Chris Williamson (host), Vanessa Van Edwards (guest)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Vanessa Van Edwards, How To Know How Someone Feels About You - Vanessa Van Edwards explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Keep 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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Replace autopilot small talk with ‘level two’ questions that surface values and goals.
Questions like “What was the highlight of your day? ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Charisma is warmth plus competence—and you can consciously dial each up.
Warmth cues (smiles, emojis, exclamation points, nods, vocalizations) and competence cues (data, decisive language, strong eye contact at the end of points) can be tuned to the person and medium (email, profile photos, presentations) to make others feel both safe and impressed.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“Closed 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can someone systematically practice these cues without feeling fake or overwhelmed by ‘performing’ all the time?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For people with trauma or narcissistic parents who misread neutral faces as negative, what are the most practical first steps to recalibrating their perception?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How do cultural differences affect which warmth and competence cues are most effective—or even acceptable—in different countries?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Can overuse of availability and warmth cues in dating backfire and make someone seem needy or low-status, and where is that line?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should introverts and socially anxious people prioritize which skills to build first to see the biggest charisma gains with the least energy drain?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Talk to me about where we should put our hands.
Oh, my goodness. They should be first things visible. In fact, uh, every time you say hello, you should be, "Hi, I'm Vanessa. So good to see you." We love a gesture. It's, it's funny because there's a primal part of our brain that knows that our hands are our deadliest weapons. So even though we think we look at the face, like when I ask people, "Where do you look when you first see someone?" People always say same, eyes or face, sometimes mouth. And that is the second place we look, but the first place we always look, especially when we're seeing someone for the first time or in a meeting or for the first interaction, is we wanna see what is your intention. And so, as humans, we will do anything to avoid the most awkward thing in humanity, which is, are we gonna hug or are we gonna handshake? Are we gonna high five? Are you withholding anything? And so part of our brain is always just looking to see if you're gonna handshake, high five, and on Zoom, it's even more confusing because our brain knows that we should see hands but when it can't, it worries. And that is because part of our brain and our amygdala begins to fire when we can't see someone's hands, especially when we're trying to understand them. And so the best thing you can do is have your hands visible. That helps with trust. And the second, if you wanna get fancy, is to actually have them be explanatory, which we can talk about if you want to.
Yes, tell me.
Okay, let's-
Explain.
... go. So really, really good speakers, they know their content so well that they can speak to you with two different modes. They can speak to you with their words, but they can also use their gestures to emphasize, underline, and outline. So the best TED Talks, you know I love, I love (laughs) TED Talks, and I, my team and I analyze thousands of hours of TED Talks looking for patterns. I didn't understand why everyone who gives a TED Talk is, is good, right? You're not invited to give a TED Talk if you're not good. And I wondered, why do some go viral, like millions and millions of views, and others by relatively unknown people, they get thousands? And we looked for all these variables, gender and color and smiling. We clocked the amount of time they smiled. The biggest differentiator was gestures. The view, the TED Talks that had the most views used an average of 465 gestures in 18 minutes. We coded all, a chunk of TED Talks. The least popular viewed TED Talks use an average of 272 gestures in 18 minutes. What's happening is a really good speaker is making themselves easy to understand by saying if they have three ideas, they hold up three. If they have a really big idea, they don't show that it's small, they say that it's big. In fact, if I were to say, "I have a really big idea," but hold up my fingers really small-
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome