6 Psychological Tricks To Read Anyone

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 these 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 is 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, 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 or 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, so start a conversation, speaking for maybe five minutes, you're going to form a very strong opinion most times. And that's gonna be, you know what, I just don't trust this guy. Something about him has 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, wow, how sharp are they? I would love to work with them. The truth is only a few minutes have gone by, right? 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 or 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 one, 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're gonna 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 is paying attention to you, or rather they're talking to you, but they're kind of looking over, they're looking down at their watch, right. They're trying to get out of there. You, you can tell that and sense that intuitively. The other thing that people, some people have a harder time sensing is where their body is, right? So when you're trying to get out of the conversation, you might start to angle out and go, 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, you. 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 say all that. The truth is, it's 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 a. Huh. Huh, Cool. Oh, interesting. Yep. Okay, that's non 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 could be a comment that is related to a story you told that is going to 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, 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. I include the voice box in this because tonality is going to be huge. Specifically, the first thing that you should start to do is identifying your expressions. We all know, we 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, go. Okay, sounds interesting. And what you'll do is you'll see people lose momentary control and flash briefly and less, less big, right? Not as much teeth, the emotion that they're feeling. And this is true for tons of different emotions. I personally got my experience learning how to read these 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 wasn't conscious at the time. And. 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 fun, they'll get you a start and maybe then 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. Cause 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, see your resume. Okay, we'll call you back. Pattern. You know that they're never going to call you back, right? You go out into a bar and I've seen this one. There's a guy who is 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, but there's. 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 would 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 liked that guy. So I'd walk in and I go, you know, that group, I think that they came here together because that girl just grabbed a 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. I think they just met. And then there was a 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, it's going really well. And it 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 get really, really good at, 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 to see the stuff that's going, I think this is gonna happen next, and then seeing if I was right or wrong. But the truth of all this is you have to go out and you've gotta be scientific about it, because you're predicting patterns, 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 thing about experiments is, is that they prove you right or wrong. And this is the science part of it, because I remember I would go out and I would try to pick up different things from friends of mine who did other things well. So, for instance, Ben, my co founder, who you might have seen in other videos, had this buddy who was very gregarious, outgoing, but he was also a big dude and people really liked him. So Ben, when he first got to college, one of the first things he did is he saw this guy, he wanted 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. A year later, he's put on £40. He's the 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, I thought, you know what? He's got big eyes. So it's probably because of these 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 go, all right, I want to see what happens, how people respond if I do the big eye eye contact. So he'd be talking to me. And I go, mm, awesome. 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 hypotheses 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, right? So I saw my buddy go up, this girl's about to split. But what did he do? I didn't know at the time, and I only put it together later that it was, oh, my gosh, when he leans up against the wall, looms over her, of course, that triggers a feeling of, I need to get out of here. And so sometimes when I'm out, I'll notice I go out to dinner, right? And I see that one friend of mine will start to tell a story, and we'll be at 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'll just fall flat. It'll 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 just say this last thing. A huge, huge underpinning of this channel and everything that we do is the idea that you are not born charismatic or uncharismatic or 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 we put a new one up, and 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 you're 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.