Lewis Howes discusses teaching kids to read facial expressions as a safety skill from childhood through adulthood. Recognizing emotions in faces helps children identify danger and navigate social situations more effectively.
So you really wanted to master this one for yourself, but also be able to teach your kids on how to be safe. What are the things you really teach them to look out for? From their early childhood to teen years and then now into some of them into their professional lives? What were you teaching then and now?
So the biggest piece is that the facial expressions need to match the words. So nice to see you. That's disgusting. Contempt. That's growling. A grown man growling at a child. That's a problem. That's predatory behavior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have them all across my side. I just recently started to put up all the expressions on my website. It's on my socials. It's on YouTube. I'm putting them out, out into the world.
That's great.
So that other people can learn them to keep themselves safe. But the main focus for my little kids, when they were preverbal, we did a lot of mirroring. You know how you can get little babies even before they start to speak? You can get them to stick out their tongue.
When you stick out your tongue, raise your eyebrows.
And so we did a lot of, like. I have one kid that still does this. A lot of, like, crazy eyes. I would get them to mirror. Oh, a lot of. And make sounds to the facial expression. So we practice the big macro expressions. And I would put words to them in the same way. I'd be, you know, coffee, apple, banana. So they've never not had words for expressions. And babies know this innately. It's our universal human language. It's the language on which we build spoken language. So our facial expressions are across all cultures. It's a species thing. But the sounds we make for different words are different. But we use that. If you're looking at me and you're going, I know that's something bad. And if you're looking at me and your cheeks are popping up. So let me ask you this. How can you tell if someone's giving.
You a real smile if they're smizing?
Smizing with smizing.
Kind of like right there.
Yeah.
Your eyes are kind of like crow.
Oh, so I can give you crow's feet.
Oh, yeah.
With a really fake smile.
The bottom half is not there. Yeah.
It's all in our cheeks.
Is it? Okay.
Okay. So when we're happy, our cheeks pop up, and then this skin is usually flat, and we get smile bags.
Okay. Yeah.
So if we have smile bags, so.
The cheeks are pushing up against the eyes.
Yeah. It has nothing to do with them.
Big smile. But you're not authentic smiling. Gotcha. Interesting.
So all you have to do is look at the skin right here. If it's fat, they're happy. And that was my four year old saying to me when I took them out. I took my kids, we lived in Singapore when they were little and I would take them out into the world and live. Narrate. Almost like a nature show in Swedish, because I'm Swedish.
At home, if you see someone walking and you're having a conversation with each other, you say, they're doing this, they're doing this.
Yeah. And then most of the time I do what you do, which is ask the questions. What do you see?
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