Vanessa Van Edwards breaks down the four channels that shape how people read you in seconds: your body language and facial expressions, word choice, voice and pace, and what you wear or display. These cues signal warmth and competence before you say much of anything.
A cue is a social signal that we send to each other. And there are 4 different modes of communication for cues to make it easy for us to think about these. So the first one is nonverbal, our body language, our gestures, our facial expressions, our posture, even how we move through the world. Nonverbal. Second is verbal, the words we use and also our syntax, how we use our words. Third is vocal. And this is the one that I think is most often forgotten. So that's our volume, our pace, our cadence, our syntax, our accent. All of those things are the vocal aspect. And the last one smallest is imagery. That's the colors we wear, the ornaments we wear, our accessories, even the props behind us, what's in our Zoom backgrounds, what we're holding in a profile picture, the kinds of clothes we wear. Those 4 modes of cues are how we diagnose or very quickly assess someone's warmth and competence.
