Modern Wisdom
#917 - Vanessa Van Edwards - The Art Of Effortless Confidence & Social Persuasion
20 Mar 2025
Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral researcher, speaker, and author. How do you make a great first impression? How can I become more charismatic? How can I stop feeling awkward in social situations? We've all wondered about these things at some point. Luckily, Vanessa is an expert on human interaction and has the answers you're looking for. Expect to learn what we should do without hands in social situations, the 4 key things you should do when prepping for a speech, the do’s and don’ts when you’re sitting down, how to detect a liar & how to become a better liar, why so many smart people struggle to be charismatic, how to get better at small talk, how to seem more attractive when dating, how to make the best first impression possible and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Talk to me about where we should put our hands.
Oh, my goodness. They should be first things visible. In fact, every time you say hello, you should be, hi, I'm Vanessa. So good to see you. We love a gesture. 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 want to 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 going to hug?
Are we going to handshake? Are we going to high five? Are you withholding anything? And so part of our brain is always just looking to see if you're going to 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 want to get fancy, is to actually have them be explanatory, which we can talk about if you want to.
Yes, tell me. Explain.
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 TED Talks. And 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 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 TED Talks that had the most views use an average of 465 gestures in 18 minutes. We coded all a chunk of TED Talks. The least popular view 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.
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