When sharing the gospel … 

(Part 6)

Speak with Confidence
(Use Contagious Tools)

 

When sharing the most exciting Good News,
Ever to be shared on Planet Earth,
Let your eyes and face remember:

The Joy of the LORD,
Is Your Strength!

Let your body and your spirit, embrace it, and express it.

 

Let your spirit and soul be contagious for all the right reasons,

And direct your audience in the right direction.

 

 

Concise summary

“If you heart is joyful, don’t forget to tell your face …”

1. When people first see someone, they often look at their hands, a leftover habit from caveman days to check for potential threats, as hands can indicate intention (00:01:44).
2. Research on TED Talks found that popular speakers use an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes, while less popular speakers use around 272 hand gestures, with hand gestures helping to convey confidence and friendliness (00:02:54).
3. Emotions are contagious, and people can catch emotions from others through body language, facial expressions, and even chemical signals, such as sweat, with research showing that people who smelled sweat from skydivers experienced a fear response (00:05:46).
4. Happiness microexpressions make a person more likeable, as they infect others with happiness and confidence, which has a positive effect on social interactions (00:12:14).
5. Certain conversation starters can trigger dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, and make conversations more enjoyable and memorable, such as asking about exciting experiences or upcoming events (00:13:42).
6. Emotions like excitement can be contagious, and simple reframes, such as saying “I’m excited” instead of “I’m nervous”, can improve performance and make a person more infectious to others (00:17:07).

 

Detailed summary

 

Introduction and the Importance of Visible Hands

1. The concept of social awkwardness is introduced, and it is mentioned that years of social awkwardness led to a fascinating career trying to figure out how people work, with a personal anecdote about a “plaid vest phase” (00:00:15).
2. An experiment was conducted to analyze thousands of hours of TED Talks, looking for patterns, including body language, hand gestures, vocal variety, and outfit choices, which revealed a pattern in the data (00:00:50).
3. When people first see someone, they often look at the hands, a habit leftover from caveman days when it was necessary to determine if a stranger was friend or foe by checking if they were carrying a rock or spear (00:01:51).
4. The importance of visible hands is highlighted, as when hands are hidden, it can make the observer feel uncomfortable and distracted, because the brain is unable to see intention (00:02:07).

 

The Power of Hand Gestures

1. A study found that the most popular TED talkers use an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes, while the least popular TED talkers use an average of 272 hand gestures, almost half (00:02:54).
2. TED speakers often use hand gestures to show friendliness and confidence, such as waving when walking onto the stage, and using gestures to explain concepts and underline their words (00:03:28).
3. The most viral TED talkers tend to use similar hand gestures and body language, such as sitting in a certain way and using gestures to break down complex ideas into simpler concepts (00:04:01).
4. The use of hand gestures allows TED speakers to communicate on two tracks, using both words and gestures to explain their concepts and make their message more engaging and memorable (00:04:08).
5. The brain gives 12.5 times more weight to hand gestures, and humans are constantly sending and decoding body language signals, as well as emotional and chemical signals (00:04:33).

 

Contagious Emotions

1. A study collected sweat pads from people who ran on a treadmill and from skydivers on their first time skydive, and then had participants smell these sweat pads while in an fMRI machine, which showed that the participants who smelled the skydiving sweat pads had their fear response in their brain activated, even though they had no idea what they were smelling (00:05:07).
2. This study suggests that emotions are contagious, including fear and confidence, and it raises the question of how to ensure that the right emotions are being transmitted to others (00:05:57).
3. Emotions can be contagious in three different ways, the first of which is non-verbally, as demonstrated by an experiment in which a person stood in the street looking at nothing and slowly gathered a crowd of people who mirrored their non-verbal behavior (00:06:15).
4. The experience of standing in the street and gathering a crowd showed that people catch emotions and then create rationales for why they’ve caught that emotion, which is a mechanism that keeps humans safe (00:07:07).

 

Microexpressions and Emotional Contagion

1. Dr. Paul Ekman has studied microexpressions, which are universal facial expressions that occur when a person feels an intense emotion, and there are seven of them, including the fear microexpression (00:07:28).
2. The fear microexpression is characterized by eyelids and eyebrows jumping out of the way, and the mouth opening to take in oxygen, and it is a natural response that occurs before a person consciously realizes they’ve seen something threatening (00:07:58).
3. The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that facial expressions can cause emotions, not just the other way around, and this is demonstrated by the fact that people can feel anxious when they see someone with a fear microexpression (00:08:50).
4. A real happiness microexpression is characterized by a smile that reaches all the way up into the upper crow’s feet muscles and upper cheek muscles, which is distinct from a fake smile that only involves the bottom half of the face (00:09:17).
5. Researchers at the University of Finland found that participants who looked at photos of people with real happiness smiles experienced a positive mood change, whereas those who looked at fake happiness smiles did not catch any emotions (00:10:13).

 

Verbal and Non-Verbal Contagion

1. When people show up to events with ambivalence or interact with others they don’t like, they become less memorable, and this effect also occurs over the phone, not just in person (00:10:35).
2. An experiment was conducted where participants recorded different versions of their hello on the phone, including happy, sad, and angry tones, and listeners were able to distinguish between the different emotions (00:10:58).
3. The experiment also found that people who conveyed happiness in their voice were rated as more likeable than those who conveyed anger or sadness, and this effect was consistent across both men and women (00:11:51).

 

Conversation Starters and Dopamine

1. A study in Portland, Oregon, involving 500 Speed-Networkers, analyzed conversation patterns and found that certain verbal cues can infect confidence and make a person more likeable (00:12:48).
2. The study used conversation starters and cameras to analyze body language patterns and identify how people can verbally infect confidence and become more likeable (00:13:02).
3. Research has shown that certain conversation starters can produce higher quality conversations, and these tend to center around the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is associated with pleasure and reward, and can be triggered by questions that spark excitement, such as “Working on anything exciting these days?” (00:13:30)
4. The most commonly used conversation starters, such as “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?”, tend to produce the lowest quality conversations, with lower volume, more silences, and negative body language, as they do not trigger any pleasure or excitement (00:14:28)
5. Asking questions that focus on positive experiences, such as “Working on any exciting projects recently?”, can trigger dopamine and create a more enjoyable conversation, as the brain tends to look for “hits” of excitement and pleasure, rather than “misses” (00:15:00)
6. This approach not only creates pleasure for the other person but also makes the conversation more memorable, as dopamine triggers a “mental post-it note”, according to Dr. John Medina’s findings (00:15:41)
   Using conversation starters that trigger excitement and optimism can be a gift to others, as it helps them shift from autopilot to a more engaged and positive state, and can have a contagious effect on their emotions (00:16:15)

 

 

Harnessing Excitement and Increasing Likeability

1. A study on the emotional contagion of excitement versus nervousness found that simply reframing one’s emotions from “I’m nervous” to “I’m excited” can improve performance, as anxiety and excitement are similar emotions that differ only in mindset (00:17:07)
2. To harness incitement or trigger excitement, several strategies can be employed, including asking dopamine-worthy conversation starters, using more hand gestures, making authentic smiles, and avoiding picking up the phone in a bad mood (00:17:34).
3. The goal is to end on a note of excitement and make individuals infectious, which can be achieved by mustering energy and participating in a collective activity (00:17:47).
4. A specific activity to achieve this goal involves counting to three and then yelling out “I’m excited” with all the energy one can muster, as demonstrated by the collective yell of “I’m excited” (00:17:55).
5. The activity is designed to be an engaging and energetic experience, as evidenced by the applause that follows the collective yell of “I’m excited” (00:18:07).

 

 

 

 

00:00 Translator: Ki Yun Lee

Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

 

Hello, my name is Vanessa, and I am a recovering awkward person. 

 

 

00:15 (Laughter) This is me at the peak of what I like to call my plaid vest phase. (Laughter) 

 

00:23 Luckily, my years of social awkwardness led me to a fascinating career trying to figure out how people work. So, what I didn’t realize is that many years ago,

 

00:34 I would do an experiment that led me right on this stage in front of you here today. My lab researchers and I were curious about TED Talks. 

 

00:43 We wanted to know, Why do some TED Talks go viral  and others don’t? So we embarked on a huge experiment. 

 

00:50 We analyzed thousands of hours  of TED Talks, looking for patterns. I wasn’t sure if we would find anything, so we were analyzing body language, hand gestures, vocal variety – 

 

01:00 we even looked at outfit choices, which made today  particularly pressure-filled. And very quickly, there was a pattern in the data that made me curious.

 

01:11 And after we coded  more and more TED Talks, we realized there was a pattern. Now, before I tell you what that is, I have a personal question for you, 

 

01:19 which is, When you see someone, what part of the body do you look at first? You can just call it out. 

 

01:26 What do you look at first  when you see someone? Face, eyes – so most people – shoes. 

 

01:32 (Laughter) They are very high. So most people say eyes, face or mouth.

 

01:44 But actually, when we first see someone, the first place we look is the hands. And this is left over  from our caveman days. 

 

01:51 Because if we were approached by a stranger caveman, the first place we looked was the hands to see if they were carrying a rock or a spear. 

 

01:58 We wanted to know if we were safe, if they were friend or foe. Now, this actually still remains from caveman days, and when we can’t see someone’s hands, 

 

02:07 something interesting happens. So I just did something  a little mean to your brain. You should start to feel  just a little bit uncomfortable.

 

02:16 The reason for that is  when you can’t see my hands, you wonder, What is she doing back there? (Laughter) 

 

02:22 And then, the longer I leave my hands behind my back, you get more and more distracted because you can’t see them. And eventually, your brain is just screaming, 

 

02:30 Can’t she just bring her hands off from behind her back? And the moment I bring them back out, it feels so much better. 

 

02:38 And this because our brain knows that if we can’t see hands, we can’t see intention. And we found as we compared the most viewed TED Talks

 

02:47 side by side with the least viewed TED Talks, we found a pattern with hand gestures. Specifically, on average, 

 

02:54 the most popular TED talkers use an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes. Yes, we painstakingly counted every single one. 

 

03:04 I have 465 prepared for you today. (Laughter) And the least popular TED talkers  use an average of 272 hand gestures. 

 

03:15 Almost half. What’s happening here? So when TED speakers take the stage,

 

03:21 they are showing you first “Friend, friend, friend.” You’ll notice when I walked onto the stage, I waved. I was saying, “Friend, friend, friend, friend.” 

 

03:28 (Laughter) And the other thing that TED speakers do – see if this looks familiar. 

 

03:33 So they come onto the red dot, and they do something like this. “Today, I want to talk to you about a big idea.” (Laughter) 

 

03:44 “I am going to break it down  into three different areas that are going to change your life.” Right? 

 

03:50 (Applause) So the most viral TED talkers seemed to sit in the same way with these hand gestures

 

04:01 because what they are doing is they are showing you, “I know my content so well that I can speak to you  on two different tracks. 

 

04:08 I can speak to you with my words, but I can also explain my concepts with my hands.” And this way, they underline  their concepts with their words. 

 

04:17 For example, if I were to say, “Today, I have a really big idea.” (Laughter) 

 

04:25 “It’s huge.” (Laughter) You laugh, and you are like, “Vanessa, it’s so small, it’s not very big,”

 

04:33 and that is because your brain gives 12.5 times more weight to hand gestures. So today I have a really, really big idea, and I am going to explain it  to you in three different ways. 

 

04:48 My big idea is that we are contagious. Specifically, as humans, we are constantly sending and decoding body language signals. 

 

04:58 We also do this emotionally and chemically. To explain this, I have a rather disgusting but very fascinating study.

 

05:07 So, in this study, researchers collected sweat pads from people who ran on a treadmill. Then they collected sweat pads 

 

05:16 from skydivers on their first time skydive. Two very different kinds of sweat. Here is the disgusting part. 

 

05:23 Then they had poor  unsuspecting participants – (Laughter) I know – 

 

05:28 they had unsuspecting  participants in the lab (sniffing) smell these sweat pads while they were in an fMRI machine. 

 

05:36 Here’s where it gets interesting. Even though the participants had no idea what they were smelling, the ones that smelled  the skydiving sweat pads

 

05:46 had their fear response  in their brain activated. In other words, they caught the fear. This means that  our emotions are contagious. 

 

05:57 Our fear is contagious. Our confidence is contagious. And this begs the big question: If our emotions are contagious, 

 

06:05 how do we make sure that we are infecting people with the right ones? So, I believe that we can be contagious in three different ways. The first one is non-verbally. 

 

06:15 Now, to test this idea, I did a very simple experiment  in the streets of Portland, Oregon. What I did is I stood in the street,

 

06:22 and I looked up at nothing. And I wanted to see if people would catch or mirror my non-verbal. 

 

06:30 So you can see in this video, I stand in the streets looking at nothing, and slowly one by one … 

 

06:37 (Laughter) I infect people walking by. (Laughter) 

 

06:42 And slowly … (Laughter) we begin to gather a crowd. 

 

06:48 (Laughter) (Applause) This poor woman, you know – she was standing there with me,

 

06:57 and we are standing there, and remember, we’re looking at nothing. And we are standing, and I am going, How long are we going to stand here? Who’s going to break first? 

 

07:07 And after about 40 seconds, we are looking, and she leans over and says, “Is he going to jump?” 

 

07:14 (Laughter) And this experience taught me  that we catch emotions, and then we create rationales for why we’ve caught that emotion.

 

07:28 Now, this is actually a good thing. As humans, this keeps us safe. Dr. Paul Ekman has studied something called the microexpression. 

 

07:35 It’s a universal facial expression, and he’s discovered there are seven of them. Across genders and races, 

 

07:41 we all make the same expression when we feel an intense emotion. This is the fear microexpression. So, fear is a really important emotion 

 

07:50 because we want to catch it from someone else to warn us if something is about to go wrong. And this facial expression  also keeps us safe.

 

07:58 So imagine for a second that you’re walking and you see a snake. Your eyelids and your eyebrows jump out of the way so you can take in as much  of the environment as possible. 

 

08:08 “Is there another snake?  What is my escape route?” Then your mouth – “huh” – opens so you can take in oxygen in case  you have to fight, yell for help, or flee. 

 

08:17 We make this face before  we consciously realize we’ve seen a snake. Now, what’s interesting about it is you should be starting to feel a little bit anxious.

 

08:28 That’s because when we see other people have fear – If we saw this face in the subway, we would be like, What’s wrong? What’s going on? 

 

08:34 Because it keeps us safe. So I want you to try it with me. Open your eyes as wide as possible. 

 

08:39 Raise your eyebrows up. Very good. Now, take in a short breath. (Gasp) 

 

08:44 Perfect. Do you feel anxious? What’s interesting  about facial expressions 

 

08:50 is they cause our emotions. So not only do our emotions cause our face, but our face also causes our emotions. 

 

08:57 It’s called the facial feedback hypothesis. So when we see someone with this face, we catch their emotion, and then we are ready to fight,  flee, or yell for help.

 

09:07 Luckily, this also works with positive emotions. So one of the faces behind me is a real happiness microexpression, and one of them is fake. 

 

09:17 (Laughter) So the real happiness microexpression is when the smile reaches all the way up into these upper crow’s feet muscles, those upper cheek muscles. 

 

09:29 And this is really important because, you know, when you tell a frenemy good news, (Laughter) 

 

09:34 and they say they are happy for you, but you know they are not really. It looks like this – “Oh yeah, I am so happy for you.” (Laughter)

 

09:44 So try the fake expression for me first. Just try this fake smile,  only on the bottom half of the face. You can even go, “Uh, uh.” 

 

09:52 It doesn’t feel so good, right? It feels inauthentic. Now, go all the way up into your eyes. 

 

09:56 So smile all the way up  to the upper cheek muscles. Ah, that one should feel so much better. What is interesting about this facial expression 

 

10:04 is it causes our own happiness. And we also catch it when we see it. Researchers of the University of Finland looked at these two facial expressions. 

 

10:13 They had participants look at photos of people with the real happiness  and fake happiness. They found that when they showed participants

 

10:20 pictures of the real happiness smile, those emotions caught – they caught the positive emotions, 

 

10:27 and they themselves had a positive mood change. But when they looked at the face  with the fake happiness smile, they caught nothing. 

 

10:35 In other words, if we show up to events that we are ambivalent about, interact with people  that we don’t really like, we become less memorable. 

 

10:45 This doesn’t just happen in person, it also happens on the phone. So I worked with a lot of different clients, corporate clients who are on the phone all the time.

 

10:53 They said “Vanessa, I get being happy in person, but how about on the phone?” So we decided to do an experiment. 

 

10:58 We had participants in our lab record different versions of their hello, the first impression on the phone. We wanted to know 

 

11:06 if people could hear happiness, sadness or anger. So we had people record different versions of their hello with happiness, sadness, anger and while power posing. 

 

11:18 We wanted to see  if they would sound different. So I wanna play you two different versions of hello and see if you can guess which one is the happy hello.

 

11:26 Are you ready? Alright. Same person. Here is a). (Sound recording) Hello. 

 

11:32 Here is b). (Sound recording) Hello. How many people think a) is the happy hello? 

 

11:37 How many think b) is the happy hello? Very good. We can hear this difference. 

 

11:43 We can hear this microexpression. Now, I thought this was interesting, but I wanted to take it a step further. So we devised a second part of our experiment 

 

11:51 where we had participants in our lab listen to these recordings and rate that person on likeability. We wanted to see

 

12:00 if the happiness microexpressions or the anger microexpressions or the power posing expression did better. Here’s what happened. 

 

12:06 After we asked people, “I do like this person a lot,” “I like this person a little,” or “I do not like this person,” 

 

12:14 we found that the happiness microexpressions across all trials for both men and women, they became more likeable. 

 

12:21 Whereas the same persons who baited the anger or sadness microexpression were less likeable. This is the happy side effect  of having your confidence be contagious.

 

12:32 Not only do you infect someone else with that happiness, you also become more likeable. We talked about non verbal, 

 

12:39 and I have to talk about what comes after the hello. How do we infect confidence verbally? So in this study we did in Portland, Oregon, 

 

12:48 we took 500 Speed-Networkers, and we asked each of these Speed-Networkers to go through a conversation starter round – 

 

12:56 eight of these rounds. So we assigned each participant  a conversation starter to have with a stranger.

 

13:02 Then we set up cameras in all corners of the room, and we analyzed each of these speed rounds for patterns. We were looking for body language patterns: 

 

13:11 leans, nods, laughs,  smiles, confidence. We were also looking  for volume differences. In a really good conversation,  usually the volume goes up. 

 

13:20 In a really awkward bad conversation, there are lots of silences, the volume goes down. And we also asked each of the participants to rate the conversation starters. 

 

13:30 We wanted to know which ones produced the highest quality of conversation. What we found was that the conversation starters that worked centered on this little chemical called dopamine.

 

13:42 So dopamine is the neurotransmitter  that we produce when we feel pleasure or when we get a reward. And I noticed that most of our chit-chat 

 

13:50 that we have at parties or networking events is the same. It sounds like this. “So, what do you do?” 

 

13:59 “Where are you from?” “Live around here? Huh?” “Well, I am going to go get some more wine. 

 

14:05 It was great talking to you.” Those conversations happened over and over again. It was almost as if  they were socially scripted.

 

14:13 My brain was on autopilot. What we found was is that the worst ranked conversation starters, 

 

14:18 the ones that got the lowest ratings, the ones that produced the lowest volume, the ones that got the most leans away,  worst head nods, worst microexpressions, 

 

14:28 those were the ones that we use the most. “What do you do?” “How are you?” “Where are you from?” 

 

14:34 from a physiological perspective,  have no effect. No pleasure. So what we tried was to find conversation starters 

 

14:42 that could spark or create some kind of excitement. Can you verbally trigger dopamine? We found that the brain is really interesting.

 

14:51 If you ask somebody a question, it tends to look for hits and not misses. What I mean by this is if you ask someone “Been busy lately?” 

 

15:00 their brain immediately looks  for all the hits of “been busy.” They think about negative things that have happened – the stress, the busyness,  all the bad things in their life. 

 

15:08 Whereas if you ask someone, “Working on any exciting recently?” their brain immediately begins to look for all the hits of “excitement.” It starts to think about  the good and happy things, 

 

15:19 all the excitement that’s going on in their own life. And that does two things. One, it creates pleasure for them.

 

15:26 You are literally asking them to borrow excitement  from other places in their life and bring it to the situation that you’re in. 

 

15:33 And the other thing that it does is it makes you more memorable. Dr. John Medina found that dopamine, when it’s triggered in a verbal conversation, 

 

15:41 makes a mental post-it note. In other words, when you ask someone else to think of what’s exciting in their life, the happy side effect is that you become more memorable. 

 

15:52 So here’s my big challenge for today. Instead of using the typical “What do you do?”

 

15:59 “How are you?” and “Where are you from?” let’s banish those  conversation starters forever, and let’s try ones that ask the brain to look for hits of excitement. 

 

16:08 Try “Working on anything exciting these days?” “Have any vacations coming up?” “Anything good happen today?” 

 

16:15 I think this is the greatest gift we can give our fellow human beings. We are asking them to flip into optimism. We are triggering dopamine and excitement and getting them off autopilot.

 

16:29 The last way that we are contagious is emotionally. So, this study is one of my favorites. In this experiment, they asked students to sing the song 

 

16:39 “Don’t Stop Believing” into an accuracy software. Now, this a very nerve-racking experiment. 

 

16:45 They are rated on vocal tone, words, and they are given no preparation. But they did three different trials of this experiment. 

 

16:52 First, they had them just walk into the room and sing into an accuracy software. The second group got into the room and had to say out loud,

 

17:01 “I’m nervous.” And the last group had to walk into the room and say, “I’m excited.” 

 

17:07 They found with this simple reframe the nervous group got 53% accuracy, the control group got 69%, 

 

17:15 but the “I’m excited” group  got 80% accuracy. Why? Anxiety and excitement  are very similar emotions. 

 

17:25 The only difference is mindset. So my challenge for you today is to think about how you want to infect people.

 

17:34 When you want harness incitement or trigger excitement: ask dopamine-worthy conversation starters; use more hand gestures; 

 

17:42 make authentic smiles; and never pick up the phone in a bad mood. (Laughter) 

 

17:47 And the last thing I want to do is I want to end on a note of excitement. I want to make you really infectious. So what we are going to do to end this talk 

 

17:55 is on the count of three, with all the energy you can muster, I want you to yell out “I’m excited.” Are you ready? 

 

18:02 One, two, three! “I’m excited.” You rocked it.

 

18:07 (Applause)