 Think Tech Away, civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to Out of the Comfort Zone on Think Tech on Spectrum OC 16. I'm your host, Arby Kelly, and I am very excited for the guests we're having today. Now we have with us today world-renowned body language expert, Mark Bowden. Hey, Mark, how you doing? Hey there. Good to see you. You know, I'm back again. Why? Because the interview was so great last time and love being on your show, so here I am. Good to see you. I'm really happy you're back, Mark. So we wanted to start out, if you were watching guests last time when we were here, Mark was talking about his new book, Truth and Lies. So Mark, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about who should read this book and then maybe even give us a sneak peek, a little preview of what's inside. Yeah, for sure. So Truth and Lies, what people are really thinking, the new book out by myself and Tracy Thompson. Here's what I would say about it. Oh, by the way, it just came out in the U.S., I think, last Monday or Tuesday. So it's new, obviously you can get it from Amazon and any good bookstore that you usually go to. Now, what's it about? Actually, I'd say this, although it says it's a book about body language and reading body language and trying to tell what people are really thinking, I would say actually what it is is a book on critical thinking disguised as a book on reading body language. So actually, what I'd say it's really about is how can you get closer to the truth of what somebody is thinking and feeling by looking at their behavior. And here's the way I'd explain this is, we make judgments about people all the time. Or every time you say, well, I'm not a judgmental person, yeah you are, you just made a judgment. We judge people all the time. And our judgments are either very, very accurate, very, very inaccurate, or something in between all of that. However, it will always feel to us like we've been very, very accurate. So we have these huge feelings of being great people at reading body language. And sometimes we are, sometimes we're not, and all the stuff in between, we remember the times when we got it really right. The times when we got it really, really wrong, we kind of go, oh, I just don't know people anymore. Like, I don't get anybody anymore. And that lasts a few seconds and then we go, no, I do, I'm a great reader of body language and behavior. It's just they were broken, they're an odd one, they're like the odd one out. And then all the stuff in between, which is the decisions and the judgments we make many, many times a day with many, many people, we forget about all that stuff. And we're very average about reading body language the most of the time. So what this is a book about is how do you think more carefully about the judgments that you make, and how could you get those judgments more accurate more of the time? How does that sound to you? That sounds like something I really, really want to read. And I wish my copy would arrive already, all right? So would you even be willing to like crack open the cover and maybe read us a couple of paragraphs? Yeah, for sure. Oh, how about this? How about this? Well, I've just, all I've done is open a chapter 11 here and this is called I'm Going to Pay for That. And what happens here is we give you a scenario that you probably may well have experienced. This is in the dating section right at the start and I'm going to read a description of a situation for you that you may have been through yourself and many of the listeners will. Listen to this description and then let's have a conversation about what you heard at the end of it. It's certainly just about a page long, okay? Here it goes. So this is called I'm Going to Pay for That. You've been dating the same person for a little while now and things so far couldn't be better. You're in the honeymoon phase. Every day you grow more comfortable together, learning each other's lovable habits, idiosyncrasies, likes and dislikes, what makes you both happy or sad? It's all good. You have a date planned and you show up late, not just a few minutes but almost an hour. Your excuses? Your phone battery died. You couldn't call. You were stuck on the subway, all of which is true. You have a good reason for being late. You arrive full of apologies. Surprisingly, your date smiles and seems totally fine, cool, still calm. They even look a little too calm, almost serene. You ask if they're okay and they say they are. You assume this is a potentially a time bomb that will explode when you least expect it. Regardless of their outward body language of tranquility, you think I'm going to have to pay for that. What do you make of that? Here's a situation whereby, from what I'm reading there, there's lots and lots of signals and verbal signals to say, it's okay. You're late. It's okay. I take your excuse. It's okay. But you as the reader of the situation and the body language, you're going, no, no, I can't trust these signals at all. I'm absolutely going to pay for this later. Now, what do you think's going on there? This is something that actually happens to me a lot because what's happening here is your own issues and the little voices inside your head that tell you how the world is are telling you one thing and you believe in that worldview so strongly it warps everything you see. So even though you're clearly getting signals, hey, it's okay. Mistakes happen. It'll be fine. Let's just sit down and have a nice dinner. Your hearing, I'm going to punish you for this later and you're going to worry about it until it happens. Right. You've absolutely got it spot on there. There is nothing in that description that would denote anger in anybody. There's nothing that denotes deceit. Every single signal that I read out there suggests the person speaking to you is being honest and truthful with you and they're fine. They get it. And your explanation is true, but there's something in your own worldview that says I can't trust my judgment here. I can't trust my reading of this situation. I'm going to have to pay for that. And what we've got to think about this is how often are we viewing the whole world around us through that lens, the lens of what we expect? And are we ever really going to be able to truly judge the situation for what it is? And if we were to do that, how would we do it? How would we get, because in this situation, I would say the judgment of I'm going to pay for that is a long way from the truth from what I'm reading in that situation. The key is, is how would we get this person, how would we get ourselves closer to the truth? And there's a question for you is knowing that you kind of see the world through your own lens, how do you adjust that and try and get closer to how the world actually might be? Give me some answer to that. Well, I'm really sorry you asked that, because I was hoping to find the answer to that question. Because that's something I've been struggling with personally that I was, I was, as you were talking, I was like, he has the answer I need. So maybe you can tell us. All right, so look, the first key, I think I understand in my experience, the first key to really reading body language and getting closer to the truth is always to suspend judgment. Yeah, you have these judgments about the world around you, but the first thing you want to do when you want to get closer to the truth is go, okay, this is a judgment. I'm judgmental. I'm going to put that judgment to one side. I'm going to hang it up for a bit. For sure, I can come back to it. I can take it down later, but I am going to hang that judgment up for just a little while and explore this idea more. So I call this the scan technique, S, for suspend judgment. C of scan, that acronym scan, is to look at the context, is to go, what's the context of this judgment that I'm making? Now, if I know that, you know, I know enough about myself to think, okay, you know what, I kind of negatively judge a lot, even when I've told the truth, and even when somebody has said, you know what, it's okay, for whatever reason, for whatever experiences that I have, I tend to default to a bit of a negative judgment. I now know I'm in that context, okay? The A in scan is ask what else? Ask for more information. So can I get more information out of this person who I'm reading the judgment of, I'm going to pay for this? Can I get more information from them around that? So can I say, you know what, thanks for that sense of it's okay me being late. I just worry sometimes that things like that aren't true. I wonder, you know, can you reassure me a little more about that? So I might need to have in my relationship a little bit more openness to ask for more data around that. And once I've got that data back, I can put the whole of the thing together and N make a new judgment. The N of scan make a new judgment, which by the way could be the old one. I could just come back to the old judgment and go, hey, old judgment, fine. It is as I thought it was. I am going to pay for that. But you may well get a new judgment and that might be closer to the trigger. So scan, suspend judgment, think about the context and what else? And then new judgment. So there's your answer. I love that. That is so helpful. And I can even see like the situations I'm picturing in my head that's basically exactly what you have to do in order to come to a clear understanding of the real situation. That is so cool. Thank you. Well, I mean, that is the, that's really the format of the book is that every chapter, and there's a lot of chapters, it's a pretty thick book. Look at the size of my face compared to the thickness of that book. It's a pretty thick book. So there's plenty in there, but we've got, oh gosh, like 36, 37 chapters or so. Each one with a scenario, split into three parts. First part of it is about dating. Second part of it is about friends and family. Third part of it is about your work world. I think really all the important relationships in your life are around, you know, the, the, the love life that you may have, the family life and friends life that you may have. And also the work life that you may have. I don't actually think we probably have any relationships much outside of that. Yeah. So we've tried to tackle all of that in about 37 chapters, a great story in each one. And then we go through that scan system to say, let's look at the story and unravel it and see how we get closer to the truth. Now, I have to say it is full though of all the great ideas that you want to know about body language. Oh, and lots of things, lots of misbusters as well. So my guess is you've come across a lot of things in body language that everybody believes to be true, but you know, isn't. Yeah, exactly. Like, like, for example, like, for example, this one. Yeah, they're holding the arms. There are so many other things it could be and it could be what everyone thinks it is, or it could be like a dozen different other things. But people just take that as what they assume it is. How about this one? Oh, the nose touch? Okay, I get a couple things with that one. Because nose touching is sometimes a cue that someone could be lying. But some people take that to mean it is lie deception every time they see it, which just doesn't sound like our nose is itch. Sometimes it just happens. Right. And there's no cue. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I get really bad allergies, like what we call hay fever. Yeah. So during certain months, I spend a lot of time doing this. And we're not supposed to do this on camera, but it happens. It just happens. Right, but this one as well, where people touch their ears as well, which is meant to be. Or maybe they're looking up into the left instead of up into the right. That one, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. So there's some crazy stuff out there. And it's not that any of this is untrue. Yes, no, that can be something to do with deception, but never always and potentially very little of the time. Especially in certain seasons with human beings, very little of the time. The key is how would you get closer to the truth of what it is? You need to use this scam system, spend the judgment, look at the context, ask for more data, and get more data from around. As long as it takes till you get to the new judgment. I'd like to say there's no one cue that all liars do all the time. But most people, most of our audience even, when you're looking for a sign that someone is lying, you're looking for a giant red flag. And there's no giant red flag. There are just little, little tiny flags that pop up. And you have to look for several of them in the area to be like, oh, there's a dead body buried there. So don't just take it at face judgment, viewers. You've got to dig in and look for the context, like Mark says. Look for new answers. Get more information before you really come to a conclusion. Now, viewers- I think you're absolutely right. What tends to happen is we pick up on one idea, one thing, and we go, look what I saw. So, you know, self-soothing gesture, for example. We've got a self-soothing gesture or a barrier gesture, a blocking gesture. And we go, oh, you see, I saw it. I saw it. And we don't take in all the other things that were part of it. We maybe get adapters, which is when we start altering the world around us. And that's often a show of stress, but we don't know what it's stressed to. But sometimes the world does need altering. So the world that doesn't need, you know, didn't need altering. You know, so I get an adapter and then a self-soothinger and then a blocking gesture. But maybe the adapter needed to happen. Maybe my collar is tight, you know? You know, maybe, you know, I'm stressed about something else, not the dialogue that's happening. So that's where the scan technique helps you go through a very set process of checking in and getting closer to the truth. This is brilliant, Mark. And viewers, we are going to take a very, very brief short break and we will be back in just a minute with more information about how you can detect deception and make sure what you're seeing is what's really happening. See you in a minute. Planning all week for the day of the big game. Watching at home just doesn't feel the same. 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I'm your host, Arby Kelly, and I'm here with special guest, Mark Bowden, who is an expert in body language communication and what we're talking about today, deception detection. So while we were over the break, I was asking Mark about what to do when you've seen a couple of those red flags and you're pretty sure someone is lying to you. So Mark, in your advice, what would you tell the viewers to do next? Yeah, so if you see what we might call a cluster of signals, to the extent that you're now going, hang on, there was a lot of data around there that makes it feel significant enough for me to want to now go back over the story and see whether the same behaviors happen again, yeah? Or see whether the story starts to change. To see whether people disassociate themselves from the story, so they're now not a main player in it. The order of the story starts to move about in some kind of way. You see some of the same maybe self soothing gestures or blocking gestures or adapters during that. You may see them put up barriers or move away from you as you interview or interrogate them for want of a better word, around this story. And notice if the story changes, not only in its structure potentially, but the detail. And then you might want to go, you know, I'm kind of interested in what you're saying because the first time I asked you, you said X and then I asked you again and it changed to Y and I'm just curious, right? Which one was it? And then again, you want to see where they go with that. Now, from the work that I've done with law enforcement, people investigating, people working, doing interviews with suspects or persons of interest, what we talk about is we're looking for the moment often when the body falls to bits, when now as they're telling you the story, they can no longer construct the world of the story anymore in a way that really holds together. It's become too much stress and they can't control their body anymore. And now the body really starts to open up and give you much bigger signals around how they're feeling, thinking and tending inside. So now you get a bigger surge of signals because there's less control. We were saying, you'll have heard this, are we? Where people say, well, the body never lies. Yeah, it does, of course it lies. It's brilliant at lying, fantastic at lying, fantastic at lying until it falls to bits. And then it's not good at lying. So you've got to get the person into a place where by they're not so much in control of the situation. They're not so ordered in their mind. And now there's gonna be a bigger flood of information around deceit. I hope that makes sense to you, Arvina. And my guess is you've seen a lot of this in the work that you've been doing in the study that you're doing about this. I'd be interested to see what ideas you have as well and what you've seen. I think you're exactly right in that people are able to control their body language and put off a certain image. For example, people think I'm a lot older than I am because of the body language I put out there that makes me seem more credible, more competent, more trustworthy. That is something even predators on the street, you hear things about Ted Bundy that, oh, he was so charming. That's because people are able to control their body language and change the way people see them. Sometimes people can be very skilled at that. On the other hand, there are people who really have no idea what messages they're sending. Don't have the skills to correct that, which is where I as a trainer come in to help them figure that out. But I think it's absolutely true that in a deceptive situation or something where we're trying to do what's best for our own interests, we are very particular to make sure we're sending the right signals. And I think it's exactly as you say, Mark, that the breakthrough in any interview or interrogation comes when you've gotten the person to the point where they stop trying to hide it and they're so not kind of amped up. They're up to the point where they are so busy thinking about how am I gonna get out of this? How am I gonna make it work? That their body language is wide open and telling you everything you need to know. Right, absolutely, absolutely. And I think you're right in the, if we move away from this area of deception and law enforcement and interview and people of interest within some very serious crimes in many cases, but we just get back into the area of work and relationships and try to get on and trying to get what we want from life. You know, all of us can do better if we study how to control our body language and get across an image that might well give us an advantage. I don't think any of us have any problem with picking up a hair product from the shelf and using it in order to make that part of us look better. Nobody has a problem with going to a store and buying good clothes that they're gonna feel really confident in. But sometimes we seem to have a problem with saying, well, we're gonna put on behavior and body language to give us an advantage. People go, well, hang on, that's not authentic. The way my hair hangs together is not authentic. It has a product in it, which keeps it in place. I didn't get born with clothes made by, you know, very expensive Italian tailor called Etro. I went and purchased this because it looks really good on me and makes me feel confident and other people, I think, are confident about me. You know, I look at how great you look at me and you make a really good concerted effort to be the best you can at all times. I doubt you have a problem with looking your best. And so therefore, you know, my appreciation is you don't have a problem with training other people in the body language techniques of presenting yourself at their best. What are your views on that? Well, something that comes to mind as you talk about looking your best is that viewers, if you were to look at my face, you would think I was wearing lipstick and maybe eye makeup. But you have no idea how much makeup I actually put on in order to look this good on camera. Like my cheekbones are not naturally this defined. My cheeks, like contouring, no, this is all fake. Like every single thing on my face has a product on it to present and look good on camera. And so a lot of people, I think you're right, Mark, a lot of people think it is being inauthentic or disingenuous, but that is what people do. Even the Egyptians were using eyeliner. Even the Egyptians had specific ideas about how a person should look, a person should act. And so for people to say that acting a certain way or looking a certain way or changing anything about themselves is inauthentic or disingenuous. Well, people were born naked. I was born bald, you know, but we change and we grow and we get better at things. And I think it's necessary that we do. That's very true. So for me, I'm excited by the truth of the lies of all of that. You know, I want to let you into a secret about this environment here. My guess is when you look at me on camera is you kind of think it must be a really bright day out there wherever Mark is. Let me just show you that, no, it isn't. It's done with lights, but I can turn those out. And there's another one over here, which I can turn out as well. Are we all, hang on, there we go. Well, let me turn it off. Oh, it won't turn off, hang on. There we go, there we go. Turn that one off. Well, it's a different world now. It's not a bright world in here. It's kind of a bit of a dark and dingy world here now. I don't feel as excited about the day here the lights going down. It's 7.30 in the evening for me right now. So, you know, I've had a long day already and I could come to you with that feeling of having a long day and the shadows falling around me. Or I can put on the lights around here and give you that sense of, you know, it's a bright sunny day where I am. We have no problem about that. So why should we ever have a problem about putting on behaviors as well? To get the best for us and to get the best for the people around us. The way I talk about it, when I'm working with banks or insurance agents or anything like that, as I say, if you're being honest in your body language, then when you come into work with a bad day or a bad attitude, you lose customers. So body language and your outer appearance, you need to be able to use it in order to show up and give your very best on the days when you feel like you have nothing left to give. And that's the power of body language. Right, for sure. I totally agree with that. I mean, look, here's the thing. Here's what I'm gonna do for you. Is, you know, as you probably know, I'm ranked as one of the top body language experts in the world. I think a couple of years running, I was voted number one body language professional in the world. So really, I should be able to come on your show and do anything I like because I'm the best and people should be able to, so I'll just be the authentic me and just hang out here. Our viewers are probably freaking out now, like something is wrong. I can't feel it, but something is different. Right, right, exactly. But I should be able to do this because build it and they should come. I turned the camera away from how untidy this area is over here. So look, that shouldn't matter, should it? It's really bad lighting, but that shouldn't matter, should it? I'm gonna cross my arms right now, but that shouldn't matter, should it? Because I'm... Maybe smirk it in the air. Right, I don't know. You know, I have to, you know, market myself, essentially even though, you know, I'm one of the best around, I've still gotta market myself and other people need to do the same. Now, Mark, I've so much enjoyed having you on this show and I hope I can convince you to come back to this show again because I want you back. I'm sure the viewers will want you back. But for now, viewers, we are going to say goodbye and I will see you next Tuesday at 1 p.m. on Out of the Comfort Zone. See you then.