00:00 Welcome to another episode of the We Have a Meeting podcast. So today we delve into the mind of an exceptional individual who is shaping the landscape of human behavior and understanding. They are acknowledged by the United States Department of State, placing her in the top 1 % in her field. Today we have a scientist and practitioner whose work not only stands out but also paves the way for a deeper understanding of the complexities that govern human behavior.

00:28 Our guest today is Dr. Abbey Morono. Abbey, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for such a wonderful introduction. No worries. I've been working on it all morning. So thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join two blokes from Blackpool. We start our podcast the same way every time, Abbey. Who are you and what problem do you solve? So I am a scientist in the private sector.

00:57 I guess is probably the easiest way to describe me. I am an academic at heart. I always will be. I did my PhD in psychology and behavioral analysis. But like I said, the problem I solve is taking the science and making it applicable to practitioners. So how do we get from knowledge to skill? How do we solve the problem once we understand what the problem is? Okay. And so it sounds like this is a

01:25 deep passion of yours. How did you end up where you are? Because I can imagine it's been quite a journey and you've got some brilliant accolades to your name. It's been an interesting journey. I started publishing in the field of psychology and non verbals when I was 19. So when I went to university to do psychology, I, I was just so consumed by the question of why.

01:55 You know, there's things that we don't understand about people, but the answer is there because everything has an answer. We just haven't solved the answer yet. So when I started university, I was just, um, engulfed in body language and I thought it was so interesting how you can identify people's intentions based on nonverbal cues. So I started researching when I was 19, I published my first paper and from that moment of publication, I was just hooked.

02:24 because you realize the answer didn't exist and now it exists. So I decided to dedicate my life to answering as many questions as I could within psychology. And then I did my PhD in psychology and behavioral analysis with Crest, so Center for Research and Evidence and Security Threats. So most of my work was tailored towards the security aspect of psychology, the forensic field, understanding I did publications in serial killers.

02:53 in counter-terrorism, I even did some in understanding cannibals, all sorts of crazy stuff. But I always ended up coming back to non-verbals. So I became a lecturer in psychology and I focused on non-verbals and forensic psych. And then I kind of got, I would say scouted by the company in the US, social engineer.

03:19 because I had worked with Joan Navarro a lot who is an expert in nonverbal communication and ex-FBI agent. And I had a lot of ties to ex-FBI and we'd done a bit of work with the behavior analysis unit. And Chris Hadnanky who runs the company needed someone that specialized in informationalist station. And my PhD was using nonverbals to influence informationalist station in the form of cooperation. So it was just a perfect fit. I...

03:48 When I started working in the private sector, I realized that academics and industry professionals don't communicate very well. There's a big divide and the practitioners are desperate for the science, but it's not always accessible to them. So they tend to use pseudoscientific notions. They tend to get information from blogs or YouTube videos of people that have

04:16 no expertise in the subject, just kind of talking about it. So I realized there's a huge gap here. And since then, my motivation has just been to make the science accessible and have been really trying to push that as much as possible. And it's been extremely rewarding. Like you said, know, psychology is a passion of mine. So we're plastic intellectuals. We read the book, we're

04:44 Autodidactic, we think we know what we're talking about. So if we start off and imagine we know nothing, what is non-verbal communication? Okay, so simply put, non-verbal communication is just everything that communicates is not a word. So most people tend to think of body language, which is a form of non-verbals or facial expressions, again, form of non-verbals, but it goes much further than that.

05:11 So you've got things like haptics, which is touching behavior. You've got proxemics, which is use of space, things like clothing, dress. And then you've also got para-language. So the non-verbals of the voice. So if I say, you know, thanks for a great podcast, thanks for a great podcast, I say the same thing, but the way that I say it communicates something. So non-verbals is really everything.

05:40 Like in the virtual environment, my non-verbals can also count as what's in my background. That would be a form of non-verbal communication. OK, so we typically have listeners who are in business settings, right? So they've got to go into a boardroom and they've got to make snap judgment on how do I behave in this room? So if you're walking into a boardroom and you're maybe having a

06:07 high stakes negotiation with someone or sales conversation or something like that. What are the things that you should be looking for to feed into how you're going to behave in that meeting? Okay, so in terms of what to look for in nonverbals, we tend to pick up on other people's nonverbals automatically. So when you go into that interaction and say, I'm going to look for this.

06:33 Usually your nervous system is responding to things that you don't realize that it's responding to. So when it comes to being a business professional, the way that I teach it is you need to improve your non-verbals and then understand how to recognize other people's distress. Because if you can recognize distress and discomfort as well as comfort and positive intentions in the other person, it can guide the interactions. But things like trustworthiness, competence, confidence, we don't...

07:03 necessarily need to overtly check for that and other people because we pick up on it. Our nervous system is picking up on that automatically. So for example, we judge other people's trustworthiness within less than a second. Research has shown within 33 milliseconds, we make a judgment of trustworthiness, which make judgments of cooperation or willingness to cooperate of

07:28 competence all unconsciously, and then we try and justify it by pulling information. So as the business professional, what you need to know is how to appear trustworthy, how to appear confident, because that's going to be your best bet in having a high stakes, successful negotiation, as well as understand what cues are persuading your judgment that don't necessarily indicate trustworthiness. So

07:58 I said appear, not be. So we make perceptions of trustworthiness and competence based on non-verbals, but they're not necessarily accurate. So in terms of how to appear trustworthy, it's so simple to begin with, simply a smile. It really is that simple. So when we see a smile, oxytocin is released in the brain and oxytocin will suppress the flight instinct.

08:28 So it reduces anxiety and increases willingness to cooperate. Being emotionally expressive shows things like empathy, shows likability, shows positive intention. Those are important to know as a business professional. So when it comes to the non-verbals of what to express it, it's almost common knowledge, but we don't always understand the reason behind why. So we don't put as much weight to it.

08:57 And then when it comes to observing for others, I would say, try not to put too much weight on the non-verbals of others. You want to make sure that they're non-verbally competent, but those non-verbals aren't necessarily reflective of their actual traits. So once we know that we're unconsciously persuaded by them, we can make sure that we rely on the information that they're sending instead. that does that kind of fall into

09:25 the halo effect where you could see somebody smile and, oh, I trust them. I'd give my life, I'd trust my life with them and then they could actually be a psychopath.

09:37 Yes, so it's a similar comparison. It's not necessarily the same psychological mechanism, but yes, when we see someone that has trustworthy nonverbals, what happens when we perceive someone as trustworthy is it changes all other judgments. So it changes the valence of other social judgments. So the positivity versus negativity. If we see someone and their trust in their nonverbal behaviors,

10:07 are perceived as trustworthy. Now we perceive them as more likeable, as more confident, as more close to us, as more familiar. So it affects the balance. And if their non-verbals are appearing untrustworthy, for example, say they show lots of negative emotional expressivity, so lots of furrowed brows, frowning, you know, when you want them to smile, they're not smiling, that kind of thing.

10:35 What it does is it moves the dial the other way. So it changes the balance, but in a negative direction. So we perceive them as less close to us. It reduces the amount of rapport. We perceive them as less competent. So those judgments, that trustworthy judgment, it does really have an impact because how we perceive someone then affects how we interact with them. You know, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

11:03 If we think someone is going to be a certain way, we will interact with them as if they are, and then we can create that behavior because that's how we've interacted with them. So it's so interesting. So I guess if we keep on that path and we think about and we flip it and we think of untrustworthy liars, what one of the phrases that gets thrown thrown around in sales all the time is buyers are liars. Okay, so in our world, we could be sat there.

11:31 having a conversation with someone and say, this is the product, this is the price. They say, it's amazing. Yeah, we'll definitely buy it. And then they might disappear into the aura and we never hear from them again. So if we're looking for like cues and patterns of somebody that might be kind of deceptive or they're untrustworthy, what should we be looking for, Abhi?

11:58 So in terms of the question, I wouldn't say untrustworthy would be the right phrase because untrustworthiness is negative intent. So with trustworthiness, it's positive intent. If someone doesn't want to buy something, it's not necessarily negative intent, it would be quite neutral intent. So you would edge towards deceptive behavior, but with deceptive behavior,

12:27 Deception is very complex. It's not expressed non-verbally. The emotions tied to deception are. So you would want to look for things like distress cues and stress cues because deception is a why. So if someone is being deceptive, if you look at the psychology of it, it's a reason. So it's the why behind their behavior, not the outward expression of emotion.

12:57 So if someone is showing, say, stress cues, it could be because you've asked a question and they're lying, or it could be because you've asked a question and maybe they had an argument before interacting with you. But you would see the same negative emotion cues. You just don't know the why. So I always say don't look for deception because deception isn't worn on the body. The emotions attached to it are. If you're looking for distress and...

13:25 Also, I would say look for intention cues to leave, because if they're saying they're gonna buy something but they're not, what they want to do is get you to shut up so they can leave the interaction. So the two things you wanna look for are distress and stress cues and intent to leave. Now the easiest one to look for is in the feet. And I love this, because people are like, why would you look at the feet for intention? That's counterproductive. But that's exactly why.

13:53 Because if you are trying to manage your perception and appear one way, you're going to be focused on, okay, what's my face doing? What are my hands doing? What's my posture doing? Guarantee almost nobody is stood there going, I really hope my feet don't give me away. That's why they tend to give you away. So when someone wants to leave an interaction, again, very simply, they're going to move their feet to where they want and towards where they want to go, likely towards the door.

14:23 So if you're interacting with someone and their lower body or their feet start pointing towards the door, what that says is you are now losing them. And you can do two things. Either one, you can let them go. Obviously they wanna leave, you can let them go. Or you can now say, my interaction approach has to change because I'm losing them. So that can be your cue. Okay, I need to do something now to hook them back into this interaction.

14:55 And I suppose where my mind's going is how nuanced is this? So like the things that might give me and Jack away or might make someone warm up to us for our nonverbal cues we've grown up together. But let's say there was someone from a completely different background, completely different part of the world. Would they have a completely different set of cues? That is a fantastic question. That is such a good question because it's the gap between culturally and communicative

15:25 non-verbals versus universal non-verbals. Now I tend to just teach the universal non-verbals because it's more applicable. And I tend to start with the biological foundation. So what I've just said about the foot is universal. And the reason is because our limbic system is very, very old. So we have evolved millions of years and our limbic system is still

15:55 thinking that it's back in the olden days. So it's not yet equipped to deal with modern interaction. So it still has the same effects as back then. It's still interacting with the basic fight, flight or freeze response. We know that every human being on this planet has an innate fight, flight or freeze response because it's how we have survived.

16:21 So what happens when we are in a situation that would trigger that fight, flight or freeze response, like when we want to leave an interaction or we feel threatened or we don't feel good, our nervous system will respond as if we are in danger. But we're not necessarily in danger, like I said, it's because those parts of our brain are not yet equipped to deal with modern society. So things that aren't threatening to our life might respond in the nervous system as if they are. So when we want to leave,

16:51 and the flight response is active, our nervous system response has behavioral manifestations that will show in our non-verbal cues. So if I said to you, your nervous system wants you to leave this interaction, get up, but move your upper body first. Run as quickly as you can, because that's what your body wants you to do, but do it without moving your feet first. You're gonna look really silly, it's gonna be really difficult because it's just not natural.

17:19 So your nervous system naturally wants to mobilize your feet first because it's part of that nervous system response. It is the same universally. Your feet, regardless of the culture, the feet will give away the flight response. And you can also look at this in the blood flow. So when we are in flight, for example, like I said, an interaction that you really want to leave, you know, it's not an aggressive response like a fight response.

17:49 your blood flow will go to your feet. That's why when people are scared, they go white as a ghost, because the blood flow is going to the lower body and leaving the face. When people are in fight mode, for example, someone is being aggressive, you see the blood flow to the chest. So that's why they pump up their chest and pump up their arms. And again, this is universal. So when we talk about the lower body being a good indication of intent to leave,

18:17 It's not a culturally dependent display.

18:23 This is so interesting, by the way, I'm really loving this. So another, I suppose, just to take it in a slightly different direction. Am I born with a set of cues that then just become part of me as I grow up, or do I pick them up from the environment and my upbringing and that sort of thing? I'm loving these questions.

18:49 So what I've just talked about those nonverbal expressions from nervous system activation, you don't have to think about those. You don't think I need to leave this interaction. So I want to tilt my feet this way. It just happens unconsciously. Same with when someone smiles, we don't think I should now release oxytocin in my brain. It just happens and it affects our judgment. So we are born with them. We are born and we know as well because newborns will look at

19:19 individuals who show more confident body language than individuals who will show less confident body language. They will look longer. So newborns and young infants already show an innate preference for particular non-verbals. But then there are also behaviors that are a communication function. So these behaviors don't necessarily have a communication function, such as I'm not trying to say to you, look over there.

19:48 You know, they communicate confidence, but it's not necessarily intentional. We perceive that. Whereas things like if I'm nodding my head or shaking my head, that is a different kind of communication function. I'm trying to communicate a word to you without using the word. And these cues tend to be culturally dependent. So if I nod my head and shake my head in Western culture, we know what that means. In other cultures, it means the reverse.

20:18 Um, and there was a great story. Um, Chris had Nagy was telling me, said he was traveling and I can't remember where he was. Um, but he was working with someone and he said to him, um, are you getting hungry at all? We'll, go grab something to eat. And he, shook his head. So Chris was like, okay. And then an hour later, he did the same. He's like, you know, do you want to stop working at any point? Are you hungry? Shook his head. So it went on for hours and he said, look, I'm starving.

20:45 He said, I have been starving for hours. I've been telling you. but you were shaking your head. He was like, that means yes. And it was just this really silly misunderstanding of the nonverbals, but it really highlights that point of the things that we communicate that we don't really think about here. We all know what waving of the hand means or shaking or nodding the head, but those are culturally dependent.

21:11 And if you don't do the research on cultural displays, if you're in a business meeting, particularly like you said, a high stakes business meeting, those little cues can lead to really unfortunate misunderstandings. Like I think it was Bill Clinton that held up what he thought was the peace sign when he went to Australia. put, I think my internet just cut out.

21:42 Am I back?

21:45 You're back. Where did I cut out? You cut out Bill Clinton. Okay, perfect. So for example, Bill Clinton went to Australia, I think, and he held up what he believed to be was the peace sign, which is these two fingers but reversed. In America, that means peace. In the UK and Australia, it's swearing. It basically means F you.

22:14 And he thought he was, you know, it was, think, some peace rally and he thought he was being involved and actually he was being very offensive. So a misunderstanding of those simple communicative nonverbals led to a really unfortunate and embarrassing situation for him. Wow. So what I'm picking up, I might be totally wrong here. Obviously correct me if I am. The universal nonverbals, you already know them, you're just not aware.

22:43 of them in terms of they're in your subconscious. once you know them, you know them, but your body and mind and everything already already understand them on some level anyway. Yeah, that's a really nice way to put it. So we have an innate ability to react to them, but it doesn't mean that we are aware of them. And that's one of the problems with them as a sender. When you understand this, you can use it to your advantage, like

23:12 When someone mimics us, if the interaction is positive, we act more cooperative towards them, increases feelings of like, closeness, trustworthiness. And when we know that we can use that to our advantage as a sender, when we know it as an observer, we can be more aware of how it's affecting us. So if we are in a negotiation and the other person is using non-verbals to their advantage and you don't have a good non-verbal awareness,

23:42 you're going to be persuaded and influenced by them without realizing why. You might think, no, this interaction was really, really great. I feel a lot of rapport. He said some really great things. He's really trustworthy. But if you don't have a good understanding of non-verbals, it's entirely possible that what he said wasn't necessarily trustworthy and wasn't necessarily valid for the kind of cooperation you're giving.

24:10 but you were persuaded non-verbally and then you tried to justify that because you don't have an awareness. And when we make a judgment about something, we like to believe that we're rational. We all like to believe that we're rational, but we're not. And we know that the brain takes shortcuts because it needs to. So we try and justify those decisions. And if you have made it non-verbally, you're like, no, I wouldn't have.

24:35 judge them trustworthy because he smiled at me or judge them trustworthy because his face or his expressions. It was because of this that he said and this that he said. And then you can convince yourself to be more cooperative. Whereas if you took a step back and assessed the information being given, you might actually make a very different assumption. I'm absolutely loving this.

24:59 conversation I've been made. This is the kind of stuff me and Zach geek out on when I bring him on a Monday morning. So it's right up our street. And so if somebody is trying to manipulate and that they're let's say somebody's listening to you, they're reading your books and they're listening to all the things you say, but they're going to use it for evil. What what should somebody be on the lookout for? What what should people be aware of going into these situations and interactions?

25:30 I would say, you know, manipulation and influence is a very fine line and people really like to say, no, no, no, this is influence, is manipulation, completely different. But if we're honest with ourselves, there's not a huge amount of difference. All the difference is the intention. So if you have a malintent, so your intention is to hurt them or to cause them psychological distress, or you use an approach that would create psychological distress.

26:00 then that is manipulation because you have malintent. If you are using it to create cooperation or trust, then that is influence. But again, it's very subjective because a buyer might say, yeah, well, they made themself appear more trustworthy to get me to buy something. I think that's manipulation. Whereas the sender might say, no, no, just influence. So it's really a subjective approach. But if you go in without malintent, you have no intent to cause harm.

26:29 It's really up to you to draw that line. I really advocate a strong ethical policy of never intend to create psychological harm, distress or malintent whatsoever. And I employ everybody else to do the same, but it's difficult. can't control the way people use them in terms of identifying which is is which. It's very difficult. What I would say though is look for inconsistencies.

26:59 Because inconsistencies from the information from the nonverbals. So say they appear very confident, appear very competent, appear very trustworthy. That's great. But what is the information saying? And you can't judge that on a single interaction particularly well. So they might be saying, yeah, this is great, great information, but the information itself doesn't reliably stack up. That is obviously an indication that it's untrustworthy.

27:29 But if you are meeting someone and their behavior is inconsistent over interactions, that would say to me that it is a perception managed, that it's a perception managed interaction, that they're not really that trustworthy. And they don't really like me as much as it appears. And I don't really want to cooperate with them as much because it's very easy to perception manage yourself in the short term. It's very difficult in the long term.

27:58 to stick that way. And when you interact with someone multiple times and their behavior is consistent, it's more likely to be authentic. If it is inconsistent, then it's less likely to be authentic. And you can also look for inconsistencies between the verbals and the nonverbals. And so if they say one thing, but then nonverbals say something slightly different, a typical example is they say, oh, I know exactly.

28:26 but they shrug their shoulders at the same time. Or they say, oh, no problem at all. But they kind of pull their lip to the side as if like, oh, there is a problem. Those kinds of inconsistency could say, well, the information being given isn't matching the way that it's being given. So something here isn't right. So inconsistencies would be the best one, I would say, to identify malintent.

28:53 And of course, anything that seems too good to be true, they seem way... you seem to like them way too much. They seem really trustworthy. All that information seems perfect. If you think that there is something that just doesn't sit completely right, something doesn't feel completely right, always check. You know, trust but verify everything because we are persuaded by non-verbals if they're giving information and you really like the person.

29:23 Just verify the information. Again, sounds really simple, but we overlook the simple stuff because we think that we know it, we think that we've got it, but that's typically where we slip up. I love it. And when you talking earlier about like making it a snap assumption in like 0.3 seconds, that's your gut instinct that we talk about, like kicking in and taking control. you...

29:50 you sometimes see them on social media and I don't know if it's a bit click baited, but you do sometimes see like psychological hacks to understand a human being or something that you can do to test somebody. So if you're in this situation, like the inconsistency, is that all click bait and myth or is there anything that you've come across in your time and doing what you do and where you thought I've got to take this and I'm going to keep this and it's like your favorite party trick?

30:19 So these like psychology hacks and the quotes that say psychology says, and it gives a really overt statement, typically they're just myths because human behavior is very complicated. Non-verbals is very complicated. There are a number of things that could affect my behavior. So if you see a post that says psychology says, if you mimic someone, you're going to create cooperation.

30:48 That's not necessarily true. When I said earlier, I said if the interaction is positive. So there's a number of things that can affect mimicry. If the interaction is negative or it's competitive and you mimic, it reduces closeness and reduces willingness to cooperate because everything is situationally based. Everything happens in context. Human behavior does not happen in a vacuum.

31:15 And when you see these very, you know, a hundred percent of the time this works or do this and it will always do this, we don't work that way. It doesn't take into consideration things like individual differences. And even that environment we talk about, you know, trustworthy cues and the effects of the fight, flight or freeze response. There are a number of things that could affect that. If you are familiar with that person,

31:41 then your nervous system's not going to be as on edge because we are more on edge with strangers. And it gets very complicated to teach these things and doing it within a day's training is not enough. So doing it within a very, very short post isn't enough. And I think these posts are really helpful, but when they're not too overt, when they don't say this always means this, when they clarify that

32:11 it increases the likelihood of. That kind of language is a lot more honest. And when I see things like if you have a power pose or you have a more open posture, it increases the likelihood that you will feel confident. That is true. It doesn't necessarily mean 100 % of the time you're going to feel more confident because what about the context?

32:39 What if you are in a situation you've never been in before? If I'm, I have my TED Talk soon, if I go, okay, I'll just stand really confidently before, now I'm completely confident. It's not gonna work the same as if I'm going to a business meeting and at the kind of meeting I've done 100 times and I stand more confidently. It's probably gonna make me feel a lot more confident than in that other interaction that creates a lot more anxiety. So behavior is.

33:07 very nuanced and it is very contextually based. So it's about the language that you use when you talk about it. So you don't accidentally promote misinformation. So I suppose basically I'm going to really simplify something now. So I apologize in advance in a clever person. This is going to be horrible for you. But if I'm to imagine there's two people that live in my head, right, as an emotional ancestral human being built on millions of years worth of

33:37 fear and survival, and then I've got a more rational, modern human being, who's in charge? So first, there's no such thing as a stupid question. And these questions have been great. I love the simple questions because if you don't know something, asking for clarification is the only way to get the answer. And the amount of times I still ask those silly questions to my colleagues just to double check things.

34:06 But the emotional brain, so the prehistoric brain, the pre kind of human as we know them today now, always in charge. It will always be the first response because the way that the brain works is when signals come in, they go through the limbic system first. So the amygdala will react first and then the prefrontal cortex comes in.

34:34 So this is why the best technique to stopping yourself from doing something irrational is to breathe, to take a step back. And that count to 10 is so effective because it takes a few seconds for the signal to reach the prefrontal cortex. So if you are really angry and you write an email to your boss or a colleague, it's going to be really mean. When you leave and come back to it, you're like, Oh God, I can't believe I wrote that. Let me delete that and change it.

35:03 If you send that as soon as you feel it, you'll think, yeah, this is a great decision. When you now step away and breathe, your amygdala has been active, but now the prefrontal cortex can come into play. And the prefrontal cortex is where critical thinking happens, because we didn't need critical thinking so much. We just needed to know, how am I gonna survive? How am I gonna eat? Who am I gonna mate with? Who am I gonna cooperate with?

35:30 very basic animalistic instincts, those are things we needed to know. We didn't need critical thinking like we do now. So critical thinking always comes last and you have to allow yourself the time. That's why we act so instinctually. That's why non-verbals has such a big effect on us because it is that limbic system. It's, know, some people call it the monkey brain, whatever you want to call it, just recognizing that the evolved

36:00 or the earlier evolved parts of our brain will respond first. Because if you threaten someone's survival, nothing else matters. Nothing else in that interaction will matter because the survival and the threat instinct has been triggered. Because that's how we have evolved to focus on. We've evolved to focus on things like cooperation, survival first before anything.

36:28 So when you understand that, can realize, okay, my emotions are gonna be the things that are gonna drive my behavior first. My emotions towards someone, my emotions towards a situation. If I understand that and I give myself a second to be rational about it, I'm gonna make better decisions. So let's say you're on the receiving end of that and you think, I've done something.

36:53 here and I can feel the temperature rise in a bit. feel like I've frustrated someone, it's leaning towards anger. Are there tools that we can start employing to get someone to come back down and calm down a bit? Yeah. So again, because we mimic other people, when other people start showing conflict or start showing anger, they will do things like their voice will increase and the tone of their voice will

37:22 tend to decrease, they will get louder, they will get closer to you, they will speak quicker, they will take less breaths. We naturally start to mimic. So when someone else is showing anger, we try and, you know, they're speaking loud, so we speak loud too to get our words in. They can't hear us, they're speaking loud, we need to speak loud. They're speaking quick, we need to speak quick. What that does increases the conflict. You have to fight the urge to try and be heard the same, so they're speaking loud.

37:52 If you speak with the same tone and actually slow down the way you're speaking, you know, they're going to speed up. They're getting really angry. They get fired up. It's really difficult when you are being aggressive and someone is being very unaggressive in return to then stay at that aggression level, because now you feel that there is this divide. It's much easier to increase aggression when someone else is increasing aggression also.

38:22 So the first thing is to recognize the non-verbals of the voice can either decrease or increase conflict. So with conflict resolution, it's just firstly fighting the urge to match their non-verbals, which is something we naturally do. And then logical, obviously, you know, a lot of it has to do with verbals. When someone gets aggressive, now you really need to pay focus on the verbals.

38:49 because non-verbals are best to avoid conflict. When you start to see someone get a little bit frustrated, you start to see distress. Now you notice that on non-verbals and if they need a little bit of space, you step away. So people like a bit more space when they feel distressed. You see that on them, you step back. So you can avoid the conflict before it occurs. Or a lot of the time we are being

39:19 too bold. So people try and show confidence by being really wide with their behaviors. And what that does is it increases our perception of dominance. And dominance can lead to conflict when we are trying to dominate a conversation because we're trying to show power. It can make the other person feel negative towards us. And confidence is just about being comfortable in your space. It's not about taking over the space. When we are aware of that, again, we can

39:49 Avoid trying to take over the space. We can avoid trying to be too dominant We can use our nonverbals and then the conflict can be reduced before it occurs once someone is very angry It's difficult to resolve that with the nonverbals. That's where you now need to okay How am I going to psychologically diffuse this situation? What do they need to hear? What is the problem? So that situation I place

40:17 more emphasis on the verbals and the non verbals and the non verbals prior to conflict. Hmm. So it's a bit, it's one of those of like, looking upstream, what could I have done to avoid the situation? What can I implement and things like that? Yeah. Yeah. So as soon as you start seeing distress cues, like people will increase their self touch when they're distressed. And the reason is because I said the nervous system is overactive.

40:46 What happens when we self-touch is it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which will calm down the automatic nervous system. And when people self-touch, you also see the brain waves associated with relaxation. So it helps calm the body. So the more kind of self-touching you see, the more distress or anxiety there likely is. And when you see the pressure being applied, that when people are angry, you often see them start to kind of grab

41:17 at their body, like they will have their fingers and instead of just rubbing, they really start grabbing or you might see them close their fist and the more pressure, the more distress. When you see that self-touch increase, you have to think, I need to change my communication strategy. What I'm doing is creating distress and it's escalating. Something has to now change. And you also have to look at your behaviors because again, we mimic and if we are making someone else feel uncomfortable,

41:46 comfortable by the way we're interacting with them, we need to now remove ourselves. need to loosen our behaviors. We need to appear less dominant, more confident. And then we can look at their behaviors. Do we see those distress cues start to decrease in intensity? And when you start to see them decrease, that's a sign, okay, this is now where I need to be heading in terms of communication. So I'd say it's a warning sign, the distress cues.

42:18 I've been very self-conscious throughout this conversation, Abi, to make sure I don't move my hands in the wrong way, because I know that you're probably reading this from the beginning of the conversation. You've got a book coming out in July, I believe, called Work in Progress. Talk me through it. What is Work in Progress? So it's unexpected. I work a lot with federal agencies, and when I posted that I was publishing a book,

42:47 We got lots of comments like, can't wait to use this for our training because people were thinking it was informationalistation and non-verbals. It's completely unrelated. I do have a second book out coming out potentially December this year or early next year, which will be about informationalistation and everything we've talked about now. And it's called The Upper Hand, but Work in Progress is actually a self-help book. It's the science of empowerment.

43:16 And one of the reasons that I did it was I could, I could feel myself holding my career back because I had had shame from previous things I had done in my past. And I was saying no to opportunities that I really wanted because I was afraid of people finding out about things I had done. And I just, I felt like a fraud.

43:43 and where I was and the more people I spoke to the more I realized everybody feels this. You know, everybody feels shame. Everybody feels like an imposter at some point in their lives and when we look for help the science isn't there like these self-help books that tell you how to be bulletproof and how to not care about what people think about you and care about other people's judgments. Well-meaning absolutely but completely scientifically untrue.

44:13 That's not how human beings work. We are wired to be affected by other people's judgments. We are wired to want to cooperate. We are wired to want to belong. We will never ever get to the point where we don't care about other people's judgments. If we do, what we have reached is psychopathy because that's the only way that we can stop caring about what people think about us. Now it's about resilience. It's about understanding where to put your efforts, about empowerment.

44:41 So I wrote the book to communicate the science of self-help because I saw it when I started working, like I said, with federal agencies and ex-FBI and people that you think are, you know, at the top, very, very strong. They don't have access to it. They're told they have to be very strong and...

45:07 aren't allowed to feel their emotions in the same way. And it was actually the private sector of these individuals that you think are the most emotionally aware and emotionally competent that have the most shame that they don't deal with because they don't feel that it is valid for them to do it. And I see this most in men that they're told that empowerment is a feminist thing. know, women get to be empowered, men get to be strong. You don't get to feel your emotions.

45:36 You just get to be strong. And I hate this concept. So I really wanted to write the book in a scientific way that was valid for everyone, for men, women, know, whatever your gender, your sex, whatever you've been through, you all deserve to reach an apartment. And we all should have access to the science to do so because it does help facilitate our careers and our personal life. So that's what work and progress is. It's the science of

46:05 shame and empowerment and how to live as authentically you, no matter who you are. And so the best way to contact me is through my website, which is just abbymorano.com. And then my Instagram is DrAbbyOfficial, but all of my socials are linked via my website. So you can find me through there.