Dr. Relly Nadler: This week we are really glad to have the founder of what is called the Center of Body Language, Patryk Wezowski. Patryk is a worldwide leading authority on body language. He brings that to sales, leadership, recruitment and negotiation. His presentations reveal in an entertaining and interactive way, a new and effective approach for more persuasion, charisma, authenticity, person impact, and leadership by using non-verbal communication.
Who doesn’t want that? To be able to better persuade, be more charismatic, be more effective personally, and be more impactful? Patryk, along with his wife Kasia Wezowski, is the founder of what is called The Center for Body Language. They have free tools that you can use to see how well you read people’s faces. We are talking about Micro Expressions and how these can be a very helpful tool for you to be able to read what is going on with someone; are they telling the truth or do they have some hesitancy about things?
Patryk has taught this methodology and tools to more than 35 representatives of 15 countries. Each month Patryk appears in the International media with an analysis of celebrities and leaders, politicians, including Fox, CBS, Forbes and also media in Belgium and Netherlands.
You can see him on YouTube with his interview especially around Presidential elections, just being able to see the candidate’s face and get an idea of if they are going to be elected or not. He also has a very popular YouTube video on Lance Armstrong, we he was interviewed by Oprah. Since Patryk is able to detect how truthful Lance was, a lot of the media was interested in Patryk’s observations, obviously, as we all were.
He has some eLearning programs and has developed dozens of programs for conversation techniques around emotional intelligence, including Micro Expressions, training videos, and the world’s first program for learning Micro Expressions with the videos. When you do your training, and I did some of the training on-line, you have to pick up these expressions and then he will actually help educate you to get better at it.
Patryk, welcome to the show.
Patryk Wezowski: Thank you very much Relly, and thank you very much Cathy for the wonderful introduction. I’m honored. Thank you very much. The Micro Expression of happiness held my face, so thank you very much.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Patryk, tell us where are you calling from now and maybe give us a little bit of your background.
Patryk Wezowski: I’m calling from Spain. We are based in Barcelona or near Barcelona, surrounded by national forests and near the beach. It’s kind of our headquarters between our busy speaking schedules and then traveling for courses and training around the world.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Welcome, we are so happy to have you with us. Patryk, one of the things that we like to ask all of our guests is, and you are not going to escape the question, who have been the main leadership influences in your life and in your career?
Patryk Wezowski: Well one of the persons very, very early when I was really a small child, was my godfather. Why, because that is how I ended up in Belgium as a three year old child. My father was an Olympic Trainer in fencing, just like the Three Musketeers and Zorro. I was born in Poland, but when I was 3 years old, my godfather invited my father to come to Belgium and train his sons in fencing. My mother and my father always were speaking about my godfather as a very successful businessperson, and he was. At the time we met with him we went really great places. He had a wonderful house, a few companies, and he was always making these amazing jokes during dinner and evenings that entertained everybody. He was a very intelligent man.
I was always, as a small child, looking up to him and I wanted to become like him. I am very, very happy with the vision that he got from my parents as an example of leadership. Then that is how I evolved over the years. My father, because he was training fencing, you have to look at your opponent’s non-verbal communication to predict what they will do to win the game.
So, already as a small child, I was given training; I was 14 years old, in the fencing club of my father. I was teaching people how to use their non-verbal communication with their opponents, and I still do the training today. But rather to business people, just like my successful businessperson and like my godfather did. So since my childhood, I combined from my parents and my godfather, I have gotten into the job that I have today.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Well that’s fascinating Patryk, just with that background of observing those queues and sensing. This non-verbal communication has been around for quite a while, but I think what I love about your work is that you are really able to take it to the next level and your marketing and internet savvy is really allowing it to be more available to folks. Something we will talk about that I was involved in is your Body Language Summit, and you have a movie that you are going to be coming out with, so you really are taking a lot of these techniques and we’ll talk a little bit more about it.
You and your wife are partners. I think I saw it somewhere; how did the two of you share this passion for advancing non-verbal communication?
Patryk Wezowski: Well, the first time that I met my wife, on the first date, it was a business meeting, actually. It was a very effective business meeting and it became a business meeting of 16 hours. We discovered during the second date that we had a lot in common. We were coaching each other and I asked my wife, she wasn’t my wife yet, where do you know this coaching method from, and she said, well, I created it. I said, that’s impossible, I created exactly the same coaching process. We discovered that separately from each other we had created the very similar coaching methods. We also discovered that I was a natural non-verbal reader from my childhood because I had a hearing disorder when I was a child and I had to look at people’s non-verbal communication to understand what they were saying, in addition to the fencing learning that I had from my father.
My wife did her doctorate and her master studies about sociology and psychology. One of her main topics was non-verbal communication. She had also trained a company in Poland. So that is how we joined our lives in work-life and love, at the same time.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: That is just outstanding. They say great minds think alike, Patryk. How did you define the school of thought which you call Micro Expression?
Patryk Wezowski: Micro Expressions are very small and short facial expressions on somebody’s face. They are half a second or shorter and they are the most reliable sign of how somebody truly feels. Why? Well because its how our body works. When we see something, when we are emotionally stimulated; when we hear something that touches us emotionally, it goes straight into our reptile and emotional brain and those two brain layers they react with immediate reactions—instinctive reactions, intuitively with touching the muscles of our face. These are first microscopic expressions and reactions that we can see on somebody’s face that are the most reliable because they come straight from the limbic system—from the emotional brain.
Then after a half second, or seconds, or a few moments, when somebody realizes that they have to hide or they may not show something on their face or with their non-verbal language, or they don’t want to put everything on the table yet, will then they hide those Micro Expressions with a poker face, with a smile, or with something else.
When somebody is able to find and perceive those tiny facial expressions, those Micro Expressions of ½ a second or shorter, before the mentalation begins, then they know everything that the other person feels, really and truly. That’s how you can also improve your emotional intelligence. I know that very much of your work, Cathy & Relly, is about emotional intelligence. We have presented at Harvard University itself of our studies that show that every single person who can read Micro Expressions well, and they can after four hours of training, can get acuity of 90% or more. They increase their emotional intelligence by an average of 10%.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Patryk, I know in your training when you give some of these assessments at first, they average around 24%. Then even the best negotiators you say, are at 50%, for really reading someone else. But then after some of the training you do, scores after about 4 hours or so, go up to about 80%. That is just pretty fascinating. Just to emphasize, this is involuntary. People present these Micro Expressions and they don’t know that they are doing it. So if you can pick up on that you are seeing the message behind the message.
Patryk Wezowski: Exactly. That brings us to some fun stuff, also. We were speaking about my relationship with my wife. The advantage you have when you can really read those facial expressions. What people regularly ask us is how do you keep secrets from each other, between you and your wife. Well, we don’t. It’s amazing to be authentic and to be just yourself. The only disadvantages is that you can’t do any birthday surprises. So we have this regularly, when for example, we were visiting our grandmother in Poland lately, and I bought a gift for my wife; a dress from a shop that we visited earlier that day. I pull it out from my back and Kasia starts to laugh, because actually, she had bought exactly the same dress for herself. Earlier when we were visiting the shop I was indicating that I didn’t like the dress because I knew that I would like to buy it for her. She read from my face that I really liked the dress, and that I didn’t want to show it, so she bought it for herself.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Where do you study this? I know there have been other folks that I have kind of researched and studied with. At least in the states we have this really popular show called Lie To Me, where it was basically a psychologist who works with the police and he was able to ask sometimes kind of bizarre questions and then look at the responses. One of the key things was that they were able to videotape that so that they could go back and show it in slow motion.
How do you get around that, because you can’t videotape everybody, and it happens, like you said, in a ½ second. How do you pick that up with such quick actions where you can’t go back and study it?
Patryk Wezowski: It’s actually pretty simple. It’s all about exercise. For example, if you go to www.microexpressionstest.com, you can try the test yourself and see how much you score. As you said earlier Relly, most people will score around 24%. But after four hours of training you’ll get that to 90%. Since it’s all about training, you won’t need a slow motion camera to examine people in your daily life because you get used to spotting those little tiny expressions. You develop kind of an angel sitting on your shoulder who whispers in your ear all of the emotions that you see on somebody’s face. It’s just the same like learning to drive a car. In the beginning when you get into the car for the first time in your life; you have the brakes, you have the gas, the steering wheel, and then you have also the road signs that you have to follow, and also the mirrors. There’s so much at the same time that you can’t focus. After a while, most of us can drive and have a telephone conversation, and have a conversation at the same time with the person next to them, and think about something else, easily, because our brain does everything. Exactly the same happens when reading facial expressions. After good training, and emphasizing focusing on it, you won’t need to focus and look at the road signs, the Micro Expressions, at the side of the road; you just get that information automatically in your brain without even having to think about it? It’s all about doing, and doing, and doing and emphasizing. What we teach, the closest that you can get in real life, is what you see on Lie To Me. Of course that is a little bit exaggerated because its mixed with fiction, but still, what you see there, most of it can be accomplished through some training and you just have to look for it and focus on it. Just like everything in life, you’ll get it sooner or later.
Listen to the complete fascinating discussion with Patryk Wezowski, without commercials, above.
Relly
