Can you tell what this guy is thinking?

Welcome back, in the previous post, Get in Their Faces, we discussed the need to be able to observe other people’s reactions more effectively and how we often need to overcome our learned aversion to looking people directly in the face (especially difficult for men it seems, even though Cal Lightman makes it look easy).

The fundamental learned dynamic in Q&A scenarios or general chit-chat is:

1. Ask a question -> 2. Avert gaze until a change in the person being questioned’s voice tells us it’s time to -> 3. Look back and ask next question.

So, obviously what we want to change is this middle phase, we want to be able to observe the person in front of us without them feeling uncomfortable. The first thing you need to do is ask yourself, what do I currently do during phase two now?

EXERCISE 1: Observe Yourself

This will depend on what your working and home life is like, if you work in a customer facing environment and see a range of people all-day everyday then this won’t take long. Probably no more than a day. But if you’re in a solitary job, or at home a lot, give yourself 1-2 weeks to do this or, alternatively, actively put yourself in positions where you interact more over the next few days.

Then memorize the 1, 2, 3, dynamic above and observe what you do in this middle phase. Do you look away? Do you find it easy to look back? Do you find it extremely difficult, almost painful (as I did), to look back? What happens if you do look back? Can you only look back for a moment? Or are you already able to look people in the face comfortably without you or them becoming upset?

Whatever you observe there is no right or wrong with this, it’s simply what we need to establish before we move onto exercise two.

EXERCISE 2: Unleash the Watcher

During exercise one you will probably have tried to make yourself look back during phase two. You’ll find over repeated attempts that the easiest way to succeed at this is to make yourself relaxed and then allow yourself to simply observe what you’re doing without judgement. People who meditate, go for long walks, run, climb, or shoot will be good at this, or any activity where relaxed concentration, attentiveness as Dr Ekman puts it, is required.

If you’re finding it difficult as I was. Then attempt it for a few days, stop, and then come back to it. Don’t make every conversation a battle of wills with yourself, it’ll only be counter-productive. What really cracked it for me was taking a break for a few days then coming back to it with my partner – she’s a high level corporate negotiator. She told me that many years ago during her negotiation training each candidate was videoed and their poor-negotiation habits were highlighted and they had to work on them if they were to succeed. One of them for her was not breaking eye-contact repeatedly. As eye-contact and staring can be used to intimidate others during negotiation. She was given this simple little meme to work with: “Don’t be afraid to maintain eye-contact”.

Try it. Next time you look away, challenge yourself. Don’t be afraid, maintain eye-contact.

EXERCISE 3: Get in their faces without getting a punch in yours

Okay, so we’ve observed our learned style of observation, we’ve unleashed the watcher within, and we can maintain eye contact through a good part of phase 2. But what happens if the other person becomes uncomfortable, defensive, aggressive, or even violent? Most likely the person you are talking to will simply avert their gaze if they feel uncomfortable, but depending on who you’re talking to the results could be very different. A bouncer may give you a totally different response to a librarian for example. And maybe not what you’d immediately think!

Basic Technique: Soft vision

Look but don’t stare. Let your eyes move around the face in a relaxed manner. Neither too quickly, as if you’re disinterested, nor too slowly so that you’d don’t zone out or stare.

Advanced Technique: Use your vision systems

Most people aren’t aware that we have two different ways of seeing. From our days as hunter gatherers we have what we commonly know as central and peripheral vision systems. If you imagine the peripheral vision was what we used when we were scanning the landscape for prey (mobile or static), the central (sometimes called tunnel) vision system was what we used when we found our prey, zeroed in and chased it – or even ran away from it. Central vision causes our heart rate to elevate, our palms to sweat and our systems to go into fight or flight mode. If someone was glaring at you and looking twitchy how would you feel?

Peripheral vision on the other hand is a restful state which allows our unconscious to do most of the work and calms our inner monologue. Most of us are familiar with central vision, we use it all the time to watch TV, use our phones, use computers but during observation it helps to be able to switch between the two. There are many emotions at play on the face, using peripheral vision you can scan the face and zero in when you need to and back out again. Learning to use this system also helps with your stress levels and will make you look less of a nutter when you’re ogling someone for signs of emotional leakage.

EXERCISE 4: Peripheral Vision

Gaze gently on a point directly in front of you. Then expand your awareness as far to edges of your vision as is possible. Begin to discern objects, without forcing it. What you can see? Keep practicing this until it feels comfortable. In a quiet room where nothing is going on you won’t always notice that much, but take your peripheral vision out for a walk and you’ll be amazed by what you can see. See how far back you can move your perception. Can you see behind you? What animals are you aware of? What vehicles? Any objects that aren’t moving?

What's she thinking? Can you guess?

Now when you’re looking at someone’s face, staring, whether from central or peripheral vision, will be unnerving to the other person. Instead gently change between the two systems, you’ll be more relaxed and more able to see what is going on. Again this is a technique that gets easier with practice. It will also help you relax due to the instant changes in your nervous system that the hunter vision gives you. It’s such a powerful technique that it’s taught to elite team-sports players and martial artists, so that they are more aware of what’s happening on the playing field or mid-fight. For a simple practice that often requires extraordinary active peripheral vision, try juggling.

These are the basic techniques I’ve developed that work for me and those around me. I’ll be putting together a cognitive behavioral therapy worksheet that should help with anyone who gets stuck on this point. Some of these learned behaviours can be very hard to break. To give you an example my 21 month old son has only recently started to look away during conversations and it takes a good 10 days to unlearn bad habits. At it’s most basic avoiding eye-contact means he doesn’t have to acknowledge what’s going on around him, but also it’s probably what he sees every day. Stick at it and you’ll get it.

If there’s anything you’d like me to expand on please drop me a line in the notes below.

In the coming weeks we’ll be looking at Dr Ekman’s seven universal emotions and seeing how many you can spot while using the above techniques. Take another look at the pictures on this page, what emotions do you think are on display? I scoured several photo libraries with emotion keywords and nearly all photos available are mislabelled, which means that even photographers, people who look at faces every day don’t necessarily know what they’re looking at. Answers in the next article, but I’d love to hear your guesses!

You looking at me? I'm looking at you!

Viewers of Lie to Me will have noticed how Cal Lightman is always getting right up people’s noses, I mean literally. Part of Tim Roth’s excellent characterization is that Lightman always looks directly at them, even the baddest scariest guys in life-threatening situations. And, after reading more on Paul Ekman’s work, there’s a damn good reason for this. Most of us don’t look at people’s faces when they’re talking, we think we do but really we don’t.

When I trained with Dr Ekman’s micro-expressions tool (article here) I improved my emotion recognition in just a couple of hours, however when it came to applying it I found it almost impossible, apart from with children. Why is this? Well with children, culturally, we are allowed to look them directly in the the face, the same with performers or politicians, anyone who has given us permission or who doesn’t have the social training most of us have.

For example we are trained from an early age that ‘boys don’t cry’, so, unconsciously, we don’t look at them when they are sad. Even if intellectually we know it’s not true. Each family may have their own rules for ‘Don’t stare’. Or we may learn not to look at Dad, or Mum, when they’re angry – it might not be beneficial for our health.

Think about it, better yet, try this: watch yourself when you’re talking to someone, you rarely look at them until you  hear a change of intonation which is the auditory cue for a response. It’s subtle but it’s always there. I’ve been watching myself and realize that I do this all the time. In fact it’s almost impossible to stop yourself doing it. I mean how old are you? Subtract maybe 2-3 years and that’s how long you’ve been doing it without even being aware of it.

I now have to re-train myself to get over this if I want to be able to apply my new knowledge in a meaningful way. I’ve only just started doing this today, and it’s hard work, but boy do you suddenly see what’s going on with other people. It’s tough not to look away though. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes and give you some techniques to work with that’ll make it easier for you to see what people are really feeling and thinking in the next couple of articles.

If you have an idea for training or a lie you want to test please get in touch in the comments below.

Read part one: Real World Micro-Expressions Training  Or go to part three: Exercises to Get in Their Face.

Agent's Manifesto - Jonny Geller - Curtis Brown

I applaud Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown for trying to up his game in the new world of publishing, here’s the original article. What follows are my own individual writer responses to Jonny’s manifesto in a Q&A format:

The Agent’s Manifesto

JG: It feels like a perfect storm is brewing; publishers battening down the hatches, retailers at war with one another, e-tailers deactivating “buy” buttons as if it’s a game of Call of Duty.

One person has been forgotten in this unholy maelstrom: the author. Remember, we don’t have a job without him or her. For those of us still working in the legacy business of publishing books, here’s a reminder of the primary mover in this chain—an Agent’s Manifesto, as it were, to All Those in the Business of Publishing Books on Behalf of the Author:

» The author is the expert. Why assume that the one person who has spent the past 12-18 months on the subject, the story and the world of their work, knows least about how they should be represented to the trade and to the reader?

FC: Good point. Some times however writers don’t know it all, or anything. But then sure as hell-fire neither do publishers. Expect respect all round or expect a bitch-slap.

JG: The author is not an object which a publisher has to step over in order to achieve a successful publication. If they have a problem with the cover, blurb, copy or format, then something isn’t right.

FC: No argument here. Add in copyediting and proofing too and I’m 100%. 

JG: The author loves bookshops. Bookshops need to learn how to love authors again. We need to bring them back together.

FC: Book shops – or I imagine Jonny is referring to book chains – are like most large companies: slow to respond, filled with bureaucracy and the last in-line for new ideas. But it’s a good point that with the chains there is no dialogue between writer and end sales point. It’s more normally a sales relationship between publishing conglomerate and chain.

JG: We publishing professionals are the ones who bear the risk—agents with time; publishers with investment; retailers with space. Authors risk only their whole life, self-esteem and their babies.

FC: Absolutely! 9-to-5ers often simply do not get that writing is a business, if you don’t pay on time or fudge your accounts, you will force writers (your suppliers) out of business. We do take it personally when you rip us off, plagiarize our formats, or enforce the often fraudulent practice of reserves against returns, along with criminally lengthy ‘accounting’ periods, laughable royalty rates, unenforceable contracts, creeping all-rights clauses and similar petty practices.

JG: Publishers need to understand that “Author Care” is not a euphemism for “Care in the Community”. Authors who are valued, understood, appreciated, included, nurtured and spoken to like an adult will experience a phenomenon called Trust. Trust breeds loyalty; loyalty means longevity; longevity means sales.

FC: In a good business relationship – as in personal relationships. All sides should ideally feel their needs are met. A lot of authors might feel that the ‘Publisher care’ they’re expected to provide is simply the “bend over and spread ‘em!” practices we’ve come to know and loathe. In my experience all this could be avoided by frank, honest, and above all accountable communication from the outset.

JG: Authors will endeavor to understand better what a publisher does—e-books are not created after two minutes of scanning and ticking a series of boxes on Amazon’s self-publishing program.

FC: Tragically we do try to understand what a publisher does, constantly, all the time. Sadly, what often becomes apparent is that some publishers don’t know what they are doing in the first place. And nobody takes responsibility for what they do. We will however continue to try to understand what publishers do as this is a part of our business. 

In return publishers should ideally endeavor to understand what an author/writer does and to factor their (author’s) business costs into advances. A license to publish is effectively a venture capital agreement in purpose not subsidy publishing on the author’s part. Written words/manuscripts can be changed with out the usual dramas, e-books can be created within a short time frame, as little as 2-8 hours. E-books can be formatted to suit readers, not designers. Indie published authors are often way ahead of the game on this. For some indie ebooks, yes, there is poor formatting, granted, but equally from trad -publishing there is a severe amount of over-formatting and nearly all the same poor formatting errors indies make too. 

When it comes to formatting never forget ebooks are reader-defined platforms. It’s their reading experience that counts. That applies to everyone.

JG goes on to say:

Authors need publishers; they need experts to guide and protect them.

FC: What writers need are respectful, professional, business partners. We don’t actually need publishers or agents to become writers, or to negotiate contracts, only to get in to the large book chains and find out which commissioning editors have any money left.

So, in summary, respect to Jonny for throwing down a gauntlet from the inside to say let’s buck up our ideas. Let’s see if anyone is actually listening to authors or to Jonny.

That’s my two ha’pennies. Thanks for listening.

Who is this bloke anyway? Frank Coles is one of those writer upstarts, who respectfully begs your leave to go back to his pit and flagellate himself at the typewriter for scraps of offal once again.

NOT!

I’ve been interested in liars and lying for a long time, ever since a situation where I realized people close to me had been deceiving themselves and me for years. I’ve read and studied books on how to spot the lie and the liar, there’s a lot of information out there from body language and persuasion skills, to NLP patterns and interrogation techniques. But one of the most interesting techniques has to be spotting micro-expressions as per Dr Cal Lightman in the TV series Lie to Me.

Tim Roth’s character is a deception expert who uses the momentary unconscious micro-expressions we all exhibit to tell when people are lying. They boil down to Anger, Disgust,  Fear, Happy, Sad, Contempt, Fear and Surprise. This fictional character’s abilities are actually based on real-life Dr Paul Ekman’s work. So I decided to give his online training tool a go, arguing to myself that these seven emotions were surely just what we teach children, everybody knows them, how hard can it be?

I first tried the demo and scored a measly 21% emotion recognition. I was shocked. The only emotions I could readily recognize were anger, disgust and happiness. It was a profound realization that I’m not emotionally aware as I think I am. I confuse sadness with anger – which explains, for example, why if I can’t make a sad person laugh straight away I basically get angry back at them. Appease the aggressor, then attack.

I signed up on the spot. Within a half hour’s training I could spot more emotions easily.

While dropping my son off at nursery I saw the straight lips and straight eyebrows that indicate fear. He regularly gets separation anxiety – the fear that his dad/mum won’t come back. It’s made me change the way I drop him off – rather than go in the car, I now walk him to nursery in the pram, we chat to his mum for part of the way, spot buses, dogs and birds and he’s generally a bit less anxious when we get to nursery – no tears this morning – a bit of bottom lip mind. But I’m working on it.

Interestingly I saw disgust on one of his little friend ‘s faces when I said hello to her in the morning, but when I saw her in the afternoon she couldn’t stop smiling at me. What this has already taught me is that as well as spotting deception you can respond much more to what those around you are feeling. But only if you don’t take the observed emotion personally and use it to understand the person’s needs.

The training is basically a series of neutral photos followed by one of the seven emotions.  In training this is done at slow speed with voice over explaining what to look for. In the pre-test you set the speed of the flashed emotions. I settled for the highest speed and improved my score to 61%. A comprehensive review and then I tried the full test. I scored 71%. That’s 100% on happy, disgust and contempt. But 0% on things like sadness. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth to realize that as a 39 year old adult, I can’t recognize sadness in others (at least for split-second micro expressions, if you were blubbing in front of me right now, I’d catch your drift!).

It’s interesting and profound training and it reminds of some of the childcare books and flash cards that encourage you to teach emotions to your children. The program tells you to not take the test for another three months so that you don’t become overly familiar with the faces and predict the responses from memory.

That’s a good tip if you genuinely want to progress, although I would recommend going over it 24 hours later (minus the test) as well.

Sleeping on it, and then coming back to a subject when you’ve almost forgotten it are two scientifically proven ways of increasing your skills and recall.

If you get 80% in the test you’ll get a certificate of competence, if you get 95% you’ll get an ‘Expert’ certificate. I think the test and training could be improved by properly randomizing the final test with a baseline photo then morph to the emotion so that you can repeat it more quickly, other than that, I’m sold on the emotional recognition idea and looking forward to getting my Expert cert – one day!

Read Part Two: Get In Their Faces 

Currently I’m opting for Kony, Cameron, Cowell and GaGa. 

In my new thriller Dark Market there is an assassination market – based on a real world model – which allows any group of people to nominate a victim and have them bumped off. Everyone is anonymous, no one can be caught.

Dark Market (Assassins Rule)

So, the question is, if you could 100% get away with it (you wouldn’t even have to pull the trigger) – who would you assassinate?

This is purely for kicks. Although there may be an app to go with the book before you know it

Join the debate over on Amazon: http://amzn.to/xvqyBL

‘And now my darlings,’ the estate agent turned and spread his arms wide, ‘the pièce de résistance.’ The easy prey followed him into the room.

Too many bankers and their dull grey suits today, the estate agent thought, not enough billionaire colour. He’d strung these two along with his bitchy queen routine for far too long already. Although he didn’t have to act too hard he had to admit.

He watched the couple blink at the blinding summer light blasting in from the two-storey lounge windows behind him. Enough. He wanted their money. He wanted it now.

‘Come with me you lovely people,’ he strutted between them, placed his hands on their backs, and moved them deeper into the sumptuous space. ‘Could this glorious penthouse actually be yours? The views, oh, the views, are all money,’ he said. ‘Canary Wharf and Greenwich in one direction, and, in the other? A skyline to die for, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, the bridges.’

He pressed a button on a small white box, the shadows moved.

‘And there’s the remote controlled skylights in every room, of course.’

The ceiling wide array of mechanised blinds slid smoothly back to reveal a glass roof and ever more sky. They stood transfixed.

‘You’ve surpassed yourself,’ the woman said. ‘How soon—’

The estate agent waved a finger, ‘Oh no, my dear, it’s not that easy. This is the palace for the kings of the castle. Residents approval only. But as I am the estate agent to the stars, for you, it shouldn’t be a problem. You really won’t believe who the neighbours are.’

‘Oh, Michael,’ she said and gripped her partner’s arm. ‘It’s what we’ve always wanted, isn’t it darling?’

The estate agent beamed at them. Skirt on the hook, it was time for the fat-cat in the oh-so-predictable striped shirt and pink tie. He turned his mascaraed eyes towards Michael, ‘Come on, stud-muffin,’ he gestured his head at the apartment, ‘you know you want it.’

Michael rocked on his heels, looked at her for a moment too long. The estate agent saw nothing nice in the man’s eyes.

‘I want it? Sure Jo, it’ll go with our town house, the country house, the yacht, the cars, the vineyard in France—’ He shook his head.

‘Michael,’ she said, a warning edge to her voice. ‘That’s the business, this, this is our place together. Our palace together.’

‘Yes, of course…my love.’ He turned his back on her, puffed his chest, and addressed the estate agent. ‘It’s a cock-swinging joint alright. How much is it going to hurt?’

Without warning she span Michael round and swung an open hand at his face.

How To Really Sell EBooks by Jon F. Merz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Short concise workflow book (7200 words) for making social media work for you, minimizing the time spent on it and maximizing the results. Primarily using TweetAdder as the main tool. Pretty decent primer overall.



View all my reviews

I caught up with Dave Cornthwaite  - adventurer, author and motivational speaker – at the RGS Explore event recently. He’s an inspiring kind of guy and as a fellow author we chatted through the highs and lows of publishing and especially his new book DATE in which Dave decides to find a girlfriend by attempting to date 100 women in 100 days, the result is an emotional rollercoaster that threatened to turn his world inside out and upside-down.

It promises to be a great read and I’m gonna hit buy on my Kindle right now.

We also chatted about the benefits of traditional publishing versus e-Publishing. Specifically the finances, it goes a little something like this:

Traditional book cover price: £10 | Traditional royalties: 15% (on a good deal) = £1.5 per book.

Epub book cover price: £2.94 | Kindle royalties @ 70% of cover price = £2.05 per book (not including other e-publishers or print on demand).

With Dave’s homegrown audience from his Expedition 1000 project this is a great way for an explorer to write and publish books while retaining control of the marketing and availability. And as Expedition 1000 continues he’ll inevitably sell more and more copies. Don’t know what that is?

In Expedition 1000 Dave plans to raise a million pounds for charity by undertaking twenty-five separate journeys in excess of 1000 miles in distance, each using a different form of non-motorised transport. The project will cover every continent, cross the three major oceans and see Dave reach both poles, a true global adventure with a total distance equivalent to the circumference of the Earth around the Equator

Completed Expeditions
1) Skateboard, 2006: 3621 miles (www.boardfree.co.uk)
2) Kayak, 2009: 1540 miles (www.thegreatbigpaddle.com)
3) Tandem Bicycle, 2011: 1396 miles (see page)
4) Stand Up Paddleboard, 2011, 2404 miles (see page)

To find out more, read the book, get involved or donate check out www.davecornthwaite.com

This is the first of regular posts on off-beat jobs for writers around the world. This week we’ve got an opportunity that sounds like one of those unsubtle ads for MI6/CIA operatives and some car writing jobs both in the US and UK. I’d jump at the first if I didn’t have kids and I may even apply for one of those motoring posts.

Adventurous job:

Honestly, I'm a writer!

International Business Journalists wanted for Oil & Gas intelligence research. Head office in Istanbul with months abroad spent working in target countries.

What you need:

• An interest in and experience of travel
• Year-around availability
• Perfect command of written and spoken English
• Excellent presentation
• A good university degree in economics, political sciences or international relations is valued
• The applicant must be up-to-date on current events, hard working and easy to live with
• He or she must keep a cool head under pressure and be at ease with tight deadlines
• A taste for adventure is mandatory

Sound like your thing? Go here: http://t.co/DpKr2GsS 

Super car wreck

Driving Jobs

How about driving Japanese high performance cars and editing three publications all about them? UK based.

Click this: http://t.co/ABlnklj5 

Or writing for the awesome Jalopnik website. Two writer positions available, one in New York, one in either Los Angeles or Detroit. If i was a Yankee-doodler I’d be in there like a slingshot.

Click that: http://t.co/xmF8Huxq

Business Insider in the US are looking for someone to write about everything from cars to spacecraft. No brainer right?

Get your OCD on and click: http://t.co/RTqEjGsm

If you get the job, let me know so I can seethe with envy.

Live well.

Top of the Christmas pile in Top Gear magazine.

Sometimes it seems like every agent or publisher wants their next book to be written by a big chested celeb with no writing talent – I guess that’s what ghost writers are for. But there’s a good reason for this seemingly annoying need. In a nutshell, if you already have a public profile or ‘platform’ then you increase the marketability of any book proposal, and, therefore, the potential sales for your book.

Why do publishers want this? More marketing bang for each buck they spend, that’s why, for example:

• A single ad page in a magazine like Men’s Health will cost between 9k-12k. Reference: http://www.mhpromos.co.uk/images/MP-Universal.pdf
• A single ad page in a newspaper like the Daily Mail will cost you more than £32k for one day. Advertorial – an article written by them (with the word ‘promotion’ in the corner) – upwards of £45k. Reference: http://www.mailconnected.co.uk/uploads/files/Daily-Mail-Ratecard.pdf

So ask yourself this, what’s the value of a regular column in one of these publications to a marketing department? How about if you regularly feature on TV? Rates to advertise on TV start at the £1-5k range for low-cost local networks to £30k for multiple high volume day time slots or £100k+ for heavyweight prime time national coverage.

What amazes me is that more TV personalities don’t publish books.

But how can you, the fledgling author who has neither the time, money, skills or resources to raise your profile go about it? Using myself as an example. For my first book How to Drive a Tank I managed to score with a range of medium sized media outlets. I secured a NatGeoAdventure web channel (40k viewers) and mailshot to their subscribers on publication date (another 40k+). A review in Top Gear magazine (300k readers per month), 20 or so local and national radio interviews, and maintaining this blog, (around 12k readers). My own personal biggest hit was while working with the Bedouin Heritage Project in Jordan we used a hotwired car. I asked one of the Bedu guys to film me while I showed how to hotwire the vehicle – which was one of the examples I gave in the same chapter in the book. It went viral on Youtube (160k+ viewers) and has driven new north American audiences my way.

As I move into a new phase of pitching and writing it’s time for me to up my game a little further. I’ve recently shot a showreel with the guys who set up the original Strictly Come Dancing line up. Although I worked in TV for ten years previously being in front of the camera is by definition pushing me out of my comfort zone – but then isn’t that what life is all about? Ideally I will secure either a column or a regular writing gig with a publisher either online or in print with a large reach in the next few months as well.

Ultimately, I’m a writer, but in this day and age, writing, and publishing are just one form of media floating in a giant sales stream. It makes sense to connect a few of these media islands together. I’d love to hear your ideas on how you intend to raise your own platform.