The Secret to Success

Transcript: that’s a cute kitty welcome back to am Northwest do you wish you were more successful our first guest has tips to get you on your way we welcome back the author of human lie detection and body language 101 Vanessa van Edwards good to see you again Vanessa yeah so let’s talk about this because you say you can be successful and not have a high IQ yes so we often think about highly successful people elite performers as super smart super smart or have these natural abilities right but actually what they found is a researcher at the state of Florida State University found that elite chess players actually don’t have high IQ the best chess players have actually lower IQ but it’s about their strategy and about their hard work and this has been backed up also by Malcolm Gladwell’s so Malcolm Gladwell wrote a wonderful book called outliers where he studied outliers people who are highly successful they kind of lay outside the typical range and he found that a musicians who are amazing performers actually don’t have any natural inclination or natural ability to play instruments they have just hit what he calls the 10,000 hour mark what does that mean they practice for 10,000 hours really that is the difference between a high performer and an elite performer is that if you whatever it is so you at home whatever your goal is whatever you want to be golden thanks grabble Scott so 10,000 hours of Scrabble it’s not exactly so it’s not just in your career or music or sports yes if you want to be an elite Scrabble player Malcolm Gladwell argues it has nothing to do with here IQ nothing to do with your natural inclination for words or spelling it’s just about playing over 10,000 hours up so the more you practice the more you do it the better you get exactly it’s all about training those muscles in your brain so if you think about any kind of skill we our brain is very malleable so the more that we do it the more the stronger we get it’s like a bicep or a tricep that in your brain mm-hm so that’s sort of the first part is the hard working strategy the second aspect of elite performers is what’s called p q or e q so now IQ not intellectual intelligence but emotional intelligence so researcher Daniel Goleman found that leaders very highly successful people are very good at reading people so I want to teach you one really quick trick okay reading people that I think everyone should you’re saying to read their emotions to read their hidden emotions as leaders they’ll be with people and they’re able to pick up on the hidden emotions this is my one quick tip on the hood there is something called the smirk kind of a one-sided mouth yeah most people think this one-sided mouth raise means it’s okay half happiness but actually that means contempt so this is the universal expression of disdain or scorn so when you see someone do it like yeah everything’s fine actually it is an indication of an incongruence something’s not all the way there so that’s a very little tip to start reading people’s faces along with their words and successful people do that successful people naturally and then not naturally practice reading faces we’re not used to reading faces as much it’s about spotting those hidden emotions and looking for true happiness which is a full smile but all of that contempt kind of hat oh it was a quick little fit so use also to say to succeed at failing yes so success is not about the lack of failure in fact author Dan Coyle found that elite performers plan to fail at 50 to 80 percent of there no way yes oh no usually we think about practice we think about wanting to succeed all the time sure but actually building in a mechanism or a space to fail makes your goals more powerful and in this way I want you to think about whatever your goal is and you should only be 50% sure you can reach it if you are a hundred percent sure you can reach your goal your goal is not hard enough oh yeah because you’re not stretching yourself you’re not going outside your comfort zone exactly okay when we have that little bit of adrenaline that little bit of fear oh my god I’m not gonna reach my goal right that actually gives you the fuel to push yourself a little harder and that is what elite performers do so don’t be afraid of failure build in to know that 50 to 80% of your attempts are going to fail and that’s a good thing Oh interesting okay and you say it’s very important to find a mentor yes so all lead performers can name a mentor someone that they have used to help them with their guideposts and there’s a famous quote that’s if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together oh that’s a good quote and I feel that is really what it is yeah anyone can do something fast on their own but if you really want to build long-term success be truly good at what you do you have to be able to reach out and ask for help so this could be a mentor someone that you admire could also be a co mentor pure so I’m the easiest way to achieve goals is to do it with someone else so if you think about what your goal is whether it’s Scrabble or its taking over the world whatever that is make sure that you have your VP your your Co colleague who can do that with you because that’s going to make you go a lot farther okay and then also the power of body language so I love body language and a lot of people tell me you know Vanessa what do I do in those moments where I feel just defeated I feel like I can’t achieve anything I say in this case you want to work from the outside in so there’s something called the universal pride body language so whenever a kid wins a race or wins a contest they usually go yay and they expand their body really big this is the universal gesture of pride and what’s funny about it is when you do this gesture you actually begin to feel pride so you can actually work the outside in so if you have those low moments get up stretch a little bit and act like you’re a winner that can actually help change your mindset is it the same kind of thing is if you put a smile on your face sometimes you just feel better even if you’re feeling down very similar and that’s there’s a scientific principle behind that called the facial feedback hypothesis that when you make a face when I smile yeah it actually begins to produce the chemicals that make you feel happy so there so there is a feedback loop and you are in control of it I love it Vanessa all good tips body language 101 Vanessa van Edwards always good to talk to you do you love this video then give us some love in the comments like this video and subscribe to our Channel