“I see you.” In the 2009 film Avatar, a huge box office and critical success, the Na'vi greeted each other with these words. The words mean that you're present and attentive—that you're completely open and welcoming to the other person … or sentient humanoid, in the case of the Na'vi. We need to see each other. And we have a deep need to be seen. The literal and emotional aspects of seeing and being seen are fundamental to the human experience. When used to build personal and professional relationships, video helps us see and be seen.

RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE WHOLE POINT

The Grant Study began at Harvard more than 80 years ago with the goal of discovering how to live a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. Initial participants in the longitudinal study were 238 Harvard sophomores. Over the years, the participant groups expanded to include inner-city Boston residents and the original participants' children, at which point it became the Grant and Glueck Study. The researchers considered various factors and data, including career, financial, social, intelligence, genetic, mental, physical, and other types of measures.

Across several populations, across decades, and across criteria, the greatest predictor of health was consistent: our relationships with other people. Robert Waldinger, the study's director, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the source of one of the most popular TED talks of all time describes the study's “revelation” in this way: “The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health.”¹

Our personal success, life satisfaction, and well-being are enabled through the people in our lives. And so is our business success. As Gary Vaynerchuk offered in the opening to his book The Thank You Economy, “No relationships should be taken for granted. They are what life is all about, the whole point. How we cultivate our relationships is often the greatest determinant of the type of life we get to live. Business is no different.”² The personal/professional connection is also offered in The Go-Giver, a classic from Bob Burg and John David Mann: “A genuinely sound business principle will apply anywhere in life – in your friendships, in your marriage, anywhere. That's the true bottom line.” This was offered in support of their Law of Authenticity, which states that “the most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.”³

So, connecting and communicating with others improves our lives and our businesses. We do this best when we're present with others. We do it best in person, face to face. Think about the people involved in your personal and professional success: family and friends, team members and recruits, prospects and customers, suppliers and partners. Think about all the people who help make your achievements possible.

In terms of connecting and communicating with these people, are you more effective in a typed-out email or text message, or are you more effective on the phone?

Most people say they're better on the phone. Voice, pace, and tone allow you to express yourself more clearly. And the feedback loop—the give and take of a conversation—creates a much richer experience for both people. Any two people anywhere in the world with a phone and an internet, cellular, or landline connection can enjoy this experience, no matter the distance. You just need to coordinate the time (and the time zones!).

Similar question, but with a new option: Are you more effective on the phone or more effective in person?

Nearly everyone says they're more effective in person. Take all the benefits of talking over the phone, but add in face, posture, body language, distance, eye contact, hand gestures, and all those rich, nonverbal cues that our brains are wired to receive from one another. We're fellow human beings. We're social creatures. Because of the subtlety, nuance, emotion, energy, and all those little things that just don't come through our typed-out or spoken words alone, we're better in person. A deep history and millennia of evolution have refined this wiring.

We need to see each other. Sending personal video helps fulfill that need when time and distance get in your way.

MILLENNIA OF HUMAN BRAIN TRAINING

As a species, humans have been speaking to one another for about 150,000 years. There's a great debate about this number; estimates range from 50,000 years to more than one million years, well before our evolution into homo sapiens.⁴ You can imagine the difficulty in figuring that out. Early symbols and writing can be found; the materials' dates of the origin can be established. It's far more challenging to determine when we started speaking to each other. There's no record of a spoken word—not prior to our ability to record audio, anyway. We have to infer from indirect data the ability, hence the debate. Rather than get into the debate's particulars, though, we'll work from the conservative end of the range—150,000 years. Most of that time, we've spoken to our fellow humans exclusively face to face. Only in the past handful of generations could we record and transmit our faces and voices across time and distance using technology.

So, how long have humans been writing? The oldest known cave paintings in Chauvet Cave in southern France date back 30,000 years to the Ice Age or Upper Paleolithic era.⁵ Twelve thousand years is the age of the oldest known pictograph, “an early method of writing in which pictures are used to convey meaning—similar to hieroglyphics.”⁶ Five thousand years ago, the transition from capturing visual images in paintings and drawings to capturing speech sounds in writing was made by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Called cuneiform, this form of writing evolved from a symbol-based accounting system into a system of phonetic symbols. Over the next several hundred years, the Sumerians developed it into a purer alphabet that was eventually used to capture poems and literature.⁷ Egyptian hieroglyphics also date back to this period and possessed some of the uniformity of an early form of alphabet.

Writing's evolution is richer and more nuanced than conveyed here, but the point should be clear. We've only been writing for about 5,000 years – one thirtieth or 3.3% of the amount of time we've been speaking to one another. The true ratio of writing to speaking is even smaller than that, though. How much smaller? Add a zero and make it one three hundredth, or 0.3%, because nearly that entire time the vast majority of the human population was illiterate. Literacy rates only started spreading into the population at large—unevenly, of course—about 500 years ago.⁸

Only 500 years of widespread reading and writing; this amount of time is too short to produce major evolutionary changes to master the complexity of producing and decoding strings of symbols (reading and writing text). The gap between 150,000 and 500 is made obvious in Figure 3.1. Scientists are only starting to understand the relationship between the brain circuits used for reading and writing and those used for seeing and speaking, but one study's authors gracefully observe that “a preliterate brain must adapt on the fly, so to speak, in learning how to process written words, rather than being able to rely upon evolutionarily ancient modifications of the visual system pathways.”⁹

This explains why we struggle to craft effective emails and overestimate our ability to do so; reading and writing is adapted. This also explains why restoring the messenger to the message with video is so effective; seeing and speaking are ancient. We've been communicating with one another face to face for approximately 300 times longer than we've been communicating through written words. It's more natural and fundamentally human.

When you're hiring a new salesperson, you're not likely assigning a writing test as part of the employment screen. You're asking them to “sell me this pen” (come on, you know you've done it) and collecting a DISC assessment or Caliper profile to gain insights into a candidate's strengths, motivations, behavioral tendencies, and communication style. When you're hiring someone for the client care team, you're evaluating abilities to empathize, connect, defuse, and transform. You require competence in reading and writing, but you're not looking for a modern-day Jane Austen or William Shakespeare. You don't need Strunk or White. While putting J.K. Rowling or John Grisham on your outbounding team might win you some calls back, your new salesperson need not turn out a 200,000-word novel.

After you land and onboard the best person, you tend to cloak them in emails and voicemails. You need to help your company's representatives shine. You need to unlock their potential and put them back into a true sales or service role. Empowering them with video recording, sending, and tracking is a leap toward the rehumanization of your business.

OUR FACES SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE

While we struggle to produce competent writing in one of the thousands of written languages in use today, our faces all speak the same language. Human facial expression of emotion is both universal and innate. We all do it the exact same way – across societies, across cultures, and across history. There's a rich body of research built by different researchers at different universities and institutions using different methodologies and participants in different cities, countries, and continents. All conducted across different decades. And despite these differences, the work points to one key finding: human emotions are expressed the same way through our faces.

With the goal of surveying the best research on nonverbal behavior and making practical the key findings, the authors of Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications describe facial expressions of emotion in this way: “The ability to read facial expressions of emotion can help your interactions with anyone regardless of his or her race, culture, ethnicity, nationality, sex, religion, or age.”¹⁰ Even when we speak to people through an interpreter, we understand what they're saying with their faces; it's universal.

The importance of this ability to read and write the same language through our faces alludes to its evolutionary depth. It helps us survive and thrive as healthy members of society. Reading others' emotions helps us accurately and reliably see a person's personality, motivations, and intentions. It helps us build rapport and relationship, as well as evaluate honesty and truth. Any effort that involves negotiation, persuasion, and influence benefits from this universal, human ability.

Human facial expression of emotion is also innate to us. We all do it from infancy. In as few as four months, a baby's brain can process and analyze faces at near-adult levels, according to recent psychology research at Stanford.¹¹ In contrast, most toddlers start speaking between 18 and 24 months and most children start reading between the ages of 5 and 7 years. As you see in Figure 3.2, infants read human faces in one twentieth the time they begin to read basic words. Further, infants' ability to recognize and read faces is prioritized over other skills; non-facial images and objects are analyzed at lower levels of our visual systems. Infants are extremely responsive to facial emotions; our social lives start early and begin with faces.

This is not learned behavior based in mimicry. Our ability to read and write emotions to our faces is nearly statistically identical when comparing expressions of blind and sighted people. This consistency is also observed in studies of twins and families, as well as reviews of developmental literature and analyses of nonhuman primates. One of the gifts of being human is that our faces all speak the same language and we don't have to learn how to do it. So, why are we hiding our faces so often in our professional lives? How much more successful might we be if we got face to face more often?

THE EYES HAVE IT

Latin for “Little Brain,” the cerebellum is a primal and primarily subconscious region of the brain that's evolved over millions of years. It allows us to lock eyes on a moving target, as well as to communicate and connect both consciously and subconsciously.¹² Even brief eye contact with another person can trigger empathetic feelings and draw us closer together through the release of the neuropeptide hormone oxytocin (the “love hormone”).¹³ Humans are motivated, then, to make and maintain eye contact with one another.

This connection through the eyes can be so mentally stimulating that research has shown we have trouble performing other mental tasks while we're engaged in eye contact.¹⁴ We're more likely to remember the face of a person with whom we've made eye contact and more likely to believe what he or she says to us.¹⁵,¹⁶ Without eye contact, we perceive people to be less sincere and less conscientious.¹⁷,¹⁸ Connection through the eyes is an important social and relational development for us; it's highly functional. As with the facial expressions of emotion, it runs deep in the human experience.

In those moments of eye contact is also a human connection, an ethical impulse, a spark of morality. French phenomenologist and Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about the significance of “the eyes of the Other” and the face of the other.¹⁹ Awareness of self is preceded by and only made possible through recognition of another person. As we look at another, we look at ourselves and at all of humanity. Through this, we gain a sense of obligation—an ethical and empathic impulse. We're obliged to return thoughts and behaviors in kind.

Face-to-face connection affects us meaningfully and even involuntarily. Direct eye contact inspires spontaneous mimicry of others, enhances affiliation with others, and improves social interaction. One study found evidence that a direct gaze “rapidly and specifically enhances mimicry of intransitive hand movements.”²⁰ So, the eyes have it in both an immediate and an infinite way. And about those hand movements …

TALKING WITH YOUR HANDS

An analysis of thousands of hours of TED talks found that the most popular talks were delivered by people who made an average of 465 hand gestures. The least popular? About half as many gestures, at 272.²¹ Our hands are tied to our use of language—both as speakers and listeners. They help us speak more clearly, quickly, and effectively. They help people pay attention, perceive the speaker as more passionate and enthusiastic, and understand more information. As extensions of our thoughts and emotions, our hand movements enhance our communication.²²

In person and in video, keep your hands in front of you. Their absence can trigger feelings of distrust. Maintain fluid motion—natural and smooth, rather than robotic or abrupt. Palms open at a 45-degree angle conveys honesty and openness while palms down conveys confidence. Palms at 90 degrees facing each other and fingers closed together conveys expertise. When you clasp your hands or touch your neck, face, or hair, we see you as hesitant and unsettled.²³

Some ways to use your hands in person and in video are the following:

• Conveying openness, confidence, or authority
• Listing and counting
• Enhancing the contrast between this and that
• Gesturing toward you or me
• Emphasizing sizes or quantities of things
• Bringing things together or sending them apart

Because our hands help communicate our messages, they increase the value of video. So do our posture and entire body. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy popularized the concept of power posing with her 2012 TED talk and 2015 book Presence. The main idea is that when you change your body's posture, you change your chemistry and behavior. Though there's been some academic debate about the effectiveness of power posing, we've successfully taught some of the techniques for use in video.

In an online training class, we asked dozens of people to record a video. Then, we taught them physically expansive and open “high-power” poses (for example, standing upright with hands on hips like Wonder Woman). We cautioned against physically contracting and closed “low-power” poses (for example, hunching or leaning inward with arms or legs crossed). Afterward, each person recorded a new video. Most of the new videos felt far more confident to both subject and viewer. Even if you don't intentionally pose, staying aware of your posture and body language should improve your on-camera and in-person presence.

To assure that your hands and more of your body appear in your videos, step back from the camera or move the camera away from you. This breaks you out of a tight head-and-shoulders shot and gives you a wider view that most people find more flattering. Few people like to see their faces fill the frame. An inability to see your own hands because of a tight shot can give you the awkwardness of Will Ferrell's “I'm not sure what to do with my hands” scene as Ricky Bobby in the 2006 comedy Talladega Nights. The scene was hilarious, but the struggle is real.

On business trips, we often rely on our laptop webcams from a hotel room for a video call or video email. Unless the laptop's set back, I feel like I'm in a tight box. Back at the office, though, a wider-angle webcam set up in the corner of the room opens things up dramatically and allows better nonverbal communication. And if you're using a smartphone, you might want to use (gasp!) a selfie stick to create a wider view than if you just held it out with your arm.

Get your hands into the frame from the top of your video by starting with a friendly wave, by briefly holding up a whiteboard, notecard, or notepad with a message, or by gesturing toward something in the room. From there, speak as comfortably as you would if you were at a social event or across the table over coffee. Use your upper body, including your hands, to express yourself. You'll be more comfortable, and your viewer will warm up to you quicker.

THE WARMTH OF YOUR SMILE

Another important idea advanced by many researchers working with the Stereotype Content Model, including Amy Cuddy, is how people judge us upon meeting us—whether in person, in video, or in typed-out text. They use two main criteria: warmth and competence. Warmth translates to trust, rapport, and relationship. In a sales context, it's their desire to work with you and the ease with which they say yes to you. Competence is your knowledge and expertise. It's your perceived ability to get the job done well.

The person with the best credentials, of course, doesn't always win. The person who connects most effectively often does. This is because even though people judge us on both criteria, warmth trumps competence. People need to know that you're going to use your competence with their best interests in mind, and warmth bridges that gap. In famous words attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, John Maxwell, and others, “People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

As shared in the previous chapter, people tend not to perceive you as a thinking, feeling person as they read the email you wrote. Personal videos, on the other hand, establish that you're a real person and warm up your relationships. One universally understood conveyance of warmth: the smile. Smiling provides many personal and professional benefits. Just as you want to make regular eye contact throughout a video or a lunch meeting, an occasional smile (especially at the start and close) helps you build trust and rapport. And it feels good. Smiling is a valuable and healthy habit.

Personal Benefits of a Smile

• Reduces stress (releases neuropeptides)
• Relaxes you and lowers blood pressure (releases dopamine, endorphins)
• Improves your mood (releases serotonin)

Professional Benefits of a Smile

• Makes others perceive you as more relaxed, attractive, warm
• Makes others more likely to believe you're a nice person
• Makes other more likely to comply with your requests²⁴

Just as it's advised to “smile before you dial,” smile before you hit “Record” to put yourself in a better mood and make a good first impression. When you can be yourself fully and express yourself naturally in simple videos, both your competence and your warmth come through.

OUTSMARTING OUR MENTAL SHORTCUTS

Why is video so much more effective than text for judgments of warmth? Among the many reasons is the dual theory of the mind. On one side are rationality, logic, reason, intellect, and thinking. On the other are irrationality, emotion, instinct, impulse, and feeling. This is a long-standing model that dates back to Plato's allegory of the chariot. The Greek philosopher described two horses, one of noble breed (logic) and the other of ignoble breed (emotion), pulling our minds forward. We struggle to keep them working together at a proper pace on the path to enlightenment.

In a contemporary context, Daniel Kahneman, one of the world's foremost behavioral economists and a Nobel Memorial Prize winner, captures the idea with System One and System Two in Thinking, Fast and Slow, one of the most well-received books of 2011. System One is gut, emotion, and instinct. It’s the source of that good feeling about a person within a few seconds of meeting him or her. System One is thinking fast. Also in play is System Two, thinking slow. It's logic and reason. It takes more energy to crank through this mental processing. Because our brains are efficient, slow thinking is a slave to fast thinking. We make most decisions with System One. Projects get kicked up and assigned to System Two only out of need. And even then, our emotion and impulse are at the root.²⁵ Review the differences in Figure 3.3 before seeing the two systems at work in one of Steve's decisions.

When Steve bought a motorcycle, he shared with me his excitement about the great gas mileage he'd get compared to his car. He'd save some real money. What a great reason. So smart. Who doesn't want to save some money by increasing fuel efficiency? Of course, that logic didn't drive his decision. Instead, it was driven by emotion. He imagined the experience of letting loose out on winding, country roads. What a great feeling. So freeing. Who doesn't want to enjoy the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground? He rationalized an emotional decision. Both of Kahneman's Systems are operating. Each of us is constantly riding Plato's chariot.

You may be thinking: Fascinating. So what's this mean for my business communication? As we work to inform and influence people, we often rely on plain text to get the job done. When someone receives your three-paragraph email or typed-out Facebook message, which system of thinking are you engaging? That's right: System Two (slow). Our minds labor as they parse through phrases, sentences, and paragraphs to discern your meaning, purpose, and opportunity. Yes, most people are capable of doing that, even if slowly or poorly. But it doesn't engage them in the way that serves both parties best.

We want to engage System One (fast) to give people that positive, gut feeling and to generate that instinctual “I like this person” reaction. We want to establish warmth before competence. Rehumanizing your business with personal videos restores the balance in how we engage people.

Do you know how many decisions we make every day? I don't, either. But it's not dozens or hundreds. We likely make tens of thousands of decisions daily. One widely cited number is 35,000. We start with things like whether to hit the snooze button on the alarm or get out of bed. A couple of hundred decisions are made each day just on what to eat. With all this mental activity, much of it done in the background without our immediate awareness, why aren't we completely exhausted within an hour of waking? Because our brains seek patterns, then create rules and shortcuts. Refined through millennia of training and development, our minds are highly efficient.

When you receive an email with an opening line wanting “just 15 minutes of your time,” what's your first thought? Maybe, Here comes the sales pitch! or More like 30 minutes, right? This is pattern recognition, which we turn into mental shortcuts. Should we delete or engage? Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of marketing, business, and psychology and author of Influence, Yes!, and Pre-suasion, describes this as “click-whirr” decision making.²⁶ The same stimuli produce the same responses because of shortcuts. I've received several hundred of these cold emails, so I recognize them, and the same goes with with LinkedIn connection requests. Too often, the company name, sales-related job title, overly friendly message, and lack of mutual connections work together to say one thing: “I'm going to direct-message you a sales pitch as soon as you accept this connection request.” In weaker moments, I accept them anyway. And nine times out of 10, the mental shortcut I've created is validated … the sales pitch comes seconds later.

When you arrive in an inbox or text message with a smiling face, a friendly wave, and eye contact, you're breaking a pattern and violating an expectation. The medium itself is an unanticipated message. You're not sending another faceless request for “just 15 minutes” of someone's time. As Keenan, President, CEO, and Chief Antagonist of A Sales Guy Inc., describes in his book Gap Selling, you're “triggering the ACC,” or the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain that connects to both the “emotional” limbic system and “cognitive” prefrontal cortex.

Among other jobs, the ACC detects errors and monitors conflict; it constantly hunts for things that violate norms and expectations, then highlights and calls attention to them. It forces a judgment and decision. A message rehumanized with a personal video demands attention and action because it breaks a pattern.

To outsmart our mental shortcuts, you need to be seen. And once you have that attention, your video improves communication, connection, and conversion. When you break up the email and voicemail pattern with a video, we have no predetermined path, so we're forced to engage with and evaluate your message. You're triggering our ACC, so we see you.

Instead of deleting another plain email because it fits the pattern, we're meeting you and assessing the opportunity you represent. We're weighing your warmth and your competence. We're subconsciously looking for signs of trust. You're helping us say yes. That yes may be a micro-conversion of replying or scheduling a call or it may be a macro-conversion of choosing you and signing a contract.

Personal video is rehumanizing. It helps you make Marche's “flight back to the face.” It puts you, the messenger, back into your messages. In the words of the authors of Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications: “Nonverbal communication adds nuance, shading, and depth of meaning to all communication, and strictly verbal media—email, text messaging—deprives us of most of that.”²⁷ Video injects nonverbal information back into the media you and your team rely on every day. If you're still deciding whether video's a good fit for your business, we present six specific signs that indicate that you need it in the next chapter.