Welcome to It's a Good Life with Brian Bafini, founder of America's largest business coaching company.

Here's a short classic cut from one of our all-time favorite episodes.

Well, the top of the morning to you, and welcome to It's a Good Life. Have you ever heard the phrase

be, watch your P's and Q's? Well, we are going to take that to a whole new level today.

We have a very special guest. Her name is Vanessa Van Edwards. She is the leader at the Science

of People and lead investigator there. Her mission is to help introverts leverage their strengths,

show high

achievers how to activate their secret skills and teach awkward people to feel more confident.

I'm a little bit of all three, so I can't wait for this. Vanessa, welcome to the show. Thanks for

being with us today. You are so charismatic. You're not awkward. You don't need me.

Well, thank you so much. Give us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and how you ended up in behavioral science. Oh my goodness. Well,

I was always scratching my own itch. I like to joke that I'm a recovering awkward person.

And I have a kind of an odd social predicament, which is that I tend to misinterpret cues.

Specifically, I tend to think that neutral cues are negative.

And I learned that my cue decoder was off.

And so I wondered very early on, if there was a way that we could study for cues, like we study

for a foreign language,

was there a universal code to the nonverbal signals we send, the vocal signals we send,

the verbal signals we send? So 17 years ago, I started my journey beginning to catalog these cues.

Little did I never guess it would have been useful for anyone but me. I started off

just making them for myself. And I realized that I thought that charisma was an innate trait.

I thought that you had to be born with it or you weren't. But luckily, anyone can learn to be

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