Examining Body Language and Psychological Sales Tactics with Gavin Stone

Mike (01:32.342)
Gavin. Thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B sales for podcast today.

GAVIN STONE (01:41.225)
No problem, thank you for having me.

Mike (01:44.702)
Now, we're looking forward to this. So for our listeners, this is gonna be a very different episode. So as you'll find out, Gavin's not got a traditional sales or agency or consultancy background. So we'll find out more about who Gavin is right now. So Gavin, who are you? What's your background? And something unusual about yourself.

GAVIN STONE (02:06.005)
Certainly. So yeah, I've worked in intelligence for around about 20 years on and off. So that's one of my main backgrounds. I've written a bestselling book called How to Tell If Someone is Lying. And I'm just starting my career path as an author. And as of last week, I've just gone up in the rankings from number 28 in the world to number nine in the world body language expert.

Mike (02:28.054)
Wow, okay. And I've never met anyone who's been an expert in body language before, so this will be fascinating. When you say intelligence for the audience, what do you mean by intelligence?

GAVIN STONE (02:29.93)
Hehe

GAVIN STONE (02:34.375)
Yeah

GAVIN STONE (02:39.509)
So the traditional kind of intelligence agencies that most people are familiar with are gonna be things like the CIA, MI6, MI5KGB. Everybody's gonna be thinking straight away of like kind of James Bond explosions and fast cars. Unfortunately, it's not quite like that for all of us. I wish it was. Few martinis maybe, that'd be about it. But yeah, what we're generally doing is we are approaching people who are in positions that.

have access to secrets from their country or secrets that we need and we kind of recruit them is the term as an asset to be able to kind of get that information for us.

Mike (03:18.85)
Perfect. So let me start off with the first question. So how and why do the intelligence community use psychology and human behavioral science to elicit intelligence?

GAVIN STONE (03:32.617)
Right, this is going to be the main reason why most intelligence guys end up going into sales. And it's because if you can get into whether it's a foreign country or your own country, and you can talk somebody into breaking the law, committing treason, risking their life, all because you want something that they've got, and there's not much of a massive reward for them. You know, there might be a little bit of a financial gain or something along those lines. But if you can talk that person into doing it, then you end up.

with probably one of the hardest sales that there is in the world. So what we do is we tend to get as much information on that person as quickly as possible in a very timely fashion to get used to what their motivation is. And when we know what that motivation is, then the psychology behind it and the profiling behind it will allow us to pull the right levers as it were.

Mike (04:24.446)
And so how do you find out quickly what someone's motivations are? Is it just like innate instinctive or are there tools that you use?

GAVIN STONE (04:28.828)
Okay, so

GAVIN STONE (04:33.821)
So yeah, a little bit of both. And again, it depends what agency you're working for. So MI6 tend to go down a slightly different route and they tend to hire people who already have an innate ability to be able to look at most people, judge and read them. They can help them to hone those skills and they teach them the psychology side of it. Whereas CIA have a different approach and they will hire somebody who's just a blank slate and they will train them in absolutely everything they need to know.

you know, on how to do it. So, to do it in a timely fashion, what they'll tend to do usually is look at their personality type. And you can usually get that from a person within minutes, whether they're an intelligence-based person, a strength-based, pity, acceptance, recognition, whatever the case may be. You can usually, these things are generally on display for us to figure out what that person is.

Mike (05:25.918)
Ooh, so just dig into that a little bit more. So you reeled off about six or seven different personality types and you said you can tell pretty quickly what kind of person they are and I'm like, whoa, can you really?

GAVIN STONE (05:28.597)
Hehehehe Sure yeah

GAVIN STONE (05:42.469)
Yeah, so I mean, again, some people you do have to probe a little bit. Some people it's a little bit more obvious. So hypothetically, if they're a recognition based person, then this is going to be the person wearing all the Gucci. They're going to be somebody who they want recognition by the people around them. So they're going to be in the Bikers Clubs or the Bowling Club or whatever, that kind of thing. And they will have the fleet with the logo on it and that kind of thing. And the recognition.

Look at everything from the jewelry the Rolex the car they're driving Are they are they doing something that's head-turning or to grab attention? And that's so that that's like kind of your recognition type person and again, you know You can go into all the different personality type strengths, you know You're looking for somebody who's obviously visually visiting the gym or they're wearing muscle t-shirts Are they aggressive are they the kind of people who brag about oh, you wouldn't come touch me and you know this kind of you know

And it doesn't even have to be physical strength, it could be mental strength, you know, trying to dominate a room as it were. So there's lots of different of these personality types. And if you do look for them, look for the cues, they are there. And again, it take me kind of too long to go through everything you're looking for and everybody, you know, but yeah, so but you can generally get to grips with the personality type. And then from that personality type, then you then will be able to figure out

Mike (06:39.233)
Yep.

Mike (06:58.554)
Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (07:08.329)
what's motivating them. And this is gonna sound really, really gray for a moment. If you understand that most people's, in fact, pretty much everybody's personality type is generally stemmed from hurt and insecurity. And I know this sounds really, really dreadful. I don't wanna go down a gray path, but what happens is, yeah. Yeah, these are people's coping mechanisms, you see.

Mike (07:26.994)
No, no, but interesting.

GAVIN STONE (07:32.993)
Um, so if they weren't accepted as a very young child, they will do whatever it takes to get accepted as they grow, whether that be, you know, going to the gym and building out because they were the skinny kid or whether it was, whether it's wearing the latest brands because they, whatever it was that got them their, their kind of recognition or, or made them feel better about themselves to cover that hurt and insecurity. So, uh, so leading us away from the gray path and, you know, even though those can be used as levers, you don't want to be.

going down the road of looking for the hurt and insecurity, what you wanna be doing is you wanna be going down the route of recognizing their personality type and rewarding what that personality type is. If it's a pity personality, for example, rather than saying, oh, get over it, you need to say, oh, that sounds really rough, you know? I don't know many people who could deal with that the way you are. And it gives them that little bit of a dopamine rush to kind of then associate it with you and what you're doing, so.

Mike (08:04.68)
No.

GAVIN STONE (08:30.025)
Does that make sense so far? I've done a good enough job of...

Mike (08:31.406)
So what, yeah, yeah. So it's what the kind of the non-trained people in the audience, which includes me, would be. So I'd call that empathy. Is that what I try and do is if I meet someone, I'm trying to tune into what kind of person they are. I'm trying to empathize. I mean, like all salespeople, we're trying to find out what motivates you the person and what they're interested in and what their issues are and what's gone well recently and find out more about them. So I'm trying to empathize with someone.

GAVIN STONE (08:41.567)
Mm-hmm.

GAVIN STONE (09:01.709)
Yeah. And of course, one of the hardest things that a lot of people don't get when it comes down to this is most people will try empathizing from their own perspective, what they would do in that situation or how they would feel about it. And instead you do have to really kind of understand the person that you're talking to. So rather than looking at it like kind of, you know, what do I do to empathize this person? You know, you need to get under their skin a little bit and say, well, what kind of person are they?

Mike (09:16.696)
Ah.

GAVIN STONE (09:30.697)
What are they after? Do they want recognition? Do they want pity? Do they want acceptance? Do they want, you know, and then, uh, kind of dangle the carrot for that rather than kind of saying, oh, well, you know, if I were you and people go down this road of giving advice of what they would do and nine times out of 10, the person on the receiving end, they don't want to hear that they know intellectually what the, what they should do or whatever the case may be, but they're not interested in that they're interested in.

Mike (09:52.686)
Correct.

GAVIN STONE (09:59.997)
somebody giving them a pat on the head or telling them how strong they are, how intelligent they are. So

Mike (10:07.818)
And also I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to be with people that are like us. And so if you've got someone who's giving you advice as soon as they meet you, A, they've not built any trust and B, they're not someone like you. Because if, I mean, I'm not the kind of person that would give someone advice. I wouldn't give you a lot of advice about anything. Yeah. The moment I've met you, I'd never do that. If you ask me for advice around a particular situation where I've got expertise,

GAVIN STONE (10:33.001)
Nana.

Mike (10:37.442)
then I would elicit what I find across many circumstances that look like your situation. Even then, I wouldn't tell you what you should do because my experience is human beings hate being told what to do.

GAVIN STONE (10:51.033)
Oh, yeah, without doubt. I mean, one of the worst things you can do is actually, you know, start giving advice to somebody who hardly knows you because straight away they're on the back foot of well, what makes you better? So what makes you so, you know, in a position to kind of give me advice? What how, you know, how is your life perfect? On the flip side, if you reverse that the best thing you can do in most in most situations is actually ask somebody for their advice, because of the fact that it then puts them where

Mike (11:18.997)
Exactly.

GAVIN STONE (11:20.137)
they're kind of going, oh, this person values my opinion. They're interested in what I've got to say. And so you can go down that route. You generally find asking for advice is a lot more beneficial and helps build a better bond a lot faster than definitely than giving it.

Mike (11:37.102)
So in the intelligence services, when someone's on overseas assignment and they're trying to kind of embed themselves into a different culture, in a different environment, different physical parts of the world, with a view to gaining intelligence, which they can feed back to their home country. How do you train people to start? I mean, basically, how do you become a spy?

GAVIN STONE (12:01.725)
Hahaha

Yeah, right. So there's a hell of a lot of training that goes into it. And without going down all the route of the driving and the shooting, that's the obvious stuff. There's a lot of time. Yeah, there's a lot of time spent on the psychology of things and kind of building relationships and building rapport with people. So, again, so when you when you are training, sometimes you will be given a target and you'll say, look, this is the person.

Mike (12:15.836)
Let's put that to one side. Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (12:34.633)
that we want you to infiltrate their life. And the spotter will tell you who, you will go and then find a way to do what they call a smile campaign. That smile campaign turns into hellos and introductions. Eventually you build up the relationship as friends and infiltrate a person's life, integrate yourself into their needs to the point where they feel like everything has to be, have you involved in it. On the other side, they may turn around and say, go out and find somebody who has access to X.

Mike (12:59.414)
Right.

GAVIN STONE (13:04.241)
And then that's a lot more difficult because there's a lot more work involved in first, you've got to locate the person before you've even started to infiltrate their life. So, yes, a lot of the training, like I say, is worked around the psychology of how to how to build a relationship from nothing up to somebody who's going to be relying on everything for you. So going back to what I said about a smile campaign, once you once you've established the personal, you've been told who the person is.

you do what's figure out what's their POL or patterns of life. And if you know they frequent a particular bar or walk the dog on a Sunday morning or whatever the case may be, you make a point to start with of being at the same place at the same time and build up that the familiarity.

Mike (13:49.394)
Okay

GAVIN STONE (13:51.573)
That familiarity helps build, yeah, I mean, I don't want to tell grandma how to suck eggs, but it just literally like say the smile becomes a hello, the hello becomes what you're doing it. And as you step by step by step, you build it up until you end up working off a system. Most people know it as mice, which is money, ideology, compromise and ego, sometimes called rice reward, ideology, compromise, ego, same kind of thing. And it's just

Mike (13:52.865)
Yeah, yeah.

GAVIN STONE (14:18.098)
that system is the foundation for kind of then recruiting them as an asset.

Mike (14:23.566)
And so what was Rice again? How does that work?

GAVIN STONE (14:26.685)
reward. So reward, ideology, compromise and ego. Sometimes the compromise is changed to coercion, but the same thing. And those are your, those are your kind of main areas of how you're going to recruit the asset. Usually the most common one is money. It works in the majority of instances, whether that's somebody who's in debt, or whether it's just somebody who's greedy, not many people want to turn money down, especially if it's something that's very simple.

Um, ideology again, everything from, you know, way back in the cold war when it was Russia and we were trying to sell the, the idea of the better life in the West, right up to the middle East, where, um, there are certain living conditions that they've got that we wouldn't tolerate here, uh, amongst certain community and demographics, um, compromise, uh, speaks for itself. You know, I have a photo of you with somebody you shouldn't be with. Um, um, and then ego is just like kind of, um,

Pretty girl playing you with drinks saying, oh, I bet you've got access to all kinds of secrets. Which, yep.

Mike (15:28.974)
So how true was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, do you think, in terms of the way it portrayed that kind of whole spy community?

GAVIN STONE (15:38.717)
It did a very good job. Let me think, I'm trying to think if there's any specific parts. I literally it's been a long time since I've read the book. Yeah. I mean, I remember at the time reading it and thinking, yeah, you know, a lot of it is very good, like kind of true because in the, in the world of espionage, it's very different to the Hollywood layout of you have one objective.

Mike (15:49.131)
Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (16:07.709)
and it's mission impossible style, let's save the world. We've got to switch something off or steal a file or whatever the case may be. And that one objective, you get it done and it's game over, happy ever after. And that's not the case in the real world. A lot of the time we've got incomplete information. We never know whether we've done something that has made a difference, a slight difference or a major difference. Sometimes we do. At the same time, it's sometimes gonna be a very slow and painful process.

Mike (16:10.955)
Yes.

GAVIN STONE (16:36.993)
and that one objective is a fallacy. If we recruit an asset, it's somebody we want for as long as possible to keep getting as much information so it's an ongoing relationship between the case officer and the asset.

Mike (16:52.134)
And I guess what I'm picking up is this still goes on. So in the intelligence services, this is going on today all around the world.

GAVIN STONE (16:58.217)
Oh yeah!

GAVIN STONE (17:04.389)
Yep, every single country and every country is doing it to every country, even the allied countries, which is crazy.

Mike (17:15.23)
Interesting. OK. So second question. So if we turn our attention now away from the intelligence and spy community world into the sales world, how can commercial salespeople profile prospects ethically to understand their motivations and to influence them? What practical things could someone do when they're looking at selling to someone to profile those kind of prospects?

GAVIN STONE (17:19.956)
Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (17:45.117)
Yeah. So I love the fact that I've always said to most salespeople that you're not selling a product, you're selling a dream. And if you're trying to get somebody to look at the schematics of something or the dimensions of something, you're doing it all wrong. Again, depends on which kind of industry you're in. I mean, real estate, for example, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most wonderful and easiest things to sell in the world. It's something that...

If you can't sell a home that has every dream available in every room to a couple or whatever that want to buy that dream, then stop selling, stop trying. So yeah, if you sell the dream, and it is very easy, like I said, with real estate, you can say to the person who is the decision maker or has the influence, imagine your family here.

Mike (18:40.606)
Right

GAVIN STONE (18:41.221)
Imagine it's a beautiful day and the kids are playing in the garden and so you're not saying it's got this and it's that far from the bus stop and it's this close to the amenities and forget all that. They don't care about that. They want to see their family. They've got this vision of their family being happy in this home and if you can sell them that dream, they'll justify it with all the other stuff.

Mike (19:03.754)
Interesting. Okay. So let's move on to... Yeah, yeah, exactly. In order to get the dream. So if we talk about NLP and for people that are listening, do you want to just explain first of all what NLP is and where it came from?

GAVIN STONE (19:04.861)
Yeah, they might even make compromises.

GAVIN STONE (19:16.661)
Mm-hmm.

GAVIN STONE (19:23.145)
Sure. Yeah, it was invented by a couple of people, James Grinder and Richard Bandler, who they looked at psychologists and they tried to figure out why some psychologists were having patients that were going for years and years and years with no success. Other psychologists were having patients and within a few weeks or sometimes as little as one session were happy to go on about their lives and problems solved. So what they did is they tried to figure out a success formula.

of what these psychologists were using to help their particular patients or subjects. Now with that, it kind of grew arms and legs because it became more than just being able to help them. It became like kind of how to influence people, how to control your own mind and the mind of others and that kind of thing. So it grew into this massive thing and NLP itself stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming for those who don't know.

So it's a way of the neuro, the brain being programmed through, through the language patterns that you use. Um, so for those of you want to use it in sales, um, especially if you've got like kind of teams of people working and you're wondering why your teams aren't working together, listen to the pronouns that, that people are using when they're being descriptive. And this is whether this is your customer or your sales team. And it gives you an idea again, it kind of loops back to personality type.

If they're somebody who is constantly saying, I love to do this, I'd love to work as part of the team, I'd love to get the team to this level, I want this, then that makes them an individually focused person. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, it doesn't mean they're selfish, it just means that they are trying to do their best as an individual for the group, as it were. Then if they're the kind of person that will use the pronoun you.

You know what I mean. If you go down the road, you will see rather than, you know, the alternative that somebody who's externally focused and they're focused on the other person or the other people in their team. And then again, you know, the same applies with we, this is a group or socially focused person and that they're the kind of person that will kind of not take charge, but they will want to do as much as they can combined. So that in itself will tell you.

GAVIN STONE (21:43.637)
that if you've got a group of people and say six of them and you've got five who are externally focused and one that's individually focused, he'll pretty much be ousted or not liked in the group and it'll result in conflict. So you wanna stick people like that together and the same applies with your customer. Listen to what their pronouns are that they're using purely because that will help you to sell to them.

you, you if you know how they operate, you know, what whether it's individually focused or externally focused, you can sell on that on that premise. And it's exactly the same with if they are audible, visual or kinesthetic people. So this is something again comes from the world from NLP, you probably know it better than I do. But if somebody is the type of person that will say, yeah, you know, you see what I'm saying, you see what I mean, look at things my way.

Mike (22:33.282)
The VARC model, yeah.

GAVIN STONE (22:39.049)
then you know they're a visual person. You know, if it's somebody who says you don't listen, you don't hear what I'm talking about, then they're an audible person. And again, using that same kind of language pattern will allow you to talk on the same wavelength as them and it'll definitely help you to sell.

Mike (22:54.506)
Okay. And so this is about, again, it's about tuning into what type of person they are, how they communicate, and then tuning into and reflecting effectively their way of behaving. Talk about kind of reflection. So again, back in the day when I was taught selling many, many years ago, they touched on NLP and the good things and the bad things about NLP with salespeople and how it can be taken too far.

GAVIN STONE (22:59.851)
Mm-hmm.

GAVIN STONE (23:04.276)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Mike (23:23.218)
about body language. So you were saying earlier on that you're a recognized leader in the body language world. Do you want to first of all just talk about what is that world? What does it mean? What do you do? And then secondly, touch on a few aspects of body language that salespeople can easily use. In particular, reflection and how you can appropriately reflect.

and how you can inappropriately reflect behavior.

GAVIN STONE (23:53.557)
Sure. So we'll start with the body language bit. So the body language community in itself, a great bunch of people and it's not, there's no cutthroat competitiveness between the majority of us. We're all pretty good friends and we all communicate together. So it's really, really great. And we all generally kind of will call each other up and say, hey, this happened today. And I think it means this, what do you think? So we will, we continue to learn even when you're kind of the best in the world.

Um, so that is something that even the guy who was at number one, I talked to him regularly and we still bat ideas around. Um, so for me, obviously it's been hugely useful in my world because I need to know if somebody's showing signs of deception and if they are, I need to kind of be aware of that because the intelligence and information that I was gathering, it was obviously very, very critical. Um, so for people in the world of sales.

There are some useful things that you can learn and I'll give you a few now. I will however say with the majority of body language, there is no one size fits all. So it's you get, you have to do what's called baselining the person and to understand what is normal for them and what they normally do. So for somebody, for example, who folds their arms regularly, it might not mean anything if they fold their arms while they're talking to you, but if somebody never folds their arms.

Mike (25:10.241)
Right.

Mike (25:17.311)
Exactly.

GAVIN STONE (25:18.373)
and then you ask them a particular question in their folder arms, then it could be a sign of, you know, deception or defensiveness. So, yeah, so once you understand what someone's baseline is, then you can understand when they deviate from the baseline because you wouldn't be able to recognize the change if you hadn't already said, right, what's normal for this person in these circumstances. So as soon as you know what's normal, it's easier to spot what's abnormal.

Mike (25:25.952)
Good insight. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Mike (25:43.255)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

GAVIN STONE (25:47.377)
With that in mind, when I said there is no one size fits all, there are a couple of things which go for the majorities out there, which are things that you can look for. Number one, one of the biggest indicators that somebody wants to get out of there is their body might be facing towards you, but their feet aren't. So if their feet are facing the door and they're angled, usually it's like I want to go. I know it actually probably sounds pretty obvious, but it really genuine.

Mike (26:04.851)
Right.

Mike (26:13.618)
No, no, I'd never thought of it. I'd never thought of it. But yes, that's a good indicator. Yes.

GAVIN STONE (26:19.945)
Yeah, and again, if you if you're at a say you're at a social gathering or you're a business venture or something along those lines and there's two people talking if you wander over and And you're talking to the you know, you've kind of introduced yourself high You know and the these two people were having this conversation if they start facing towards you both slightly bladed And you were to get a chalk and draw a line in between their feet your feet and the third person's feet if it makes a letter Y then

that means you're welcome. I use it as a why you are welcome into this kind of conversation, as it were. So if you can imagine like, you know, like an upside down Mercedes symbol, if you were to do that line between, yeah, and then your to let the table be bad, I'm not going to say what I use for that, for that particular one. But but yeah, so yeah, it's a carry on face

Mike (27:04.094)
Yeah, but if it's a letter T, a letter T would be bad.

Mike (27:12.178)
No, no, no.

GAVIN STONE (27:17.909)
T capital T shape, then you know, just say you could buy it. And it might not necessarily mean they don't like you. It just might mean that they're there, the conversation they're having, they want to continue and then they'd rather you not be part of it or don't want you to hear what they're particularly talking. So it might be subject, you know, not, not the person. So, so that's one to, to kind of bear in mind, especially if you've approached a couple of customers and they're having a discussion about, say they're about to buy a car and you've walked over and said, you know,

Mike (27:31.252)
Exactly.

GAVIN STONE (27:45.193)
Do you want any refreshments or something? If they both turn to face you, then you can carry on the conversation and the sale. If they're still carrying on facing each other and they say, no, we're good for a minute, thanks, turn around, wander off, they need a few more minutes. So, and then the other one, a nice big one, if you're talking to your customer at any point and they might turn around and say, oh, can you tell me what the Miles Brighalen is for this, please?

Mike (27:54.838)
Yep.

Mike (27:59.475)
Okay.

GAVIN STONE (28:10.609)
Um, and you've turned around and say, Oh, you know what? I'm not sure on the exact figures, but I know it's pretty good. And they put something in their mouth, whether it's a pen, whether it's a ponytail, they've pulled it out, you know, even their finger, whatever the case may be. Um, anything that's inserted into the mouth, please don't go down a naughty road with this, but anything that's inserted into the mouth, um, is, uh, is, is a need for reassurance. So, um,

Mike (28:29.025)
No.

Mike (28:35.745)
Ah, okay.

GAVIN STONE (28:36.765)
Yeah, so basically they might ask us something they might ask about the reliability, they might ask about the efficiency, they might ask about the value over time, whatever the case may be. If you give them an answer and they suddenly start putting their finger in their mouth or something in their mouth, then there's that need for reassurance. You need to, yeah, give that more attention. Um, so, and again, I'm not sure where that comes from. I've had a couple of guesses in the past that it might be related to.

Mike (28:51.146)
Yep, they're looking for reassurance.

GAVIN STONE (29:02.713)
breastfeeding or pacifiers as a child, you know, when it, when as a baby, you know, you need feeding or you need reassurance and comfort and therefore you get the, you know, the dummy, the baby's dummy, and it might be down to that. I don't know, but that's, that's literally just an educated guess. There's no science behind that. Um, so yeah, that's a couple of things, you know, that you can kind of take on board.

Mike (29:12.79)
Yeah.

Mike (29:21.919)
Okay, interesting.

Mike (29:28.214)
So also talk about reflection. So just in the last few minutes, talk about how to appropriately reflect body language so that someone feels comfortable and how to inappropriately reflect body language. Because this goes to the negotiation piece as well. So when people ask me about when I'm doing negotiation skills training programs, they ask me often about the kind of the reflecting pieces. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? And I say, well, it can be both.

The good thing when you're negotiating with someone, when you're trying to build a relationship and you're trying to build rapport, some elements of reflection are good. But if you over-reflect someone else's body language, it can really irritate someone and it can move against you in a negotiation.

GAVIN STONE (30:13.433)
Yeah. If you're going down the mime artist route, you know, the kind of mime in the mirror, kind of where you're doing it, then please stop. It's going to do you more harm than good. You basically, you don't need to be mirroring that person exactly for everything. You know, if they, for example, put their hands behind their head, you don't have to do that. If you've got them on their waist, you can just move them out and up a little bit. As long as it's

Mike (30:19.021)
Yes.

GAVIN STONE (30:42.273)
some kind of similar match, it doesn't need to be exact. So don't worry about that. And then the other thing I'm going to give you a breakthrough in the world of NLP, which is called pace, lead. And what this does is, if you're if you're reflecting, if you're whether you're doing what they call mirroring and matching, and they fold their arms, and then you fold their arm, your arms, right, then they undo them, then you undo them. Now you've done it twice, you've done two paces. Now what you do is lead, now you fold your arms.

If they then copy you, you then got rapport with them, you're in rapport. If they don't, then go back to pace, but pace twice. So many people get this wrong, they go pace, and they're like, why aren't I building rapport? And it's because you've gone down this my Martyrs route again. It's twice, you know, pace, lead. And then and what happens is, you go from being in rapport with somebody to kind of you've taken the lead and now they're matching to keep rapport with you and it's a subconscious thing.

Mike (31:29.425)
Uhhh...

GAVIN STONE (31:42.305)
So and that's how you can tell. And if the rapport is broken, then just go back again, just pay face lead and job done. And you can keep that to keep that rapport in step, you know, while you're going through the sales process.

Mike (31:43.083)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike (31:57.042)
Very good. Very interesting. And again, we're talking subtleties here. So if anyone's listening going, oh, I'll try that out, it's to be done appropriately. And it's a subtle thing, is that if they cross their arms, then immediately crossing their arms and looking at them, they're going to start to get a bit spooked. So I think it is, if I'm right, it's about subtlety in the way that you do it and appropriateness.

GAVIN STONE (32:01.353)
Mm-hmm.

Hehehe

GAVIN STONE (32:09.215)
Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (32:23.777)
Yeah, and of course it doesn't have to be a 100% match. It can be something where if they kind of sit back and they cross their legs in what I call the number four figure, if you know what I mean by that, where they've got like the kind of one leg up on their knee, you could simply sit back a little bit and cross your ankles.

Mike (32:45.729)
Right.

GAVIN STONE (32:46.862)
You don't have to be an exact, and I've said this and I'm repeating this, but you know, it just has to be somewhere in a similar region, just so there's some similar kind of movement to what you're doing, to what they're doing. So you know, you don't have to be an identical reflection.

Mike (33:05.134)
What's the benefit, Gavin? So why should people think about body language? What's the benefit in any kind of relationship that you're building, be it professional or personal? Why is body language important?

GAVIN STONE (33:17.065)
So with what you were saying there about the reflection side of it, that's something that it shows that you are like them. And if people think you are like them, it builds on that relationship of, oh, people generally irrelevant to the other. I'm not a bad person. So if I'm not a bad person, he's like me. So he must not be a bad person. So therefore you build that connection and that kind of rapport straight away, which is brilliant.

in the world of like kind of outside of business and in relationships, for me, body language has been invaluable to know when somebody's feeling vulnerable, when somebody's feeling insecure, when somebody's being deceptive, hiding something, it really, really helps me, you know, to kind of, um, you know, whether it, whether it's my, my other half, whether it's my children, and I can see something's wrong. I can then go a little bit further and say, Hey, you know, is there something you want to talk about or, you know, and, um,

and I've just got that slight edge and advantage over most people who You know can't quite yeah

Mike (34:18.666)
Yeah, exactly. No, but it's a very good point, Gavin, about young people, about children that we have, is that spotting the cues, you know, and the cues are quite subtle in our children about when they're starting to feel just slightly uncomfortable about something. And trying to find out what that is a real skill. Because if you confront them about, oh, you don't look very comfortable, what's wrong? They climb up.

GAVIN STONE (34:33.633)
Oh, yeah

GAVIN STONE (34:38.645)
Mm-hmm.

GAVIN STONE (34:43.552)
Yeah, yeah.

GAVIN STONE (34:49.617)
Yeah.

Mike (34:49.834)
So you've got to find a way of spotting the cue and then tuning into them.

GAVIN STONE (34:55.593)
That's it. Yeah. And because children naturally are, you know, very, very vulnerable and, and they, they don't want to, to kind of open up too easy. In fact, while we're on, if you don't mind me saying there was an instance not so long back where there was a child that was playing with the toys quite happily, lovely little kid happily playing away all the time. I mean, anybody walking in and out the room, no problem.

And then on one occasion, there was a gentleman who walked into the room. I'm not going to go into details on names or anything else, but this child just froze and put her arms down by her side and sat up back rigid. And he left the room again. She went back to playing with the toys again. This happened two or three times. And I called her dad aside and I just said, look, this is what I've seen. And I think you should look into it. And it turns out he was actually abusing her. So this is something when it comes to body language, children, we can learn so much from children. Look at.

If they do something different when one particular adult walks into the room irrelevant to what that different is, question it, please. It's important.

Mike (35:58.462)
Yeah, exactly. Kevin, it's been amazing. Insights into the world of espionage and intelligence, NLP, body language. So where can people find out more about you?

GAVIN STONE (36:02.601)
Yeah.

GAVIN STONE (36:10.133)
Brilliant. I'm on all the usual social media sites. Gavin Stone author on Facebook at author Gavin on Twitter. I have a YouTube channel, which is Gavin Stone author. And I get a lot of friends from the intelligence community, from like CIA, MI6, KGB. We all chat about stories from the field. And if anybody wants to contact me with regards to any kind of training or anything like that, I'm on LinkedIn. And the books I've done are on pretty much everywhere, but primarily on Amazon.

Mike (36:41.185)
Gavin, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks everyone for joining us on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast.

GAVIN STONE (36:43.061)
Thank you for having me.

Thank you very much for having me on.

Mike (36:49.57)
Brilliant. So I'm going to stop recording just to check.

GAVIN STONE (36:52.063)
Okay.