Impact Theory: Vanessa Van Edwards - Key Takeaways

These are notes from Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu #32 with Vanessa Van Edwards.

Anyone can learn anything - no matter who you are or your initial talent. The main difference between people is how much they can improve and how much effort they will need to put in.

You can "solve" people like you would solve a math problem by figuring out their core values, motivations, and the most effective method in communicating with them. By doing this you essentially know how people are wired and will understand where people are coming from when they make decisions.

People are like onions with multiple layers (Shrek was right lol). The outside most layer is the easiest to "solve", the Big 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. All you need is a small look into someone's life and some pattern recognition skills to figure out where people lie on the Big 5 spectrum.

Understand how you are naturally wired and optimize for it instead of fighting it. Figure out your own wiring before figuring out other peoples' wiring.

At some point you need to make a decision of having fewer but higher quality friends, or more quantity but less quality friends. Most social media friends are cotton candy friends, people you would love to see a few times at social events and are mostly only fun, but not meaningful. Figure out which friends are cotton candy friends (the ones you can have a few times, but too much is bad) and which ones bring you sustenance.

Ambivalent relationships are the ones that drain you. For toxic people, you completely understand since the line is clear. There's not much worrying about them. But for ambivalent relationships, you usually spend more time and energy worrying if they are actually your friend/you actually want to spend time with them. The boundaries are easy for toxic people, it's an easy no. But for ambivalent people the line is murky, leading to more mental energy spent. Everyone has a finite amount of this energy so using it up on ambivalent relationships can be very unproductive.

A good question to differentiate between ambivalent and toxic is asking whether or not you are ever doubting if they are happy for you.

People also pick up on chemical cues. We can smell emotions through the chemicals in our body odor. This means you might subconsciously pick up on chemical cues of the people around you, leading to a "feeling" you might have about someone. The worrying about people comes when there's a difference/discrepancy between the logical side of your brain reasoning about things and the more "animal" side picking up on subconscious cues.

A similar thing applies to facial structures where some people, by their facial structure alone, might seem more approachable or intimidating. By figuring out what you're resting facial structure is and the cues it gives off, you can do certain things to make yourself more approachable (ex. smiling more). You can find what cues your facial structure gives off by doing 2 activities. 1) if you were standing in an alleyway with your default expression, would people be intimidated (vs. the face of an old lady)? 2) put your head down in front of a mirror with your default expression then slowly lookup. No matter what you're natural expression is and the cues it gives off, it can still be used to your advantage. Know when to sometimes counteract/adjust.

Eyebrows up is the natural sign of engagement/interest in something.

(For radical honesty) instead of giving an excuse for something, instead, be honest and try to find a work-around.

Know how the people you work with are wired so you know how to optimize for the success of the team. Some important things to know are communication style, personality matrix, and feedback style.

Scientifically, every relationship is a transaction and there are 6 main resource types including money and status. Finding out which resource motivates people is important when working with others. A way to figure it out is to see when people reacted very positively when you did x and see what that key factor was.

People show micro-positives and micro-negatives. These are subtle cues given off by people to show what they feel about something and can come from their tone, facial expression, body language, etc.

There are generally 3 tiers to relationships. Tier 1 is finding interests and personality traits. Tier 2 is finding the values of other people. Tier 3 is how you relate to them. (Here's 36 of them that will guide you through all 3 levels in a question format https://www.scienceofpeople.com/deep-questions/)

Figure out more of your logistical vs emotional worries to ask for help more efficiently. Logistical worries are more concrete and can be helped through specific actions. Emotional worries can be helped with others or by yourself, depending on how you cope with stress/how you worry.

Learned helplessness is when people learn to be helpless, and even when the stressor isn't there anymore, you stay helpless. The same applies to happiness. You can unlearn your unhappiness and raise your baseline. Most happiness actually comes from the small little day-to-day things, not the large once-in-a-while events. Rank your happiness when doing different everyday things and also how often you are doing them. Then try and figure out how you can do more of the small things that make you happy. Small moments of gratitude can add a lot of happiness to your life.