ep. 85 - Traci Brown
Bio
Question: What do Lance Armstrong, Chris Christie and Vladimir Putin have in common?
Answer: Traci Brown’s revealed their secrets to the world
And she’s told the world what they’re not saying. NBC, CBS and Fox have asked this body language expert to reveal secrets hidden in plain sight. And she can help your team reveal the secrets your clients are keeping from you that are impacting your bottom line.
In her fast paced, interactive programs that are sure to entertain, Traci teaches lie, fraud and identity theft detection she’s used to get to the truth in billion dollar business deals, crimes and politics.
Traci is not only a master lie detector, she’s a persuasion expert. Her persuasion system landed her a lucrative product deal with Kevin Harrington, a Shark from ABC’s hit show Shark Tank and took her on a wild ride to the big time consumer markets of TV shopping channels, infomercials and beyond.
Traci has even adapted the skills to talk herself out of an embarrassing number of traffic tickets. She’ll teach you how to do it, too!
Transcript
ep. 85 - Traci Brown
Gail Davis: Can you tell who's pants are on fire? Our guest today is a body language expert and a leader in fraud prevention. She's a frequent guest on TV, interpreting the body language of criminals and politicians. [00:01:00] She says, "Sometimes both labels describe the same person." She's the author of How to Detect Lies, Fraud and Identity Theft. Please welcome our in-studio guest, Traci Brown.
Traci Brown: Hey, thanks for having me.
Gail Davis: So glad you're here. We were talking a little bit before we went to recording, and you have a very interesting story on how you got into body language. Why don't we start by sharing that with our listeners?
Traci Brown: It all starts years ago when I was racing bikes. I was racing [00:01:30] road bikes and like I said to you, and many people listening to me recognize one of my former teammates. His name was Lance. He's a pretty fast guy. There's no two ways about it. That's really where I started my study of body language inadvertently because I'm pretty tall. I'm 5'9". Bike racing is for little people, so I had my weight working against me.
I had to learn to keep up with him and guys like him. I had to learn to read my competition and know [00:02:00] what they were going to do before they did it, so I'd look for tiny things like the drop of a shoulder or the angle of someone's back or maybe a little hitch in their petal stroke. Over time I was able to correlate that with what was going to happen next, and I could get a jump on people.
When I started paying more attention to my competition in that way than I did to the road and any other factors, that's when I began to win. It worked pretty well. I landed a spot on Team USA, and I won three [00:02:30] national championships in college. I had a great career out of things. It was from paying attention differently, paying attention to what was more than immediately obvious.
Kyle Davis: You know, in football, just because I played it in college as well, they teach you to don't look at the eyes, look at the hips because the hips don't lie, tip stole from Shakira. The point in the direction of someone who's going to run, they may look one way, but they're going to run another. I've never heard of another sport, especially cycling [00:03:00] where you don't get to see someone's face or see something like that start to pick up on movements like a drop of the shoulder or a click in the leg. What made you start to pick on those things?
Traci Brown: Losing made me start to pick up on those things.
Kyle Davis: That does help.
Traci Brown: I had to figure it out. Here was a sport I loved that I was doing horribly at partly because I was so big. A lot of my competition, the top girls we're only 5'2", 5'3", so I had to [00:03:30] do things differently in order to be able to compete. I was bound and determined to figure out what that was, and that's what I began to fall back on was body language.
Kyle Davis: When in your cycling career did this start to gain traction for you?
Traci Brown: Really early because I would always train with the men. A lot of times I would jump in and race in the men's races. Lance and his buddies were in there too. That's automatic, [00:04:00] what do you call it, the disadvantage. That was the automatic disadvantage, just jumping in a men's race because it turns out they really are stronger than us.
Kyle Davis: Maybe. Finally, did you ... The whole curious thing last week on Instagram. Did you see the picture of the guys legs after the hill course. [crosstalk 00:04:20], this whole veiny ... Nevermind, that's a whole other thing.
Traci Brown: Oh, Tour de France. Yeah, they all look the same. They're all skinny. Yeah.
Gail Davis: How did you make the leap [00:04:30] from you personally observing body language of fellow cyclists to realizing you actually knew a lot that would translate to sales and to negotiations? How did you bridge that?
Traci Brown: There was an intermediate step there, and that is that I also was really curious about how my mind was playing an effect on my results. I went out and I got trained in hypnosis and neurolinguistics and even Hawaiian Huna. All [00:05:00] of those disciplines teach you the first thing you got to do is read people because the information that you need from them to get them to change, to get them to shift is right in front of you. The question is, are you going to pay attention? Are you going to see what's going on and respond to the messages that they're screaming at you without saying a word?
I saw clients for a lot of years, and I thought that I just wanted to work with athletes, and I actually did just want to work with athletes. It [00:05:30] turns out it's a really small pool of clients at that point, so I expanded to any affliction anybody could ever have, I've heard it, and I've helped people get to the other side of it. It's because I have this experience with clients of just sitting there and reading them daily over and over and over with different people for years and years and years. That's how I [00:06:00] really learned the nuts and bolts of body language and integrated it into I guess the way I operate every day.
Gail Davis: Let me try to get clear on that. People were coming to you initially who were competing or trying to overcome an issue and looking to you to help them use the skill of body language to increase their performance?
Traci Brown: Not the skill of body language. Their mind. Their mental performance. What's going on in their head. Maybe a golfer [00:06:30] would come and he'd have the yips. The yips is when you can't putt. We would work and in not too long, he would not have that problem anymore, but I would be reading his body language all the time, so that when we were working together, I knew what was on his mind, what he wasn't saying, pulling out the information that I needed to get him over the fence to great performance.
Kyle Davis: Essentially, sports psychology of trying to figure out what was, [00:07:00] whether it be an outside factor or just mental blockage?
Traci Brown: Yeah, thought pattern. Yeah. Most of it's just thought patterns that aren't effective. They come up in the most important area of your life, so you got to pay attention to them, so into my office they'd come. I wanted to transition out of that into speaking. I thought I was going to talk about human performance and use my sports background and all the clients that I've worked with, pump up corporate America and then leave. It turns out, it's pretty [00:07:30] hard to sell.
Gail was talking about athletes, they need a moderated Q&A session, not to give them the microphone on their own. Right about then, the recession hit. Everything I had, canceled. Everything. I think quarter one of 2009, I believe my income was $300, and I really had nothing going on. A client of mine called and he said, "Hey, you know this body language stuff."
I said, "Who cares. [00:08:00] Nobody cares."
He goes, "No, I need you to come in and put together a program for my lawyers. Money to pick and persuade a jury has just dried up with all the money in the recession that went away. I know that you know how to help them do this. Put together a program and come in. I'll see you in three weeks."
That's really how it went. I just ran with it. It was ... Was it divinely orchestrated? [00:08:30] I don't know, or just luck, but that's what I did. I've since extrapolated all kinds of body language talks, mostly for sales, but lately I've been getting into fraud prevention. It turns out that there's a lot of fraud that happens in person.
Kyle Davis: To start with the jury selection kind of process. I know that there's companies that bring in experts that sit by the wayside and say, "Hey, let's not get that person. Pick that person. That person didn't like the answer or didn't answer truthfully." [00:09:00] Instead of them hiring out somebody, you would come in and then teach the lawyers what to look for?
Traci Brown: Absolutely, and I would rather do it that way. A lot of the jury consultants, the lawyers have problems with them because they come from outside and they don't know maybe the neighborhoods in the area and how people generally think in certain groups that are local. I'd rather equip the lawyer with the tools.
You can tell how if you ask one person a question, you can tell what the other [00:09:30] people think about that person's answer and about that person. They'll either associate or disassociate their selves with them just through watching their body language, so I would rather teach the lawyers themselves, so that they don't need me to be in the courtroom.
Kyle Davis: Well, you made an interesting comment. Location, not location, but maybe regional influence has an impact, so if you're-
Traci Brown: It's right down to the neighborhood [00:10:00] has an impact.
Kyle Davis: Can you give an example?
Traci Brown: Yeah. If you go to south Dallas, there's a different group of people that live in south Dallas than live in north Dallas. They're going to think a different way, and so if you have a crime that happened in south Dallas, let's say, you may want to start to understand, because you want a quote neutral jury, but you may want to understand people's tendencies just based on where they live. Is it generalizations? Yeah, absolutely, but that local knowledge isn't something that a trial consultant's going to be able [00:10:30] to replicate of a local lawyer.
Kyle Davis: Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
Gail Davis: Are there some favorite questions that you have in jury selection? I'm just curious.
Traci Brown: You know what? There's really not, but what I like to do is start to watch their reactions. If one person says ... One of the questions is, "How do you feel about the police?" One person goes on a tirade about how [00:11:00] terrible the police are, you will see people lean away that disagree with that comment the same way you will see people lean toward that guy who's having the tirade if they agree.
Gail Davis: It's almost like asking that question, you may or may not learn something from the person you ask, but you sure can learn a lot from the other people potentially on the panel.
Traci Brown: Exactly, and when you start to understand that lawyers ... They don't select a jury. They deselect their people, [00:11:30] people that they feel have bias. Well, I say, "Great. You can deselect all the people you want, but wouldn't it be great if you could start to have some information that the other side didn't have about that person? Then you can move to selection a little more closely." It's really just through watching the pool, the jury pool.
Gail Davis: Is it a general truth what you just said that in general, if people lean toward you in a discussion, [00:12:00] they're in agreement, and if they pull back, they're in disagreement?
Traci Brown: I would say generally, yes. This becomes really important in the sales process. Is someone with you or are they not? Watching little things like this can make all the difference in closing a sale. It's not just about jury selection, it's about how can you use these tools broadly to get agreement and also find the rats in your own [00:12:30] business.
Kyle Davis: Whether it be jury selection or teaching people to become a better sales professional, especially when they do an in-person meeting, how long does it take for these skills that you're teaching people to pick up? There's some cases where people intuitively get it, but some people just don't.
Traci Brown: I think most of us intuitively get this. The Sheldon Coopers of the world don't.
Kyle Davis: That's a Big Bang reference.
Traci Brown: However, [00:13:00] it can be learned. What I do is give us a set of rules or not necessarily rules, let's call them guidelines to operate by so that you can put some science behind a hunch you may have so that you can answer people's likely unspoken questions. Profile them just a little bit. Profiling has a bad name. Right now, I'm going to tell you it's the best thing you can do is to start to understand people [00:13:30] and what's likely going on over there and answering those questions, speaking to them in the language that they need to be spoken to in instead of just your language. Most of us aren't all that flexible in our communication. When you start to introduce that, you can connect with people more deeply.
Kyle Davis: What are, without selling the family farm, what are some those guidelines that people should probably look at when they're starting to read into people's body language so to speak?
Traci Brown: Well, I think Gail picked up a real [00:14:00] good one. Are they leaning forward, or do they seem interested or not? I can't tell you how many execs I have that work with me that say a sales guy comes in and just punches the start button on his mouth and starts talking. It's their script and that's what's going to get said without seeing that the CEO may be glazed over completely and is just not interested at all in what they have to say.
[00:14:30] Another one is when people cross their arms. People are going to cross their arms for a couple reasons. Generally, it puts a boundary between them and you, and the word on the street's like, "Oh, they're closed. They're closed to what you're saying." Well, the science says something a little different. The science says that they're actually comparing what you're presenting to what they know and what they know is different. Now, the risk is that if you leave them with their arms closed, their neurology is actually going to close off, so what you have to do is get [00:15:00] crafty and figure out how to get them to uncross their arms because you want them in an open neurology. Remember, where the body goes, the mind is going to follow. When you can get them to uncross their arms by any creative means, you're going to give yourself a much better chance of getting agreement.
We talked about this in the conference room just a few minutes ago. I've worked with a lot of hospitality and wedding vendors and things like that. A bride and groom came in to see this wedding [00:15:30] venue. It was down in Arizona. The bride was excited. The groom did not want to be there, crossed arms, and just a week before, the fellow had been in my talk, the proprietor, and I said, "Look, you keep drinks on hand. I don't care if it's water, coffee, something stronger, whatever," and he pours ... He sees this, and he pours the groom, and gave one to the bride too I assume, a glass of champagne, which where he was forced to open up his arms and take [00:16:00] the glass of champagne, carried it around the tour with him and they closed the deal like that. He was really excited all of a sudden.
You can do that with ... I have clients in the sewer industry. It's real sexy. They have branded hot sauce that they will use in their meetings and they've gotten a custom label on it. They'll open it up with chips when they see someone starting to shut down. The sales cycle's really long for those sewer clean-out trucks, [00:16:30] municipal trucks.
The car dealers that I work with, they'll keep a pen on their desk. They'll flick it off quote accidentally in the direction of their client who's beating them up on the price of a minivan such that they have to pick up the pen and hand it back to the sales guy. They make deals like crazy just through getting people to open up their ... Physiology's [00:17:00] going to open up their mind.
Kyle Davis: Well, open people up then.
Traci Brown: Yeah.
Gail Davis: I love that. I saw on some of the material on your website that you have a technique for people being able to talk their way out of a parking, or a speeding ticket-
Traci Brown: A speeding ticket. Yes.
Gail Davis: ... if they get stopped. That's great take-home value for all of our listeners, so do tell.
Traci Brown: Yes. Okay. This works a lot. Now, I have been pulled over, true story in the last four years, 10 times. I've been pulled over 10 times, and I'm running 90% of getting out of tickets. [00:17:30] I started to realize that I was using the same tools every time. What you got to do is understand the cop is looking for certain things that say you're either safe or you are dangerous.
First thing you got to do is roll down the window. Just pull over the car as soon as you can. Roll down the windows. Roll down the front window. Roll down the back window. Let them see in. They don't know if you've got a backseat full of guns, weapons of mass destruction, they don't know who you are. They have to assume that you're the last guy on America's Most Wanted, [00:18:00] so turn on the dome light. Let them see in if it's night. Then keep your hands on the steering wheel because what we want to do ... We want to be polite, and we want to rustle through your purse and get your driver's license and get your insurance, registration and all those papers. Don't do that. Just wait, hands on the steering wheel where they can see them, so let's say 10 and two or one and 11, whatever you do, and just sit there.
[00:18:30] They're going to come to the window, and remember, the feeling you give them is more important than any number they've seen on a radar gun, anything that they think they've seen you do. Your job is to say, "Hey, I'm safe." You got to watch your tonality. For one, don't cry. You got to keep it on. Keep yourself together. Then just answer the questions in a carefree tone that's a little bit [00:19:00] more slow than what you normally would. They're going to ask, at least in Colorado, where I get pulled over a lot, they're going to ... I like to think I'm a good driver, but maybe not. They're going to say, "Where you going? You know how fast you were going?"
Then you just slow it down. You go, "you know," nodding your head yes just real easy, not like a bobble head, just real easy, "it felt like I was just poking along," [00:19:30] forcing them to try on the idea. You've opened them up to that you're probably okay, forcing them to try on the idea that, "Wait a minute. Maybe you were just really poking along not going all that fast." Remember, just keeping your head on in the conversation ... Remember, cops are people too, and they have rarely decided, although they're supposed to, they've rarely decided if they're going to give you a ticket before they speak with you. [00:20:00] Sometimes they're going to give you a ticket no matter what.
Now, here's the thing. If it's the latter, than you're in trouble, but when they ask you "Give me your driver's license and your registration," and those kind of things, just go, "Okay, so that's in my purse and in my glove box. Is it okay if I get it out of there?" You've told them exactly where your hands are going to go, you've asked permission. Cops love to be in control. [00:20:30] Just let them. Just let them. Really, there's not much more to it than that. You've been agreeable. You've been compliant. You've showed them that you're safe and showed them a little bit of respect and yeah, like I said, a lot, a lot of people get out of tickets.
I get emails all the time from people getting out of tickets. I even have in my talks when I do this ... I have an in-car guide that I give people. It fits in the visor of your strap, and it's just instructions on what to [00:21:00] do to get out of a ticket. I got an email two days ago about someone who did that. They've never gotten out of tickets before, so it really works. It's just a fun way to put all your tools of reading people and persuasion and sending the right message together into one fun segment for keynote that really is effective.
Kyle Davis: Prior to going to record, you mentioned that there are some differences between you and other body language experts, and you just kind of tell it like it is whereas other people say what they need [00:21:30] to say to sell books or something else like that. I'm just wondering if you could expand on that for the listeners, so that they have some ideas as to what makes you unique versus the other experts.
Traci Brown: Well, yeah, we did talk a little bit before we went on the record here about other body language experts. One of the bits of feedback that I get from when I do TV is that I'm not afraid to [00:22:00] take a stand on a certain situation. I'm not the one that says, "Well, it could be this or it could be that," unless it actually is. I'm batting a thousand. Knock on wood. When I get on TV, it being very definitive with truth versus lies, guilt versus innocence, those kinds of things most of time, it's right there in the body language.
Gail Davis: I think what prompted you to tell us that you didn't mind taking a stand is we were talking about OJ Simpson, [00:22:30] and you were very clear that you think he did it.
Traci Brown: Yeah, I do think he did it just based on his murder trial tapes. Also, no one writes a book that says "If I did it," if they didn't do it. Give me a break.
Gail Davis: Another thing I read on your website is that you have a persuasion system and that you used your persuasion system to get a deal with one of the sharks from Shark Tank.
Traci Brown: [00:23:00] I did.
Gail Davis: I'd like to know a little bit more about that.
Traci Brown: Well, yeah, I got a deal with Kevin Harrington. He was on Season One of Shark Tank, and just to be real clear, I did not get air time on the TV show. They brought the sharks to the NSA conference, the National Speakers Association conference a few years ago, a couple years ago, and I was selected to pitch and I'm the one that got a deal. I got to tell you, working with those things is not for the faint of heart. [00:23:30] They have big ideas that they drop on you and expect you to accomplish in very short periods of time, but they have the connections to get a lot of things accomplished.
I was able to profile him. He was the one I knew I wanted. He invented the infomercial, and I just thought, "Wow, with my How to Get Out of a Traffic Ticket talk or segment, that has some retail potential," and he thought that it did too. [00:24:00] I was able to roll in some personal things about him into my pitch. I saw his eyes light up and he said, "I'll make that deal." It was one of the most amazing moment ... I'm even getting goosebumps talking about it. It was one of the most amazing moments in my life, not only business-wise, but also just because I was at NSA in front of all my peers. It was like getting an MBA in six months with his ideas and positioning. I have my [00:24:30] own infomercial now.
Gail Davis: So you took the product to market?
Traci Brown: Yeah, we took it to market, and we pitched the home shopping channels, there's three of them, so there's QVC, HSN and Shop NBC, and never made it on the air with them. Actually, what they told me was, "We love the product, but go out and ... We're only working with celebrities now. Go out, make yourself famous, come back to us in three to five years."
I thought, "Yeah, I'm going to get right on [00:25:00] that," but yeah, we pitched them, and they really liked it. It didn't get air time, but we went the infomercial route. I wrote and directed and cast and produced my own infomercial, and it's a hoot, and I play it in my ... I have a whole keynote just about that shark experience and what I learned from him. I play it for folks. It's on my website too.
Kyle Davis: A lot of people think that when you go on Shark Tank, it's just like basically [00:25:30] the length of the segment duration. They don't think it's actually longer than that. Since yours was at NSA, it may be a little bit difference experience than going to LA where they actually film it, but what was that experience like? Then, aside from what you did on stage at NSA, what was the after?
Traci Brown: The experience was the most nerve-wracking in my life. You've got to remember, I speak to people all the time. I am not scared on a stage. I was sitting backstage ... I was shaking because I was a news script in front of sharks, and then [00:26:00] in front of all my peers, two thousand of them who were ... The NSA conferences are the ... You've been to them Gail. They are the most critical audience but also the most supportive at the same time.
This is really good. We can talk about this because I realize the music was pumping through the ballroom and I was about to go onstage. I was listening to people get torn up out there, just torn up. I thought, "Oh my God. What is going to hap- How am I going to answer these questions, that [00:26:30] I don't know what they're going to be," because I like to generally know what's going to happen when I get on stage, not put myself in this situation of the unknown.
As I started to shake, I went, "Wow, this is ineffective. Completely. I need to ... I'm going to calm down. I'm going to do some deep breathing," so in through my nose, out through my mouth, and that was ridiculous. Nothing changed. I was like, "I don't know who that works for, but it ain't this girl." [00:27:00] Then I went, "Wait a minute. I'm an expert in this," and I took my fingers, and you all can do this with me, I tended my fingers and I put the pads of my fingers together. They call this a power steeple. I did this for about a minute. Just keep doing it, and if anyone's listening, you can keep doing it as well. Within a minute, within a minute of doing this, I felt all that stress and all that tension and all that anxiety just drain, literally drain right out of me.
[00:27:30] You look confused, Gail.
Gail Davis: [crosstalk 00:27:33]
Kyle Davis: You know who else does that?
Traci Brown: who?
Kyle Davis: Trump.
Traci Brown: Yeah, because he's really confident. This builds confidence. Remember where the body goes, the mind's going to follow like we talked about with the crossed arms. I said, "All right, I need to build some confidence," because clearly I didn't have enough and ...
Kyle Davis: In case you people are wondering what this looks like, when he's sitting down, when Trump is sitting down in a chair, and he's spread leg and he has his hands looking, all the finger pads are touching the opposite fingers [00:28:00] on the other and it's between his legs, that's the power steeple.
Traci Brown: Well, when he puts it between his legs, that's a whole different deal. That says that he's learning something that he didn't know. There's an Obama picture with him pre-inauguration of that, but when you put it more up like belt level and up, it's more of a confidence ... It shows confidence and it also builds confidence within you. What I'll [00:28:30] see in my audience is, and you all may feel this too, is that you feel a little more centered, a little more grounded and it's a great way to get past the shakes or any lack of confidence, like before a sales call, before a date, in an elevator on your way to a meeting. It looks elegant and it works fantastically because I went out on that stage, I heard them call my name and I went out there, and I got the deal.
Gail Davis: Well, you said I look confused, and I [00:29:00] think it's because I've been around the block. I thought I knew it all, and I'm like, "That is so simple," and you're right. For me, it fostered just a sense of calm. We'll take some photos here that maybe we can include, and we'll have a picture of you doing this. I think it's really neat.
Traci Brown: Yeah. It's really about deciding to take control of your own physiology and your own neurology and deciding how you're going to show up instead of [00:29:30] taking what comes because what comes isn't always what you need.
Gail Davis: Also, I know you do a lot about detecting lies.
Traci Brown: Yes.
Gail Davis: I'm wondering if there's any great take away, something maybe as simple as that, that people can use in being able to observe when the untruth is prevailing.
Traci Brown: Yes, and we have so much untruth. No, there's no untruth anymore, Gail. It's alternative facts. That's what we have now.
Kyle Davis: It's alternative now.
Traci Brown: Yeah. Basically, you want to look for times when the body [00:30:00] language and the words don't match. If somebody's nodding their head yes and saying, "I would never do that," you see how it doesn't match. In western culture, so this does not count for Asia and India, when you nod your head, that means yes. When you shake your head left to right, that means no. If someone is shaking their head left to right and they go, "That is a beautiful baby," then you know it's really the face only a mother could love. [00:30:30] Even Bill Clinton, he nodded his head yes to the beat, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
You see it all the time. You see it all the time. It's called a hotspot. When ... I've been lucky enough to train with the FBI in deception, and when you see three to five of those tightly clustered in maybe one sentence, that's when you know, "Wait a minute. Someone's pants are on fire." [00:31:00] What I've done because I've always done a little bit a lie detection in my talks, when I started calling it fraud prevention, which it is, there's a ton of fraud that happens in person in finance and banking. There's a lot of lies in sales too. Customers lie to you all the time about are they happy with your proposal and do they really have the budget that they say they have? These are the kind of things ... Lies look the same no matter what the lie is. It could be a little lie like, "How you doing today?" "Oh great." [00:31:30] How many times you lied about that, or "You haven't changed a bit." It's your 20-year reunion, or "Tell them I'm in a meeting." You're on a golf course.
All these things look similarly because they all are deception, so being able to detect those is important. When the body language and the words don't match, that's when you have this hotspot. That's when you go, "Wait a minute." You need to ask a few more questions [00:32:00] to get to the bottom of things, especially with centralized lending and banking and things like that where people are paying more attention to the numbers on a page than the feeling that they're getting from their client. All their going to do is rubber stamp it and send it in. That's when you open yourself up for a lot of loans that go bad. Accounts get opened that shouldn't be. It hits the bottom line really hard.
Kyle Davis: I'm assuming in the new [00:32:30] book, How to Detect Lies, Fraud and ID Theft, you talk about this a little bit.
Traci Brown: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kyle Davis: What are some other things that ... If we're using ID theft as an example, how does your work in body language prevent ID theft? When I think about it, I think about the person who rummaged through my trash can at my school and stole my passport [inaudible 00:32:49] that my mom so lovely put into a middle school project that I had.
Traci Brown: Is that a true story?
Kyle Davis: That is a true story. Sojourner to Korea. Thanks Mom.
Traci Brown: [00:33:00] People have a normal way that they answer questions, so let's take ... Let's talk about the Jean Benet Ramsey situation, murder. That's 20 years old now. I live in Boulder, Colorado, not very far, really close to where this all went down. They found, for those who need a refresher, they found a six-year-old beauty queen in the basement of her home wrapped up in a blanket dead on Christmas [00:33:30] night I believe, maybe the day after Christmas. The question was, who did it? Did the dad do it? Did an intruder do it? Did the mom do it? Did the brother do it?
Well, Dr. Phil did an interview with the brother, who is under suspicion because they still never solved it. It's been all these years. I have a theory about why that is too. Where I live in Boulder, not much goes on. Police don't have the acumen that's really sharp to [00:34:00] solve these kinds of things. It's not like every day in Dallas, just because it's such a small town. Well, they asked him a lot of questions. They said, "Was this the baseball bat?" Dr. Phil asked, "Was this the baseball bat that was at the house?"
"Yep, it was a baseball bat." He answered the question. His eyes went up, down, and then down to his left I believe.
"Did you eat pineapple the night before?"
He answered the question. Eyes went up, down and to the left. He was like, "Probably."
Then he asked a few more questions [00:34:30] and then Dr. Phil said, "Did you hear anything that night?" His patterning totally changed. That's when, and he said no, but just from his patterning and you could start to hear his tone change a little bit. His tone was starting to go up. That's why I believe that yes, he did hear something. Then Dr. Phil asked him, "Did you kill your sister," and he went back to that same patterning originally with the baseball and the pineapple [00:35:00] and he said no.
I don't believe that the brother did it. The statistics point to the dad. The FBI fellow that trained me worked on the case. He was pretty sure the dad did it, but it's all there in the interview in the body language.
Kyle Davis: You mentioned something, patterning, patterning ... I'm horrible with words sometimes, but it seems to me like in trying to establish someone's pattern, you ask a series of inconsequential questions before you ask what you want [00:35:30] to know.
Traci Brown: Right, so with ID theft, people are going to answer the question, what's your dog's name the same way as what's their name the same way as what street did they grow up on. That should be stuff you just rattle off really quick. When they don't, that's when you may have someone who's not who they say they are because that stuff should be on autopilot. [00:36:00] All you got to do is look for changes. It's not that hard to do. You just got to pay attention.
I had a cycling coach, his name was Wally. His name still is Wally. He'd say, "you know what? You got to pay attention or you pay with pain." He's right. There's no more true statement. Most of us pay some much attention to ourselves and so much attention to what's on our iPhone and what the last Tweet was that we're losing [00:36:30] that connection face-to-face, especially our younger generation. My job is to say, "Hey, wake up. This is what you need to look for."
Kyle Davis: So you're advice to let's say the 20-something year old banker who's trying to approve a small business loan is to just pay attention to how people start answer some questions and then link them to something else?
Traci Brown: Yeah. Notice what the difference is. Notice where you need to do your homework and dig deeper into the numbers. What information do [00:37:00] you need to give your centralized lending? Does this business owner really have a strong plan for how they're going to make money while their business is closed remodeling it? How are they going to pay that loan back? Those are the kind of things that need attention that are serious conversations that can really ... If there's not a tight answer, if there's not truth there, a bad loan happens fast.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, cool.
Gail Davis: I'm curious if these skills [00:37:30] are effective in interviewing.
Traci Brown: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I'm working with a business honor society in ... It's their international conference just about this, about interviewing, paying attention. You got to remember, when you go into an interview, you're interviewing them too. They're interviewing you, but you're interviewing them, so are you hitting the nail on the head of how you need to address this person. Flexibility [00:38:00] in communication is the biggest gift I think anyone can give themselves because most of us say things our way. The only way that we normally say things, it may not be how the other person needs to hear it, and they may not tell you that. You got to watch and see how receptive they are. If you need to start shifting your message a little bit to fit what they're looking for.
Gail Davis: Perfect. I feel like there are just so many different avenues where this [00:38:30] comes into play ...
Traci Brown: Oh, yeah. Dating. Yeah.
Gail Davis: ... relationships, dating.
Traci Brown: I do a lot with dating. You bet.
Gail Davis: Give us a few. There are a lot of single people out there. Give us a few dating tips.
Traci Brown: Okay, so I get people sending me pictures all the time of people they're thinking about going out with. I actually just came from a lunch where someone did that because so much of dating now is online, the initial part of dating. What I want to know, and I met my husband online, what I want to know is what is their tendency? [00:39:00] We all go to one of four corners when we get stressed. It's either anger, sadness, fear or guilt. All those are shown in the eyes. If you take your hand and you cover up from their nose down, what do you see?
If the eyebrows in the middle are going down, it can be anger. They can get angry when they get stressed, and the more they do ... It [00:39:30] could seem like they're smiling, but when you start to pay attention to this little thing, you can start to tell, "Wait a minute. This guy, he's going to tend towards violence. You probably don't want to hang out with him."
Other people are going to tend more toward sadness and melancholy. Do you want that around? Fear can show as well with the eyebrows that go up a little higher than maybe they should more than a neutral position.
Kyle Davis: Arched in the middle.
Traci Brown: Yeah, it can be. Well, here's the problem. Botox can screw things up. Carly [00:40:00] Fiorina, I believe, because I thought her policies were okay, people argue ... It's not the point. She has some okay to say, but she was over-Botoxed. She could not express emotion, and that's one of the big reasons why she lost the election because she couldn't connect with people. A little bit of Botox is good, too much, bad. We all know people who've had too much. She's one of them.
[00:40:30] It's important to be able to still show emotion and not rub it all out because you'll wrinkles.
Kyle Davis: They're called expression lines for a reason.
Traci Brown: Expression lines. Yes.
Kyle Davis: Cool. Well, hey, I think that's probably a good place for us to wrap up. If you would like to have Traci Brown come and speak for your event, organization, whatever, you can do so by contacting GDA Speakers at 214-420-1999 or by going to gdaspeakers.com. For [00:41:00] the transcript and to be able to purchase the new book, How to Detect Lie, Fraud, ID Theft and the other books as well, you can do so by going to gdapodcast.com.
With that being said, thanks Traci.
Traci Brown: Thank you.