By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

“My face is my livelihood!”, Cosmo Kramer (Seinfeld)

The amount of non-verbal clues you can absorb in a person is almost unlimited. In my personal files, there are over 1,500 recorded clues for learning, reading and “conceiving” another human being.

Today we’ll do a quick exercise, that will surely give you some insights about personal and interpersonal communication, from the view point of the most important person in your life – which is you.

To make the most out of this exercise, grab a mirror (or go to your bath, where hopefully you have a mirror) and take a good look at your face. Not the kind of look you take when you’re plucking hair out of your nose. Look as if you’ve never seen that face before. Then, start to take mental notes on the most delicate features you notice.

To help you out, here’s a list of facial surfaces you can notice:

• Facial skin, in general – it’s color, thickness and stretch.
• Ears – not how big, but in what shape.
• Earlobes
• Forehead
• Eyebrows
• Eyes
• Eyelids
• Eyelashes
• Nose
• Nostrils
• Nostril bulbs
• Cheeks
• Cheekbones
• Lips
• Jowls
• Hair
• Wrinkles
• Moles

There are about 90 muscles in your face. There’s an old saying, that it takes fewer facial muscle to smile than to frown… But you know, sometimes you have to “make a face” in order to get the reaction you want from others.

So your first mission of the day is to get to know your face by taking a closer look. Isn’t it true, that we look at other people’s faces 100’s times more than we look at our own?

That’s when we introduce the concept of “Facial Phantom”. That concept illustrates how “know” that we’re smiling or that we’re frowning.

The “phantom” part of that concept is the actual feeling of where and how your facial muscle are arranged. Without gazing through a mirror, you can only assume or guess how your face look like when you “make a face”.

All of the above means, that you know much better how other people use their faces, than you know your very own face.

Why is all of that important? Because, for our purpose here – which is to learn how to read other people – you first need to learn the kind of non verbal message you send out yourself. The most important messages you send out yourself come from your face. The center of expression, the first thing people notice in you (unless you wear a ski mask) is your face. It takes one second of TDS to tell the whole world you’re disconnected. It happens on its own. One minute you’re fully aware of your surrounding, the next minute you’re off on a cloud in a day dream. In that minute, your facial muscles change instantly, delicately, in such a hidden way that everyone else can tell what’s going on – but not you.

Lucky for us, there’s this great invention since ages ago, with which you can stare at your own face! Amazing. So use it.

Once you took good mental notes (no need to write them down) of the structure of your face, give yourself a nice stare in the eyes and see how fast you can sneak a little tiny smile in there. Just as if it was only a tendency to a bigger smile, but not yet.

Now, that we’re off on a playful state, let’s do some serious research. It is time to FACE yourself.

We’ll start with the eight basic emotions: fear, joy, anger, acceptance, sorrow, anticipation, disgust, surprise.

Notice that I have arranged these emotions in a special order – first a painful one, then a pleasurable one, finishing with the pleasurable-curious one. That is done to make sure we don’t send you on a depression voyage.

Take 60 seconds. Enter a state within 5 seconds, notice the expressions you make for 2 or 3 seconds, then break the state within 1 second.

For your first few days, use medium to low intense memories as emotional triggers. Recall a situation when you were afraid, but not that much afraid – just to get the feeling, enough emotion to change your physiology but not enough to make you sweat with anxiety.

Work fast, that’s a very important key for the success of this exercise. Get into the state within 5 seconds, quickly recalling a fearful event, being associated (as if you’re there, seeing it from your own eyes), hold it for 2 seconds so you can notice your facial expression in general (without thinking about it or debating it in your mind) – then break the state within 1 second. To break the state quickly, take a power breath through your nose and look up at the same time. Release the air, and continue with the next emotion.

Do not use auditory modality with the memories. Auditory parts take time to listen to, much more than a couple of seconds, and they tend to flood us with a lot of memories.

Do use auditory on the last emotion, surprise, so that it will stay with you for a few minutes and might make you feel better.

If you feel you’re emotionally weak in general, please have a friend with you to guide you and comfort you when you need it.

Take a few days to practice this exercise. The fast you can get the emotions and breaking out from them, the better you’re going to get in doing an actual mind reading, communicating with yourself and others – or in short, NLP.

Once you’ve got a good pace at entering any of the above states whenever you want to, and of course breaking out from them within a second – you can continue to the next exercise, which is much more complicated but will certainly astound you. You’re going to be very surprised to learn how much power you gave to random thoughts and emotional stream of associations, while you could very easily direct them to achieve whatever it is that you want.

Interested enough?

Ok, let’s begin. Drink some fresh water, since in this one you’re going to sweat…

Aristotle wrote in his “Rhetoric” work, a list of emotions and their counterparts. We’ll use his list, since it’s the best one I found:

• Anger Vs. Calmness
• Friendship Vs. Enmity
• Fear Vs. Confidence
• Shame Vs. Shamelessness
• Kindness Vs. Rudeness
• Pity Vs. Adoration
• Indignation Vs. Acceptance
• Envy Vs. Gratitude

There’s no depression in this list, so I want you to go full steam ahead. Use the most intense memories you can, and do it in a slower pace than what we did in the last exercise.

The pace should be – 8 to 10 seconds for the first emotion, 5 to 7 seconds for transition and then again 8 to 10 for the counterpart. 5 seconds to cool down, breaking a state.. Then continue with the next pair.

Use all the modalities you have – make the visual bigger, the auditory noisier, recall the smell or taste and sense it as if it is happening all over again. Go for the extreme, because you’re going to learn so much about yourself that it can only benefit you.

It takes practice, just like any good skill. Practicing this exercise for a few weeks will benefit you much more than you might think right now. Think about “being enlighten”, the spiritual voyage all the new age people are talking about… that’s going to be much better!

Breaking the pattern of ignoring your own face, of living in a phantom understanding of how you look like when you feel something, of not realizing that other people see through you and those who are skilled enough use that information to manipulate you – breaking that pattern has so much value, that it takes you to experience it yourself in order to really understand.

Isn’t it true, that most psychological problems begin with “not knowing oneself”? Isn’t it true that depression, disappointments, procrastination and so on – are all the result of not finding one’s identity? “I lost my true self” is probably the most frequent statement that therapists hear from their clients.

Your eyes are the windows to your soul, right? But your face is your identity. That’s where your personal map of the world is being reflected outside, showing the whole world what’s going on inside of your mind.

Getting to know your face like you’ve never done before will help you a lot. Granted.