This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How to Read the Room with Pamela Meyer | 439

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

We spend a whole lot of time thinking about how other people perceive us. How we communicate, present, negotiate, network, make a good impression, say the right thing at the right time. Basically, we put a lot of effort into being interesting. But what if we spent more time being interested? Because entire conversations are happening around us that have nothing to do with what anyone is actually saying. And we might be missing all of it because we’re too busy planning the next brilliant thing we’re going to say. In this episode, Nicole sits down with Pamela Meyer, a leading expert on deception detection who trains executives and institutional leaders on information elicitation, social observation, and insider threat mitigation. She’s also the author of How to Read the Room: The Art and Science of Social Observation. They discuss: Why being confident in our ability to read a room doesn’t mean we’re actually good at it Why talking less can help us notice more How our own ego, biases, and needs distort what we observe Why asking “How can I make this room better?” can change an interaction Pamela’s “Triple B” method: background, behavior, and beliefs What to watch immediately after conflict happens How to identify informal power and influence in a room The back-pocket questions that can reveal what people are really thinking Why crossed arms, eye contact, and other body language “rules” can mislead us Why clusters of behavior matter more than individual gestures Verbal and nonverbal signals that may warrant closer attention when deception is suspected How to avoid confusing anxiety or nervousness with dishonesty Why context, curiosity, and giving people the benefit of the doubt matter Maybe the most powerful person in the room isn’t the one talking the most. Maybe it’s the one paying attention. Thank you to our sponsors! Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to HeyPolo.com/work or use code WORK and get 70% off your first year Connect with Pamela: Website: https://PamelaMeyer.com  Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250378230?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback  X: https://x.com/Pamela_Meyer  LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelameyer  Related Podcast Episodes How To Listen with Emily Kasriel | 321 Pants On Fire (The Truth About Lying) with Lauren Handel Zander | 219 131 / Maximize Your Success By Managing Your Ego with Christie Garcia Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. And as much as I believe that the most important person for us to understand is ourselves, it would probably help to get better at understanding the people we're navigating life and work with too, which brings us to something I've always been fascinated by, and that's human behavior. I mean, what makes someone tick? What are they thinking but not saying? Do they mean what they're saying,

or are they lying? I mean, if it weren't for the whole murder and dead body part, I'd like to believe I would have made an excellent detective. Or even better, one of those behavioral analysts on criminal minds who looks at someone's desk and somehow knows that their unsub is a left-handed accountant with abandonment issues. And yet, for all of our fascination with other people, we spend an awful lot of time focused on how they perceive us. Think about how much time and energy we spend on how we communicate, how we present, how we negotiate and network, how we come across to everyone else, how to make a good impression, how to say the right thing at the right time. Ultimately, we spend a lot of time worried about how to be interesting, but a lot less less.

of our time is spent on how to listen, how to observe, and to notice. Basically, how to be interested. Meanwhile, entire conversations are happening all around us that have nothing to do with what anybody is saying. They're wordless conversations that let you know who has power in the room, who's engaged and who checked out like 10 minutes ago, who genuinely agrees and who's just nodding so that the conversation will end. And what I'm wondering is how, how many of those conversations do we miss while we're busy planning the next brilliant thing that we're going to say? And how often are we projecting instead of actually observing? Because there is a difference between reading a room and assuming we know what everybody in it

is thinking. And according to our expert guest, a lot of what we've been taught about body language, things like crossed arms, eye contact, nervous movements, all the supposedly obvious tells may not be as obvious as we think, which is wildly inconvenient for those of us who are hoping one episode would turn us into human lie detectors. So how do we actually get better at noticing what's happening in the rooms that we're in? Well, that's where our guest, Pamela Meyer, comes in. She's a leading expert on deceptive detection who trains executives and institutional leaders on information elicitation, social observation, and insider threat mitigation. That was a mouthful, by the way.

Her new book, How to Read the Room, The Art and Science of Social Observation, teaches us how to notice the hidden signal shaping power, trust, influence, and connection, and maybe more importantly, what to actually do with what we notice. So, Pamela, thank you for joining us. And before we talk about reading the room better,

I want to know how well we're reading it now. So my question is, how good are most of us at reading the rooms that we're in. Well, first of all, Nicole, I'm so happy to be here. So this is going to be a really fun conversation. You know, it's really interesting. I give a lot of talks, and I often start the talk by asking people to raise their hand. I say, like, who here feels they're pretty good at reading the room? And you know what? The majority of people raise their hand. But it turns out that the more confident you are in your ability to read the room, the worse you are at it. So not only are we not particularly good at it or overconfident

at the same time, so that's a big problem. So I guess let's start at the, I don't know if basics is the right word, but what is room reading? Like, what are we actually talking about here? Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, room reading is exactly what you'd think it is. It's the ability to walk into any room to know what's going on, who has the power, who's checked out, what's not being said. And it's part observation and it's part emotional intelligence. And the reason we've lost our ability to do it is because our culture rewards talking. It doesn't actually reward watching, but we need to be doing a whole lot more of it.

Okay, this might be a dumb question, but can we do both at the same time? Can we be talking and observing at the same time? I can't multitask. So for me, the answer is no, but I'm just wondering if that's possible. So that's really important because most people cannot do that unless they're saying something they already memorized. We call those conditioned witnesses in the deception detection world. And what happens is when you go in and you're just blah, blah, blah, and you're talking,

you've missed the moment often. So what I consult people to do, particularly when it's a very powerful CEO or if it's someone who's in charge who can walk into the meeting and say the first thing, I always advise them, walk in and don't even talk for the first seven, eight minutes. In fact, pause, look really carefully and don't even talk until you have some. something to say that directly relates to the conversation already going on. This sounds incredibly simple. It's not. You can't do it at a dinner party. It can't do it on a first date. You have trouble doing it in a job interview. You're going to have trouble doing it when you're in a big confab

or a meeting. And so it's a skill. It's a muscle. We have to learn to do it. Yeah, full transparency. I don't know that I've ever done that. So clearly I have something to work on. So if this is about a combination of observation and emotional intelligence, what are we missing when it comes to observation? What does that even look and feel like? Because I think a lot of times we do spend a lot of that energy thinking about what we're going to say. Well, what are we missing is exactly the right question because oftentimes what I tell people to do if they can't figure it out. And I'll show you and talk to you about what it means to be a good social observer. But even if you're not a good social observer and you're walking into the room and you can't figure it out,

ask that question, what are we missing? Because what are we missing will oftentimes elicit exactly what you need to know. One of the things with social observation that we don't think about is that, I mean, I really, with the work that I do, go out of my way to make sure people are not mediocre room readers. They're actually really good at it. So that movement, that shift from being mediocre to being really good involved a lot of personal work first. So it turns out that our accuracy at reading the room is directly related to how much our own ego might be in the way. And so when we walk into a room, it's very, very important that we did a whole bunch of prep in the days or the months or the hours or the minutes in the bathroom, whatever you've got before you walk into that room.

So that means understanding what your own needs might be, what your own blind spots might be, what your biases are, how you might bring that into interpreting the signals that you're looking at, and then really pausing and thinking about ways in which you might or others might distort those needs in the room. So let me give you an example for that. We know that from what's called social determination theory,

that we all, regardless of age, regardless of where we are in the world, have these kind of core needs. We have a need for competency. We have a need for relatedness, having relationships. We have a need for autonomy, a very strong need, particularly in the workplace for autonomy. And if you've ever had a teenager, you know what that need for autonomy feels like

on the receiving end. If someone walks into the room and they are, you know, bragging about who they met at the dinner last night, they're dropping names, they're a credential collector, or they've just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro as their vacation. Oftentimes that's a bid for competency.

Oftentimes people are showing what they need by the distortions they bring into the room. Someone walks and follows you out of the meeting and they're glomming onto you and they want to tell you exactly what was said about you in the Slack channel right after the meeting. Oftentimes that kind of gossip is not necessarily anything more than a bid for relatedness.

they really want to connect with you in some way, and they're using what they know as social currency. Same thing if you're a manager and somebody just won't get the job done. Oftentimes that's not an executive function issue. It's not all the things we like to label it as. It's just someone is saying, you know what, don't tell me what to do.

It's just a bid for autonomy. And so understanding, social observation starts so much earlier than just when you open the door. It has to do with understanding the people in the room, their background, their behavior, their beliefs, understanding your own biases, asking for that hard feedback from people, and trying to do the hard work so that when you walk in, your needs are not in the way of what you're seeing. I have to imagine that a lot more challenging than it sounds, because a lot of these things are

unconscious, I think, and are in the driver's seat when we're not even aware they're in the driver's seat. And so what are some of the tactics we might employ before we even walk into the room to set our ego aside, or at the very least, be aware of it? Well, that's the hard question, isn't it? I mean, there are many things that we can do. There are things we can tell ourselves, and there are things that we can do. What you want to avoid, and I'm the worst at this, I mean, you can ask anybody that works with me. I mean, so we don't all practice what we preach, but I'm getting better. It's blurting. You know, that desire like, oh my gosh, that happened to me too. I need to tell you about that. Oh, that's wrong. That contractor is actually gone bankrupt, all the things that you might want to say and interrupt. First thing you can tell yourself, before you walk in the room, to avoid this kind of

interruptive blurting is, you know what? I'm going to have time after that meeting. I can call my friend after that dinner and say, you know, I really wasn't comfortable with what you said. I can send a memo afterwards and say, you know, let me summarize and hear a few things I didn't get to say. You're always going to get a chance. So first of all, it doesn't all have to happen in the moment. If you mind yourself of that, it calms you down. The other thing you can do, and I think this works really well, is give yourself one singular purpose for the meeting.

So before you walk in, say, I really want Matthew to take on the budget and cut it by 20%. If you tell yourself that one purpose, it narrows your focus, when you narrow your focus, when you narrow your focus, you become less self-conscious, you do less of that self-monitoring, you worry less with the dialogue, what do they think of me, and you're actually become more curious about what's happening in the room. And what's great about that is the world gets more interesting. When you have that purpose and you can focus on what other people are saying, what the rhythm of the meeting might be like, what the vibe in the room might be like, who's leaning towards whom, all the micro signals in the room that you should notice, then it just gets really interesting. So that's what I recommend you do.

I love that and it aligns with something that I think has worked for me because I am somebody who, you know, I think wants to prove myself. That's probably the need that comes out a lot and wants to say everything that I know or that I think people need to know. And one of the things that has helped to me is asking myself, what's the outcome I'm looking for? Like if only one thing happens on the other side of this meeting or this conversation or this interaction, what would be the most important and impactful outcome? And it sort of helps eliminate a lot of the unnecessary ego-oriented things. And so that resonates with me. Is that an example of what you're talking about? Yes, it is absolutely. You know, the other thing that I feel very strongly about and this really gets to like kind of what's the purpose that we're all here for is if you've

had a really bad day if your cognitive load as we call it is very high and there's a whole lot of really interesting information about cognitive load and how it influences us if you're walking into that room and you are kind of junior you don't have much power or authority or you don't really know what your role is here's something you can do and you don't even let's say you don't even know You're not as focused as Nicole, and you don't even know what your outcome should be. Simply ask yourself, how do I make this room better? What can I do? And you would be surprised if you go in with that view, how can I make this better?

Then you will. You might just offer a warm glance towards somebody. You might offer to help someone else. You might bring in a resource that you hadn't thought you might bring in. If you ask yourself that from a really generous standpoint, you will make the room better. your relationships will be better. Everything will be more interesting. And you will not necessarily have read the room perfectly,

but you will have had a great experience and you will move things forward in a way that's positive. And that's as good as not even getting to the exact outcome if you can't get to it. So my next question is around maybe interconnected skills. So when we think about social observation or reading the room, I have to imagine there are certain skills that really lend to doing,

this well, you know, noticing and observing for sure, but like curiosity, listening, you know, those types of things. Are there any skills that are necessary or instrumental to do this well? Yeah, there are lots of skills. One of them is easy to learn, but we just don't take the time to do it, and some of them are harder. Here's one of the easy ones, which is get to know the people in the room before you walk in, prepare. Because I will tell you, every single leader that I work with says to me, they know when someone's prepared and when someone's just kind of been in the bathroom reading the night before or the day before. They know. And so, you know, I call it the triple B method, background, behavior and beliefs, but understand people as deeply as you can before you walk in

in because it really will predict somewhat of how they behave. So know what their college experience might have been like, know if they've had any formative experiences. Did they have a mentor that really inspired them? Did they witness a social justice at a very early age? Had they moved from a new country? Did they win any awards? Get to know them because one, that gives you a good view. And then second, you have something to connect with them on and develop some rapport later when you're negotiating or when you have something you really need to get from them. So get to know them and understand what matters to them. Because if you do that research and you can, you You can do it digitally. You can do it by calling friends. You can do it by taking them out for dinner the night before. There are lots of ways to do it. You'll have a much better relationship with them for sure. And what I love about it is it's something any of us can do anytime we want, totally within our control. My next question is around the things that are most overlooked. So obviously you do this for a living. You're an expert. What are the things we miss the most or the most overlooked cues that are happening in the rooms?

that we're in. What I find the biggest mistake we make as room readers, people come in and they really want to, they really do want to read the room. So they're looking and they're listening, but they don't know what to look at. And so here's what happens. There'll be a big conflict in the room.

Two people have just taken each other on. What we tend to do is look very carefully at that conflict and start getting the popcorn out is oftentimes kind of entertaining. We particularly see this on Zoom rooms where people don't necessarily know what you're doing, but you're kind of staring at the screen, watching it even more carefully. Actually, what you should do when there's a conflict is watch everybody else right afterwards,

because that's ever going to see who's looking at who, where the power is, who's leaning towards whom, who may have gotten their phone out and all of a sudden they're on a chat with somebody. What happens right after conflict tells you a boatload about what's going on in the room. That's one of the things. The other thing you might, and that also gives you kind of like the power map. The other thing that we don't do enough of is we just don't, and this is really well-worn advice for anybody, we just don't ask enough questions so we don't get people talking, so we don't actually let the hidden dynamics surface.

So most people enter conversations thinking about what they want to say, but the skilled room readers do the reverse. You know, they draw people out first, they listen for what the answers reveal, and then they start to pay attention to things like phrases that were repeated, missing details, changes in tone, the stories someone chooses to tell. Then they ask follow-up questions. If you can get people to elicit and to talk and to tell you what they're really thinking, and there are lots of questions I have in my back pocket all the time that always get people to talk. If you have those in your back pocket, you will surface hidden dynamics for sure. So it's funny, I often refer to back pocket

questions or back pocket like it's literally tucked in there that you can pull out when you don't know what to say or when you're not sure so can you give us maybe a couple examples of these back pocket questions that really work yeah i mean you should have them that match your personality um because it doesn't it's important to have them it doesn't necessarily have to be phrased in a particular way but here are my favorites so the first is what's the pettiest thing that's bothering you about the weekend, honey, about the deal we just did, about the move, about the merger. When you ask it that way,

you're signaling that you're not judging someone. You're saying, you know what? You can tell me anything. And you will be shocked. When you phrase it that way, they won't tell you something petty. They'll tell you something really significant. If I ask my husband that, he's going to say,

oh, you know, we spend too much money at dinner. Well, that's not insignificant, right? And so if you ask it that way, you'll get more information. the other thing you can ask is how can I be useful to you? Just back up and actually listen because if you're in a negotiating standpoint with them, then there may tell you something that they perceive is very expensive for you to provide

that's actually not so hard for you to provide to them. Oh, I really just want to work from home two days a week. Well, maybe that's fine with you. Oh, I really like to move into the corner office. Well, maybe that's not such a big deal because the corner office is vacant. So ask, how can I be useful to you? People will tell you, listen carefully.

And then finally, ask, is there anything else you want to tell me? I'm sure you do this on your podcast. I bet you do. I mean, is there anything else here we all need to know? And you'd be surprised. People will just tell you. They love to talk. So these are open-ended questions.

They're not on-off, yes, no questions. And if you have a few on the ready, people will always tell you. And then if you listen and you signal, especially that you're not being condescending, because we have a big issue with all generations now being in the C-suite with condescension. People feel condescended towards very easily and all the time there's a lot of sensitivity to that. If you listen without judgment, you ask in a way that says, you know, I'm supplicant to you, give me advice. How can I be useful?

You would be surprised what people will tell you. I'm thinking of times where I've been in rooms where something happened. and I noticed that it happened, but I don't really know what it was, and I'm, like, curious about it. And I want to be careful not to project my interpretation or, like, think that I know what happened. Do you recommend acknowledging it? Like, hey, something just shifted, and I have no idea what it was. Let's talk about it. Or do you put it out there what you think happened? Like, what are your thoughts there? That's a great question. I think the truth of the answer to that is it really depends. It depends on how. how sensitive the issues are. It depends whether or not the group is in a kind of expansive or contracting place. And so if you have kind of like a good kind of heat and friction in the room and it feels like the room really trusts each other and you get the sense that the room is expanding,

which is very different than kind of silence, contraction, quiet, people glancing furtively at each other, you have that kind of like healthy friction. Then I think, and you have a certain level of authority in the room. you're not junior, then you absolutely have the right to say, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, I think we missed something. Susie, you see, you have something to say? You can do that for sure. But it's quite risky to do if you don't have authority, if the vibe of the room is really off in some way, that's not necessarily the best way to do it. We have found from years of doing interventions in organizations that people really hate to be embarrassed. They really don't like to, most

people do not want to be called out in front of a group. They're particularly afraid of kind of cancellation and public embarrassment now more so than they ever have been. So oftentimes you're better off end the meeting a little early, call the person that you noticed and say, hey, what was going on? Can we have, oftentimes people are more likely to tell you on the phone than they will even in person. We have like just a conversation about that. Then you reconvene the next meeting, you readjust, and you can be, it's a little safer. Yeah, okay. You mentioned authority. We've talked about power. we have been taught that whoever is talking the most or whoever is the loudest or on social media, whoever's foaming at the mouth or being the meanest or whatever is the person who has

the power and authority. What you're saying is very different than that. So how can we tell who really has power in the rooms that we're in? Well, there are lots of little micro ways. I mean, if somebody's ideas are repeated, if someone looks towards them, particularly when something happens that's awkward, a bad joke was told, an unexpected person entered the room, watching gaze, mapping the gaze is pretty significant. Taking note over multiple meetings as to who sits where makes a difference. So you can get a sense of the informal power structure by observing more carefully, you can also get a sense of trust relationships. And so one of the things we oftentimes don't understand in the room is that we'll feel like we don't trust somebody, but we can't figure out

why. Like there's just something off. And learning to detect coherence between communication channels can make a huge difference. So if what our body language is saying, what our eyes are saying, what our face is saying, and our vocal intonation as well as the words, if all of these channels are coherent in the same direction and kind of telling the same story, we tend to be drawn towards those people. And they do tend to have a lot more authority in the room and a lot more influence. It's the person who's kind of off where the smile dropped a little late or they said, yeah, that's a great idea. And then you saw this kind of expression of contempt or kind of half shrug. Those kinds of counter signals, as we call them, can really

de-influence the room. So you're looking for coherence, you're looking, not necessarily. transparency, but you're also looking for signals of fairness. Someone says, you know, I'm a fair player. That makes a huge difference for people in terms of building authority and building credibility. So you talked about some of these things already. I think that we are often told that there are certain things that we should do when we are in a position of influence or authority or even if we just want to project honesty or competence or whatever, things like look people in the eye or shoulders back or don't cross your arms. I think a lot of what we're taught is how to project versus how to practice or actually be those things. And so my question is,

what are some of the body language, and I put in air quotes, rules that are actually myths and what does work? That is a great question. Let's talk about what works first, and then I'll talk a little bit about the myths. You know, we all know that feeling. Somebody walks in the room and you all of a sudden feel like you went to high school with them. There's just that connection, right? You feel it. And that person walks in the room and normally they're projecting warmth first. And so, you know, there's a kind of combination of having executive presence, showing that you're competent and being warm, that whole stew allows us to project certainly a high presence in the room. But what we often forget to do is we need to be warm first because people will really test whether or not you're warm

first. So the person who you feel like you just connected with, who you feel like you just went to high school with, usually their eyebrows are up, they're walking in, they're smiling, they'll touch you in some way, they'll shake your hand, they'll touch you on the shoulder, there's a little bit of contact, there's definitely a, they'll drop something that you all have in common. When all that happens at once, at least you're on the road there towards influence. What we often do that, and you're asked for like the myths is we misinterpret when all of a sudden they've crossed their arms, let's say, for example, we call this in body language the crossed arms problem because it doesn't mean anything, right? They could be cold. They could be mad at their kid because they refused to go to

school that morning. You don't know why their arms are crossed. And we oftentimes, the biggest mistake we made is we look at single gestures. Oh, they didn't look me in the eyes. Well, that's not necessarily a sign of deception. Crossed arms doesn't necessarily mean defensiveness. A smirk oftentimes can be associated with contempt, but you're looking for clusters. When the FBI comes in and they're interviewing you, they're like, hey, how are you? How was your weekend? Did you go shopping? They don't care if you went shopping.

They're baselining you. They're getting a sense of your norm so they can figure out a reliable reference point for measuring those changes later. They're looking for when you shift. And so with body language, again, you're looking for, you've got to baseline someone to get their norm, you've got to look for clusters of behavior that all point in the same direction, then you have to actually verify your facts. And so the biggest mistake we make is by thinking single gestures mean anything. They oftentimes don't. We all know that foot tapper. Maybe they're just a

foot tapper. They may not be lying. They may just be an anxious person who taps their foot. Give them a break. Okay, so I can't let you go without asking a little bit more about how to spot a liar, which was another book that you wrote. Yeah. So I'm hearing clusters. I'm hearing finding a baseline. Like you said, somebody might just cross their arms when they're cold. And if you read it as a single issue, then that's not going to be helpful.

But how do we know when we're being lied to? So for those clusters of behavior, let me just tell you real quick what you'll be looking for. You're looking for verbal or nonverbal indicators of deceit. oftentimes someone who's questioning someone they think is lying, well, ask them harder and harder questions because that's when the cognitive load raises and they leak these verbal and nonverbal indicators. But we know from body language,

someone who kind of looks down, lowers their voice, pulls back in their chair, feet point to the exit, they take a backpack or a phone, or we call these barrier objects, they put it between you comfortably and them to give them a sense of comfort. And then we see in their language, We may hear in their language something like they may use distancing language.

I mean, the famous example is Bill Clinton where he said, you know, I didn't have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. That woman was really distancing language. They may ask the question. You ask them a question. They'll repeat the question. You know, what do you mean? Where was I at 7 o'clock? Where was I?

Huh. Where was I? Let me think. They may pepper their account with way too much detail to appear authentic. when in fact they didn't need to tell you so much. They may not be able to tell their story backwards if you ask them to tell their story backwards because we rehearse our stories, but we don't rehearse our gestures and our language around them.

And so there are many ways to tell if someone is lying, but the most important thing to do is there's no single tell. You're looking for a cluster. As I said at the beginning, I'm training people to be expert, not mediocre. So it's really important to me that they understand that. There are a lot of myths. You need to baseline them, need to see where they shift from baseline, and then validate, validate, validate. Okay, this is fascinating to me. And I could ask you approximately one million more questions, but I'm going to end on this one. I always make up that I would never want to take a lie detector

test because I'd be so nervous and I'd like overthink and over. So how do we tell the difference? Like, Even when I'm telling the truth, if somebody's challenging me, nerves kick in. I don't know. I feel like this angsty feeling. How do we not read nervousness as lying and how do we be authentic and truthful even when we're feeling nerves? Is that making any sense? Yeah, I mean, I think if you're being questioned and you're very nervous, you have every right to say that. You have every right to say, you know, I want to be really honest with you here. I'm telling you the truth, but I feel like you're watching me. I'm not comfortable being watched, and it's causing me and triggering me to feel anxious

and to feel a need to tap my foot. If you narrate that, if you actually tell somebody how you feel, they'll hear you, they'll listen to you. And so that's one piece. You have every right to say that. In terms of observing someone else's nervousness, again, it really goes back to baseline. It's really important that you don't misjudge someone.

all of us feel anxious for different reasons. There are many, many people out there that are not neurotypical, and we don't necessarily know that, but we misinterpret their behavior. We have to give people the benefit of the doubt. We have to baseline them well. We have to look for clusters, and we have to think much more carefully about the context and their particular story,

because we're all different, and that's the human path. That's the human journey. And we need to respect it and understand it, not point the finger and judge people too quickly. Again, fascinating stuff. I know I'm not the only one. I've already ordered the book and just received it.

I'm going to give everybody a minute to go get their own. How to Read the Room is available on Amazon or wherever it is that you buy books. And let's keep our local bookstores in business. And also, if you want to find out more about Pamela and her work and previous books, the website is pamelamyer.com. We're going to put those links and all the other ways to find and follow Pamela in show notes. Pamela, thank you. Again, I just can't think of a more fascinating topic. And I learned so much in just this brief conversation, though. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was a blast.

All right, friend, maybe the most powerful person in the room isn't the one talking the most, commanding the most attention, or working the hardest to be interesting. Maybe it's the person paying attention, listening, observing, being interested. Because the less consumed we are with how we're being perceived, the more we can perceive what others miss. And use that information to understand, connect, and influence. Read the room, my friend, because that is woman's work. For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean. Like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds.

Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No. In Swedish, not opa. means night monkey. Mom, he's back. Ikea, 50 years of Swedishness

at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas. So cute.