At the San Francisco Writers Conference last weekend I had the opportunity to listen to a wonderful presenter by the name of Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. Carol presented a workshop on The Nonverbal Advantage for Writers.

Her handout is reprinted here with her permission:

The Truth About Liars

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D.

“You’re next in line for a promotion.”

“Let’s have lunch sometime.”

“I’d love to read your report.”

“No, those pants don’t make you look fat.”

We get lied to all the time. People are dishonest with us out of politeness, to avoid punishment, to protect others, or to deliberately mislead us for personal gain.

On Fox’s new drama, “Lie to Me,” Tim Roth’s character (Dr. Cal Lightman) is a human lie detector with the ability to recognize a variety of body language cues that indicate deception. The show’s science is based on solid research in emotions and nonverbal communication. But is it really that easy to spot a liar?

Well, yes . . . and no.

Yes, liars can “leak” nonverbal information in telltale “micro expressions” (those genuine emotions that flash across someone’s face in less than one-fifth of a second) and “suppressed expressions,” which slip out before realized and are then replaced with more acceptable reactions. One illustrative thing that “Lie to Me” does is incorporate photos of real people (Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, Kato Kaelin. Simon Cowell). When the actors are caught making a particular facial expression, the show cuts to a photo of a famous person with that same expression, all designed to make the point that there are telltale signs - if you know where to look.

Yes, there are behaviors that suggest deception. Some examples are:
o Incongruence between what’s being said and the speaker’s body language (like saying “no” while nodding “yes”).

• An increased blink rate - especially over 50 blinks per minute - or eyelid flutter.
• Gazing downward after asserting innocence.
• Shorter, less descriptive statements.
• Incomplete gestures, like a shrug that uses only one shoulder.
• A decrease in hand gestures, especially those used to illustrate speech - like drawing pictures in the air to help explain what is meant.
• Fidgeting feet that shuffle, wind around each other, stretch and curl or kick out.
• Dilated pupils.
• Face touching - especially around the mouth and nose.
• Discrepancies in timing: When the lie is well rehearsed, deceivers start their answers more quickly than truth-tellers. If taken by surprise, however, the liar takes longer to respond.

It’s also true you are already subconsciously picking up on signals of deception. Your ability to do that is one of your basic survival instincts. In early human’s history, rapidly deciding if someone was dangerous or duplicitous was often a matter of life or death. And consistent among the research is that as the importance of having the lie go undetected increases, the more difficult for the liar to conceal the falsehood.

But, as innate as this ability may be, and as compelling as the scientific research is, it’s not all that easy to catch a liar. Here’s why . . .

1) There is no absolute signal for deception. Most cues, including blink rates, vocal tone, pupil dilation, etc., are signs of heightened anxiety and stress. But there is no way of telling if the observed stress is caused by lying or by something else. Likewise, incongruence, where gestures contradict words, may be a sign of deceit or simply an indication of some inner conflict between what the person is thinking and saying.

2) Although done with ease on television shows, micro expressions occur infrequently and are difficult for most of us to spot without video footage to review. (Suppressed expressions are somewhat easier to see because they appear more often and last longer.)

3) Signs of deceit may differ from individual to individual. Take eye contact, for example: Some liars shift their gaze and won’t meet your eyes, while others give too much eye contact. One person may raise her vocal pitch when she lies while another speaks in a flat, unemotional tone.

4) Nonverbal cues need to be evaluated in what is called a “gesture cluster” - movements, postures and actions that (taken together) reinforce a common point. A single gesture can have several meanings or mean nothing at all. So when you are trying to catch a liar, you can never do it from a signal deceit behavior.

5) It’s tough to spot deception unless you know a person’s baseline behavior under relaxed or generally stress-free conditions. The more you understand which gestures or postures are part of someone’s unique repertoire, the more you can spot significant deviation from these patterns. This is why police interrogators begin with a series of broad, non-threatening questions to help establish that baseline.

6) All nonverbal communication is influenced by cultural heritage, and the higher the stress level, the more likely it is that culture-specific gestures will show up. It is extremely difficult to judge nonverbal deception cues in people from another culture.

7) No one, not even with the aid of functional MRIs to track brain activity, can identify liars who believe the lies they are telling.

In my speeches to business organizations, I often start with an exercise in which the audience guesses which of four volunteers is lying. And audience members are pretty good at picking out the liar - they just don’t know how they did it. So watch the show. You may come away being a little more discerning about the things people tell you.
Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., is a professional speaker, executive coach, and the author of THE NONVERBAL ADVANTAGE - Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work. Carol’s programs on this topic include: The Nonverbal Advantage (general business audience), The Nonverbal Advantage in Sales, The Silent Language of Leadership, and Body Language for Women Who Mean Business.   For information about booking Carol to speak at your next event,, contact her by phone: 510-526-1727, email: CGoman@CKG.com, or through her web sites: www.NonverbalAdvantage.com and www.CKG.com.
–
Author of ten books, including:

• The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work
• This Isn’t the Company I Joined — How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down
• Ghost Story: A Modern Business Fable
• Creativity in Business
• Change-Busting: 50 Ways to Sabotage Organizational Change
• Adapting to Change: Making it Work for You
• The Human Side of High-Tech

The 2009 San Francisco Writers Conference held this past weekend at the Mark Hopkins Hotel was a hugh success. I loved hearing all the success stories from past conference atendees and was inspired to get home to Write! Write! Write!

I only got to hear one keynote speech: Richard Paul Evans who wrote The Christmas Box. His charming, funny and engaging speech ended with major words of encouragement for writers everywhere. It is important to remember that success follows failure, often many failures. Keep writing no matter what.

The workshops were quite productive with some good hands-on advice and sharing. My favorite was the presentation on Building an Online Platform by Stephanie Chandler, author of From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur. Do take a few minutes to drop by her informative and fact-filled website and look around. If such a visit does note inspire you to start writing articles, please take two Aspirin and call me in the morning.

As we say back home, “God willin’ and the crick doesn’t rise,” you can find me at this same conference next February. I hope to see you there. Click here to learn more about this conference.

by

Ellen Taliaferro, MD

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

–Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

Got a problem? Get a journal. Let your journal, and you the author of what goes into it, be your caring friend.

There is no substitute for a listening ear. About 400 years before Christ, Hippocrates noted that every person had a doctor inside him or her. The trick is to bring out that doctor and activate his or her wisdom. So often we know what is wrong with us or in our life but we just don’t know what it is that we know. Thus the common observation among many writers that they “write to know.”

Journal writing affords the private opportunity to express feelings, examine reactions to stressors, and explore feelings. Journals keep their secrets while you can let yours out by confiding in the pages of the journal.

What to write about?

Folks new to journal writing often wonder what to write about and where to start. The simple answer is to start anywhere and write about anything as long as it is about you. How do you:

• Feel about something
• Delight in what you see in the clouds
• React to distress

When you engage in such writing, you lay the path down to establish an ongoing writing practice. At first, it may seem that you need to force the words out but if you keep writing an amazing thing happens. Words begin to emerge on their own. Then they might even dress themselves up and try evoke different responses. You know you have arrived in the right spot when you go back an read a journal entry and then think to yourself, “Gee, I didn’t know that I know this.”

Jump-start exercise

Take a painful event that happened to you at sometimes in your life. Write it down on the top of a blank page and then start writing about how that event impacted your life. Write without thinking or editing and write steady for at least 15 minutes a day three times a week. If you wish, write longer than 15 minutes in each session and write more often than three times a week.

Big events extract big costs. It’s OK if it takes you many sessions to write about how an event impacted your life. Just keep writing. Past research has shown that this type of ongoing writing about stressful and painful events builds and restores health.

Write on!

Does Disease Have Meaning?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 90 million Americans now live with chronic diseases. These chronic diseases such as diabetes and arthritis result in a decreased quality of life, limited activity, and extended pain and suffering.

When you suffer with a chronic healthcare problem, you deal with many factors that compose that problem. Some of these factors overlap, augment each other, or oppose each other.  And each factor may call for its own physician or treatment. If you want to succeed in your quest for wellness, the first thing you must do is drop out of the “I just do what my doctor tells me” school.

Join your healthcare team. Indeed, take over:

Any why not? You have the disease, not your doctor.

Growing evidence supports your role as a collaborative team member and captain. Remember, about 90 percent of what’s needed to help you improve comes directly from you, the person with the chronic health disorder.

When you become a team caption on your healthcare team, your care will improve as well as your satisfaction as a patient.

To learn more about the growing area of “patient self management,” check out the Stanford programs on self management by clicking here.

Many of us have ongoing struggles with our weight. We find that “diets” don’t work for the most part nor do most of the “gimmicks” that go around.

But here’s a question: Can a writing practice help you lose weight? Writing guru Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way book says, “Yes.”

Check out an interview with her in Newsweek where she reports that she went from a size 16 to a size 10 once she put her program into place. Better yet, visit Amazon to take a peek at her book by clicking here.

by
Ellen Taliaferro, MD
Zita Surprenant, MD, MPH

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), the psychological, emotional, and physical abuse of your patients by a current or previous intimate partner affects close to four million women a year. A little over a third of these women report violent victimization. Like many other medical conditions, IPV often escalates in frequency and severity the longer it persists. For approximately 1,000 women each year the violence becomes fatal.

Few of us in healthcare are comfortable dealing with IPV. Couple this with the fact that many physicians feel that their patients do not have family violence issues and you end up with a devastating problem that goes unrecognized, unaddressed, and untreated.

The truth remains that IPV presents a major challenge to physicians in every practice setting and specialty, and the after effects of violence and abuse cast a long shadow on the patient’s current and future health.

Early recognition of IPV and an appropriate response to IPV goes a long way to getting patients the help they need to be safe and escape ongoing injuries and illness. In addition, a valuable added benefit occurs when the psychological and physical trauma of the abuse is addressed, laying the groundwork for the patient’s improved health and well being.

IPV problems can appear at any moment in any practice setting. In light of this fact, physicians and healthcare providers can improve patient care of IPV victims by implementing 10 Action Steps in their clinical settings.

Section One of our new book, Respond to Intimate Partner Violence—10 Action Steps You Can Take to Help Your Patients and Your Practice, provides guidance for the recognition and detection of IPV in the practice setting. Section Two stresses appropriate response to the identification of IPV by putting into place 10 action steps.

Action Step No. 1:  Respond Effectively to Patients Who Disclose Violent Relationships

When a patient tells you that IPV complicates her life, you have a unique opportunity to help her improve her health and well-being. Support her in making changes by validating the difficulties and challenges she is experiencing, as well as her need to make changes.

By validating victims and survivors of IPV, you give your patients a tonic more powerful than any prescribed drug. Validation occurs through therapeutic messages, listening, and providing supporting materials.

Some therapeutic messages that you tell the patient bear repeating several times during your time with the patient. Chief among these:

•    “You do not deserve to be hurt, no matter what.”
•    “You are not alone; help is available.”

Listening non-judgmentally is a therapeutic message in itself. Once you have validated your patient, you have her trust and can move to the next step in her care.

Action Step No. 2:  Respond to Your Patient’s Safety Needs

Start by determining how safe your patient is right now. There are numerous safety assessment tools you can us. One simple one is the Physical Abuse Ranking score. Ask about these ten things:

1.    Throwing things, punching the wall
2.    Pushing, shoving, grabbing, throwing things at the victim
3.    Slapping with an open hand
4.    Kicking, biting
5.    Hitting with closed fists
6.    Attempted strangulation
7.    Beating up (pinned to wall/floor, repeated kicks, punches)
8.    Threatening with a weapon
9.    Assault with a weapon

If your patient’s abuse-related incident ranked higher than five on this scale, your patient can be in extreme danger. However, even if the abuse ranks low on this scale, your patient may still be in danger. Any patient who feels in danger should be considered to be in danger.

Safety planning for your patient should be tailor made to conform to her needs. For instance, she may elect to stay in her relationship with her batterer because she feels that is safer than leaving at this time. Regardless of whether or not your patient elects to leave or stay with her batterer, she must not leave your clinical setting without a plan in place.

Action Step No. 3:  Manage Your Patient’s Referral Needs

Services available to help patients differ in each community. However, a fast call to the National domestic violence hotline, 1-800-799-SAFE, provides you with local resources that your patient can access. Be sure to identify yourself as a provider at the very beginning of the call.

Most patients dealing with the presence of intimate partner violence in their lives don’t need to be admitted to the hospital. If your patient has medical or mental health needs that require admission, and her perpetrator remains free or poses a threat to your patient, consider admitting her as a Jane or John Doe patient. Note that HIPAA provides that patients can request not to be listed in the healthcare facility directory. 

Action Step No. 4:  Document Your Findings

Good documentation builds a bridge of communication among healthcare providers attending the patient and also assists when community advocacy and legal referrals are indicated. When taking care of victims of IPV, the three main modes of documentation consist of:

•    Charting
•    Body maps
•    Photo documentation

Action Step No 5:  Meet Your State and Local IPV Reporting Requirements

Mandatory injury reporting requirements vary considerably from state to state. To provide effective IPV intervention, you need to understand your state and local reporting laws, procedures, and the methods of enforcement, whether the issue is IPV, child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of someone with a disability, or assault involving weapons.

Specific information about state reporting laws can be found at the http://www.endabuse.org/ website.

Action Step No. 6:  Respond to Your Patient’s Stage of Change

Change is not easy. Leaving an abuser or staying in a relationship with new family dynamics often represents a major life change. You can best help your patient to bring about necessary changes in her life by understanding that change occurs in stages and that relapse is a normal part of the change process.

Action Step No. 7:  Address IPV in Special Populations

There can be additional barriers, special needs, and safety issues when working with IPV victims across age groups, gender, sexual orientation, and different cultures. You can best help individual patients in each of these groups by understanding the special needs each group has. For instance, a male victim of IPV struggles with issues separate from a teenage girl being abused by her partner or an elderly widow who remarries and then finds herself a victim of abuse.

Action Step No. 8:  Address Special Clinical Situations Involving IPV

In addition to separate populations, special clinical situations arise when treating IPV patients. For instance, the IPV victim and her perpetrator may both be your patient. Or your patient may be suicidal. Another special situation arises when her abusive partner manually strangled your patient during an assault.

Action Step No. 9:  Develop a System for Addressing IPV in Your Practice Setting

You need a team approach to lay the groundwork for effective IPV intervention in your practice setting. Two critical ingredients set the stage for success:

• Provide training for your staff to understand IPV and to respond to it.
• Designate a practice setting “IPV Champion” who becomes your local expert on policies, procedures, and local resource coordination.

Action Step No. 10:  Respond to Abusers

Although your first concern must be the safety of the IPV victim, who is not safe until the abuse and battering stops, you must also care about your patient’s abuser. Caring about IPV abusers can be a means of ending the abuse and ensuring the victim’s safety. Remember, even when victims leave their abusers and are safe, there is a high probability that their untreated abuser will victimize a new partner.

You can learn more about identifying IPV in your practice and preparing your practice setting for effective intervention in the book, Respond to Intimate Partner Violence—10 Action Steps You Can Take to Help Your Patients and Your Practice. The accompanying CD-ROM in the book contains resources such as medical record forms, patient handouts, and even a staff-training guide. The book can be ordered from the Virtual Lecture Hall of Medical Directions, Inc. by visiting their website or through Amazon.com. Online training with CME credits featuring the information in the book can also be found at http://www.vlh.com/.

Physicians and healthcare providers have a unique opportunity to identify and intervene with IPV in their practice settings. Doing so can save lives, promote their patients’ health, and enhance their patients’ well being. Los Angeles physician Bruce B. Ettinger sums this up quite well, “Set up a response system if one does not already exist, and take the risk and ask questions. The reward will equal anything you have ever done in medicine. You will save a life.”

Author’s note: You have permission to copy this article for distribution for web and print publications as long as you do not change content or remove hyperlinks in your online distribution. Notification of your use of the article is appreciated. For questions or to arrange for one of the  authors to speak at your event, please contact DrT at: DrTspeaks@gmail.com.

Please mark your calendars and plan to attend the Saturday, January 10, 2009, NSA/NC Chapter Meeting at the Sheraton Gateway hotel near the San Francisco airport. The program will start at 9:00 a.m. and end at 3:00 p.m. This informative day will help you move beyond a speaking platform to products and publications that reach many.

Lunch is included in your low registration fee of $45.00 for chapter members or $65.00 for nonmembers and guests.

Grow your idea into products and a National Day

Jeff Rubin

The day will begin with speaker Jeff Rubin, founder of National Punctuation Day®. His presentation, “How I turned a national holiday into a branded, moneymaking enterprise” describes how he turned a publicity stunt into a brand, and then developed a speaking program for children and an instructional DVD for teachers. These products have now become major business enterprises. You will learn how to take an idea that might come to you in the middle of the night, develop it, and market it, and become known as THE expert in that discipline and make money from it.

Grow your speech into a published book

Michael Larsen

Have you often wished for a published book to support your speaking work and mission? Perhaps you have heard the advice that “If you have a speech, you have a book.” Speakers who have attempted to turn a speech into a book, however, realize that this task can be an enormous challenge because they:

• Have little or no time to write
• Love to speak but dread penning words to a page
• Lack an agent

The good news is that speakers can be authors without also being “writers.” Michael Larsen and his selected panel members will show attendees how to:

• Understand the publication process
• Find and work with an agent
• Promote and market their published work
• Work with a collaborator of ghost writer to produce their book’s content

Networking lunch

Your low registration fee includes lunch. An experienced speaker will sit at each table to facilitate a fun networking experience. Be sure to bring your business cards!

Proposal writing afternoon workshop

Elizabeth Pomada                               Michael Larsen

San Francisco agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada will wrap up the day with a proposal-writing workshop. Between the two of them, Mike and Elizabeth have written or coauthored fourteen books, including Mike’s popular, must-have book, How to Write a Book Proposal.

An appealing and tight proposal will help you find an agent and, in turn, will help your agent sell your book. Even if you don’t choose to seek an established publisher, a proposal will help you to test market the potential of your book idea. The other major benefit a proposal provides is that the tough work of outlining your ideas and organizing them comes near the first of the process. Once the outline is firmed up, the writing and research can flow in an orderly fashion.

If you have a proposal already written, bring it with you and either Michael or Elizabeth will look at it and give you feedback if time permits.

To read more about this upcoming meeting visit the NSA Northern CA website by clicking here.

Save the Date

Who: National Speakers Association/Northern CA chapter meeting featuring writer Linda Vanderwold, CSP

Where: SFO Sheraton Gateway Hotel, 600 Airport Road, Burlingame, CA

What: A one-day conference (lunch included in your registration fee)

Do you have a turning-point-in-my-life story to tell? Speakers and writers often refer to these as “signature stories.” This type of story is what we tell ourselves and others about what we do, want, and seek to achieve.

If so, think about joining others at this event for a full-day meeting (lunch included) for the one low price of $45.00 for members and $65.00 for non-members.

The speakers are quite good and will tell you how to enhance your speaking activities through marketing and “power thinking” and “power writing.”

If you are in or near northern CA, the hotel is right off of 101 just south of the San Francisco airport.

Coming from further away? Hop on a plane to SFO and catch the shuttle to the hotel. The rooms are nice, food is good, and the hotel rates are very reasonable if booked ahead on the internet. If you call the hotel for a room, make sure you tell them you are with the host organization.

To learn more or to register for this event, click here or call (650) 871-4220.