Today I'm joined by someone I think you will love and learn a lot from. We met while doing an event for the Young President's Organization (YPO) at the London Business School, and she very quickly became a friend and someone I respect tremendously. Annie Särnblad is a preeminent global speaker and expert in reading facial expressions. She is Certified in the Facial Action Coding System “FACS” and can numerically code the 10,000 muscle combinations in human expression. Annie is a microexpressions expert and a human lie detector, and someone who is tremendously interesting to talk with. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. We discuss the fact that facial expressions are universal - they are biological. Annie shares some of the key things she teaches her clients and we talk about the paleomammalian brain, mirror neurons, and a lot more. Enjoy!
Annie Särnblad is a preeminent global speaker and expert in reading facial expressions. She is Certified in the Facial Action Coding System “FACS” and can numerically code the 10,000 muscle combinations in human expression. She has developed her own easy-to-absorb teaching techniques based on the knowledge she accumulated living in 9 countries and studying 8 languages through immersion. Annie has a Master’s in Cultural Anthropology, and has lived across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and is currently living in Boston. Annie raised her three children as human lie detectors - by taking them out into Singapore on a daily basis and live narrating human's faces in real-time in Swedish. Over almost ten years, she and her children simplified the identifiers and locations of each emotion on the face down to the briefest flicker of muscle movement.
Microexpressions are the subconscious “leakage” of emotion that makes “unspoken” feelings visible. They are universal to our species and not dependent on culture. In a negotiation, reading microexpressions allows us to gain insight into the other person’s position that is invisible to most people. This ability to identify the subtle changes in the mood of the person we are talking to allows us to observe how a conversation is going - as it is happening - so that we can instantly adjust our behavior and improve the negotiation outcome. Reading and responding well to another person’s needs and wants greatly influences their desire to close a deal on both a conscious and subconscious level.
Connect with her on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-sarnblad/