Expert articles from Steve Van Aperen on body language, deception detection, leadership communication, behavioural interviewing and the human signals that shape trust, influence and decision-making.
“The most dangerous mistakes in business are often not strategic. They are human.”
Steve Van AperenThese articles bring Steve’s old-site insight content into the new editorial format, preserving the substance while improving readability and authority.
Every conference organiser has sat through a keynote that left the room flat. The speaker was technically competent. Their slides were professional. They said nothing wrong. And ye...
Read article →The average cost of a bad hire, when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and cultural damage, exceeds twelve months of that person's salary. Yet most hiring m...
Read article →Most people enter a negotiation focused entirely on what they're going to say. The words, the numbers, the arguments. They've prepared their position, anticipated objections, and r...
Read article →When I first walked into an FBI training facility, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew the methodology had a formidable reputation. What I didn't expect was how directly applicabl...
Read article →Before the objections arrive — this isn't a commentary on honesty or integrity. Research consistently shows no meaningful difference in how frequently men and women lie. What the r...
Read article →You form an impression of every person you meet within seconds. Neuroscience tells us that the brain processes social information this rapidly — generating an initial read that sha...
Read article →Every conference organiser has sat through a keynote that left the room flat. The speaker was technically competent. Their slides were professional. They said nothing wrong. And yet, the moment the applause faded, so did the impact. Delegates moved straight to the coffee station and forgot everything they'd just heard.
The right keynote speaker doesn't just fill a timeslot. They define the narrative of your entire event. They give delegates something to carry back to their desks, their teams, and their next conversation. That kind of impact doesn't happen by accident — and it certainly doesn't happen by booking the cheapest available name.
After 700+ keynotes across 17 countries, I've seen what separates the speakers who create lasting change from those who simply show up. Here's what to look for.
Most event organisers begin by searching for a speaker on a topic. That's backwards. Begin instead by asking: what do I want my delegates to feel, know, and do differently after this session? Work backwards from that outcome to find a speaker who can deliver it.
A speaker who talks about leadership in the abstract is very different from one who equips your team with a concrete skill they can apply in their next meeting. The best speakers close that gap completely.
Impressive credentials matter — but only when they're directly relevant. A speaker who trained with the FBI and assisted in homicide investigations brings a very different kind of authority to a session on reading people and building trust than a speaker who simply read the same books and built a slide deck.
Ask yourself: has this person lived what they're teaching? Real-world experience creates a quality of storytelling and insight that no amount of research can replicate. Audiences feel the difference immediately.
Any speaker can have a good day. The real question is whether organisations bring them back. A re-booking rate above 50% is exceptional in the speaking industry. It means the speaker consistently delivers value that organisations want their teams to experience again — and that's the clearest signal of sustained impact you'll ever find.
Your audience should leave with something they didn't have when they walked in — a skill, a shift in perspective, a technique they're itching to try. They should still be talking about the session at dinner. And your CEO should be asking you who that speaker was before they've even left the room.
That's the standard. And it's achievable, every time, if you ask the right questions before you book.
Book Steve Van Aperen for your next event Steve has delivered 700+ keynotes across 17 countries. Enquire now to check availability for your conference date. Check Availability →
The average cost of a bad hire, when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and cultural damage, exceeds twelve months of that person's salary. Yet most hiring managers are still conducting interviews the same way they learned twenty years ago — focused entirely on what a candidate says, and almost entirely blind to how they say it.
In over two decades working alongside the FBI, U.S. Secret Service, and homicide investigation teams, I've learned that deception leaves traces. Not always obvious ones. But consistent, reliable ones — if you know where to look.
Here are seven signals that most hiring managers walk straight past.
These signals are indicators, not confessions. No single gesture or phrase proves deception. What matters is clusters — multiple signals appearing together, particularly in response to specific questions, in a person who presents differently when the pressure is lower.
Build your interviews around behavioural questions that require specific, verifiable detail. "Tell me about a time" questions are harder to fabricate convincingly than opinion questions. Follow up with "and then what happened?" repeatedly — liars run out of detail faster than truth-tellers.
And remember: your gut is data. If something feels inconsistent, it's worth exploring. The discomfort you're feeling might be your brain pattern-matching something your conscious mind hasn't named yet.
Train your hiring team to read people with precision Steve's Behavioural Interviewing for Leaders program equips HR professionals and executives with these skills and more — in a single day. Enquire About Training →
Most people enter a negotiation focused entirely on what they're going to say. The words, the numbers, the arguments. They've prepared their position, anticipated objections, and rehearsed their opening. What they haven't done is prepare to read the room.
That's where negotiations are actually won and lost — not in the words, but in the space between them.
Before you can identify meaningful body language signals in a negotiation, you need a baseline. How does this person normally carry themselves? What's their natural speaking pace? Do they naturally make strong eye contact or do they look away when thinking? These are their normal patterns — and deviations from them are what you're watching for.
Spend the first ten minutes of any high-stakes meeting in casual conversation before business begins. Not just to build rapport — though that matters — but to establish a behavioural baseline you can measure everything else against.
Crossed arms do not mean someone is closed off. This particular piece of body language mythology has caused more unnecessary anxiety than almost any other. People cross their arms because they're cold, comfortable, or simply resting. In isolation, it means nothing. In combination with other signals and in deviation from baseline — then it might mean something.
Ask a question and then stay completely silent. Comfortable silence is one of the most powerful tools in any negotiation. Most people are trained to fill silence immediately. The discomfort it creates often prompts the other party to volunteer information, concede ground, or clarify a position they hadn't intended to reveal.
Pair silence with a genuinely curious expression — not a hard stare, not a smile — and you create a space that most people feel compelled to fill. What they fill it with is almost always useful.
Bring these skills to your leadership team Steve's keynote on human behaviour and body language equips your negotiators, sales leaders and executives with practical, immediately applicable techniques. Book the Keynote →
When I first walked into an FBI training facility, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew the methodology had a formidable reputation. What I didn't expect was how directly applicable every principle would be — not just to law enforcement, but to every high-stakes human interaction I'd ever have again.
The FBI doesn't teach body language as a party trick. They teach it as a survival skill. The ability to accurately read another person's emotional state, detect deception, and build rapid trust in hostile conditions isn't theoretical — it's operational. And that precision translates directly to business in ways most corporate training programs never come close to.
One of the first things the FBI methodology dismantles is the idea that any single behaviour means anything in isolation. Touching the face doesn't mean you're lying. Looking up and to the left doesn't mean you're fabricating. These oversimplifications circulate endlessly and they make people worse at reading others, not better — because they replace careful observation with pattern-matching that doesn't hold up.
What matters is whether a behaviour is normal for that individual, in that context, in response to that specific stimulus. Everything is relative. Everything requires a baseline.
This is the insight that changes everything. A person can construct a completely truthful verbal statement while their body communicates something entirely different — not because they're lying, but because the two channels are processed differently. Conscious thought produces words. Emotion produces body language. And emotion is much harder to control consciously.
In interrogation settings, investigators learn to watch for leakage — the moments when emotion breaks through controlled verbal presentation. In business, those same moments appear in board presentations, performance reviews, client pitches, and salary negotiations. The executive who says "we're very confident in this quarter's projections" while engaging in self-comfort gestures and avoiding eye contact is giving you two different pieces of information simultaneously.
Elite interrogators don't extract information through pressure. They extract it through connection. The FBI's rapport-building methodology is precise and teachable — and it produces results in hostile conditions that confrontational approaches never could.
The foundational principle is simple: people share information with people they trust. And trust is built through mirroring, genuine interest, and demonstrating that you understand someone's perspective — even if you fundamentally disagree with it.
FBI interviewers are trained to ask open questions and then listen — really listen — without rushing to the next question. In business, we tend to listen just long enough to formulate our response. That's not listening; that's waiting. And it means we miss the information that comes in the second and third sentences, after someone has said the thing they prepared to say.
The most revealing information in any conversation almost always comes after the scripted answer. The moment someone has finished what they planned to say and keeps talking — that's where the real signal lives.
Every leader, every salesperson, every negotiator, every hiring manager is conducting informal interviews every day. The question is whether they're doing it consciously or not. The FBI taught me to do it consciously — to bring deliberate, trained attention to every significant human interaction rather than relying on untrained instinct.
That shift — from passive participant to active reader of human behaviour — is the single greatest competitive advantage available to any professional. And unlike technical skills, it applies in every conversation you'll ever have.
Bring FBI-level people-reading skills to your team Steve's keynote translates two decades of real-world intelligence training into practical tools your leaders can use from day one. Book Steve →
Before the objections arrive — this isn't a commentary on honesty or integrity. Research consistently shows no meaningful difference in how frequently men and women lie. What the research does show is a significant difference in how effectively they do it when they choose to — and understanding why has profound implications for how we communicate, lead, and build teams.
From early childhood, girls are socialised toward greater emotional literacy and communication sophistication than boys. They develop earlier facility with reading facial expressions, managing emotional tone, and calibrating language to context. By the time they enter the workforce, this translates into a measurable advantage in several areas: they're better at managing the emotional content of communication, more attuned to how their words land, and more skilled at navigating socially complex situations.
These are precisely the skills that make deception harder to detect — not because women are more dishonest, but because they're more precise communicators. The tells that reveal deception in less skilled communicators are better managed by those with higher emotional and social intelligence.
If you're applying standard deception detection techniques uniformly across your workforce — in fraud investigations, HR processes, or performance conversations — you may be systematically less accurate when assessing female communicators. The baseline assumptions built into many traditional interrogation and interview frameworks were developed primarily with male subjects.
The solution isn't suspicion. It's calibration. Understanding that communication sophistication varies across individuals — and that gender is one of many factors that influences it — makes you a more accurate and more equitable assessor of human behaviour.
The same communication skills that make deception harder to detect also make elite leadership communication more accessible. The ability to read emotional states accurately, calibrate messaging to audience, and manage interpersonal dynamics consciously are not soft skills — they're high-leverage strategic capabilities.
Organisations that invest in developing these capabilities across their entire leadership cohort — regardless of gender — consistently outperform those that treat human behaviour as either innate or irrelevant.
Stop assessing people through a single interpretive lens. Build your baseline for each individual. Invest in developing emotional and behavioural intelligence across your team. And recognise that communication sophistication — wherever it originates — is an asset worth understanding, not a variable worth flattening.
Develop behavioural intelligence across your leadership team Steve's workshops build practical people-reading skills that apply in every professional context — hiring, negotiation, leadership, and beyond. Explore the Workshop →
You form an impression of every person you meet within seconds. Neuroscience tells us that the brain processes social information this rapidly — generating an initial read that shapes the entire subsequent interaction. The question isn't whether you're profiling. You are. The question is whether you're doing it accurately.
The 60-Second Profile is a framework I developed across 25 years of working with law enforcement agencies and corporate organisations. It's built on the same principles used in behavioural analysis for criminal investigations — systematised, teachable, and applicable in any context where rapid, accurate human assessment matters.
Every person broadcasts information simultaneously across four channels. Most observers monitor one, occasionally two. Elite communicators and investigators monitor all four, simultaneously, and in real time.
Not attractiveness — information. How someone has chosen to present themselves tells you about their self-perception, their audience awareness, and their relationship to authority and convention. Deliberate choices about appearance communicate values. Inconsistencies — the expensive suit with worn shoes, the casual dress in a formal setting — are worth noting. Not as judgments, but as data points that invite curiosity.
Body movement, posture, gesture, and facial expression. This is the channel most people think of when they hear "body language." The key principle: you're not looking for what a gesture means in isolation. You're looking for congruence — does the body support or contradict the verbal message? And you're looking for change — what shifts when the conversation moves to specific topics?
Everything about how someone speaks that isn't the words themselves. Pace, pitch, volume, rhythm, pausing patterns, vocal quality. People's paralanguage changes measurably under stress and deception. A person who speaks at a consistent, moderate pace typically slows down or speeds up when discussing content they find difficult. A person whose voice quality changes — becoming slightly strained or higher-pitched — on specific topics is signalling increased arousal around that content.
Finally — the words. Most interactions process this channel exclusively. By attending to the other three first, you arrive at the verbal content with far more context. Listen for word choice, for what's included and omitted, for the structure of narratives, for the pronouns used. Language reveals psychology in ways that are difficult to consciously manage.
In your first sixty seconds with any new person, your objective is not to impress. It's to observe. Ask one open question and listen across all four channels simultaneously. You're building a baseline — understanding how this person normally operates — so that meaningful deviations become visible.
Most of what you need to know about a person is available in their first sixty seconds — if you know what you're looking at. The challenge isn't access to information. It's the trained attention required to receive it.
Like any complex skill, accurate behavioural reading requires deliberate practice. Start by monitoring one additional channel beyond your natural default. If you naturally attend to verbal content, spend a week consciously monitoring paralanguage — notice pace and pitch changes across different topics in conversations you're already having.
Over time, the monitoring becomes automatic. What once required conscious attention becomes integrated into how you naturally engage with people. And at that point, you're operating at a level that most of the people you'll ever deal with don't even know is possible.
That's the edge. And it's available to anyone willing to develop it.
Learn the 60-Second Profile directly from Steve Steve teaches this framework live — with demonstrations, exercises, and real-time feedback — in his keynote and workshop programs. Book Steve for Your Event →
For people who want the frameworks beyond a keynote, Steve’s online course teaches how to detect deception and read body language.
Explore Online Training →“In 89 homicide investigations, the signal that eventually mattered most was almost never the obvious one. It was the small thing that didn’t fit.”