09/30/2026
You can rehearse a script, but you cannot fake your nervous system.
I've seen it room after room for over 24 years…everything the speaker said was perfect, and something still "felt off" to the audience.
MIT professor Alex Pentland's book Honest Signals explains what that "something" is.
His team used wearable sensors to measure how people interact and found an unconscious channel of signals that predicts a lot of what people end up deciding.
He calls these signals a "window into our intentions" and says they're hard to consciously fake.
He focused on four of them, each rooted in older parts of the brain and body:
• Activity: your energy level, which he ties to your autonomic nervous system. It goes up on its own when you're genuinely interested.
• Influence: how much your speaking rhythm shapes the other person's, which he links to ancient attention and orienting systems.
• Mimicry: the automatic copying of nods, smiles and gestures, thought to involve mirror neurons. In one salary negotiation study for example, mimicry alone accounted for almost a third of the variation in what the new employee ended up getting.
• Consistency: how steady your emphasis and timing are. He calls it a signal of a focused mind, and presenters who were more consistent came across as more convincing.
You may be thinking, "Roberto, can I control these signals with a lot of practice?"
Pentland says the smooth, steady part of your delivery comes from practice, the same way it does for athletes and dancers, so rehearsing is worth your time.
But in one of his studies, executives listening to business pitches were unconsciously reading how much each presenter believed in the idea, and no amount of rehearsal can script that for you.
That's why we built our Influencing From The Front program the way we did.
We start with you and your internal state, and then we work on the message and how you deliver it, so what your audience picks up on is real.
Join our next program, details at the link in the comments.
