Hello and welcome to the psychology podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman where we give

you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. Each episode will feature

a new guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.

Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the

podcast. cast. And now I'm really excited to be speaking with my guest Vanessa Van Edwards. Vanessa is a self-described

recovering boring and awkward person who performs research on human behavior to

figure out what makes people tick. Her latest book, Captivate the Science of

Succeeding with People,

provide simple ways to improve your social intelligence and level up your

relationships.

This should be a very practical and informative episode.

Vanessa, it's so great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, there's so many things to discuss with you.

But I want to like talk about, I bet there's just this huge transformation in you

because you write about how you were an awkward kid

and that's just like really hard to see,

like talking to you.

So can you maybe take me back to like,

if you don't mind calling it back to the your childhood

of course yeah yeah of course you know it's funny I for a long time tried to bury that part of my

life and then I realize that through writing and through thinking about it actually the more I talked about it the easier it got so I'd be happy to dive into those awkward years.

...