Marcus runs a successful flooring company, that has been growing year over year for the past four years. Yet, he constantly felt frustrated. Even with all the work he’s done, it felt like he’s always missing something.

It’s not that he wasn’t fulfilled. He had a beautiful family with a supportive wife and two stunning daughters.
It was more that he always felt like he was missing a piece.
Missing a piece of the conversation or of a deal.

This caused him to ask endless questions, overthinking and left him second-guessing himself.

His team started dreading updates with Marcus because he'd turn every simple conversation into an interrogation.

Same thing happened with clients. After every conversation, Marcus would spend hours trying to read between the lines, searching for what they "really" meant.

His wife told him, "You do this at home too. I tell you something simple and you act like I'm hiding some secret agenda."

While things looked successful, this thought process was killing the business from the inside out.
His team felt like he didn't trust them. They'd start over-explaining everything just to avoid his questions, which made meetings drag on forever.

Clients felt interrogated instead of heard.
And Marcus himself was exhausted. Every conversation felt like detective work.
He tried being more direct. Asking more questions. Creating detailed forms for updates. Nothing helped because the real problem wasn't how other people were communicating.


Marcus wasn't paranoid or overly suspicious by nature.

This was a thinking skill weakness.

You, without you even realizing it, you are using the 28 thinking skills to do any task - including understanding what people are communicating to you.

When the thinking skills you need to use are strong, doing the task happens easily. When the thinking skills you need to use are weak, doing the task becomes a challenge.

In Marcus's case, the thinking skill that was getting in the way was identifying relevant cues.

His brain couldn't pick up on the signals that tell you "this is important” or “don’t go down this rabbit hole because it’s personal, nothing against you”

Once we improved at identifying relevant cues, Marcus didn’t enter every situation with his guard up. He was able to be more trusting. Both in the other and himself as he was able to see what was really happening here.
I'm gonna share with you the exact steps we took to improve Marcus's thinking skill of identifying relevant cues, but you’ve got to understand that you may be struggling with communication because of a completely different reason, because of a different thinking skill.

You can take the thinking skills assessment to see where each of your thinking skills are standing at: www.lifepixuniversity.com/cf


Identifying relevant cues is your brain's ability to notice the signals that actually matter in any situation and ignore the ones that don't.

In communication, there are hundreds of cues happening at once - tone of voice, body language, word choice, what's said, what's not said, facial expressions, timing, context.

When this skill is strong, your brain automatically picks up on the cues that tell you what's really going on. Is this person being genuine? Are they holding back? Is there a problem they're not mentioning?

When it's weak, your brain either misses important cues completely or treats every tiny signal as equally important, which overwhelms the brain.

Marcus's brain wasn’t picking up the little cues that say the full story. For example, his project manager's saying “the client loved it” in a relaxed manner with open body language, was all cues that the statement was genuine.

But Marcus's brain didn't pick up on those signals. It just heard words and assumed there must be more to the story because... there usually is more, right?


Well, sometimes and sometimes not. Generally, we can know through the cues.

Here are 3 exercises I did with Marcus to help him improve his understanding of relevant cues which drastically improved his communication:

Exercise #1: List of Cues

In the beginning of OYB, Marcus’s brain missed SO many cues. We needed his brain to simply be aware of them as they were coming in.

I had Marcus make a long list of cues that can potentially come up in conversation.
Such as:
Their tone of voice.
Where their hands are.
How confident they are in what they’re saying. Etc.

The goal here is not some sort hack to read people. It’s to simply have your brain be able to read the cues people are telling you. Is this something you can trust or do we need to ask more questions?

List became living list.
This way, his brain was on the look out for more cues during conversations and helped cues stay top of mind.


Within two weeks of observe the cues, Marcus noticed he was reading situations more accurately. He learned what it looked like when “no issues” was really not a issue and when it more of just trying to get by.


Exercise #2: Practice With Movies

This one's about training your brain to read cues in a low-stakes environment.

Marcus would watch scenes with the sound off and try to read what was happening just from body language and facial expressions.

Then he'd rewatch with sound and see how accurate he was.

Is this character lying? Are they confident or nervous? Is there tension in this conversation?

This helped Marcus see how many cues his brain was missing or misreading without any real consequence.


Exercise #3: Getting Clear on Hiding Looks Like

I wanted to make sure Marcus’s brain knew what hiding DOES look like. Because sometimes people do hide information and if we’re missing it, it can be harmful.

However, I wanted it to be specific because the more specific we are, the easier it is for our brain.

If I told you “Point to something that’s big and fluffy, you’ll have to go look for something. Verses if I tell you, point to a cloud, you’ll immediately look up and point at the clouds.”

So I had Marcus create a list of cues a person might show when they are hiding something.
Such as skirting a question or deflecting everything you’re saying.

They are cues (not facts!) that you should go down that path to figure out what’s going on.



One big switch that Marcus had to make, was understanding that most people, especially people who cared about him, we’re purposely hiding information all day long.
The default needed to be they’re on my side (and I’m on theirs) or else it’s really hard to trust the others person.
So what I had Marcus do, was if there wasn’t a specific cue that he can point out to, to accept what the other person was saying (if it’s someone he knows his on his side, his wife, employees etc)

This takes time. You've built a pattern of suspicion. Your brain will resist believing people are being straightforward.

But gradually, as you practice reading actual cues instead of assuming hidden meanings, this gets easier.

You'll know you're improving when you can have a conversation, get information, and move on without replaying it for hours looking for what you missed.


A few weeks after improving his thinking skill of searching for relevant cues, Marcus comes into session and shared
“My manager came into my office earlier with 'I need to talk about the Peterson project.'
In the past I would immediately freaked out, there’s a problem, something’s wrong. But I noticed myself notice the manager was calm so I knew it wasn’t a big deal. And I was right. Nothing major happened.”


I smiled so big when I heard that story as I knew from this point forward, things would forever be easier for Marcus.


Cheers to Peak Brain Performance!