Russell Newton explains how eye contact patterns reveal power dynamics in groups, based on Patrick King’s insights on reading people and understanding human behavior. Learn to establish baseline behavior before interpreting social cues, body language, and behavioral tells—essential skills for understanding human behavior and detecting deception in social dynamics. ⏱

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:07 Narration Experience 2:16 Framework Introduction 3:21 Visual Dominance Ratio Explanation 4:27 Observation in Corporate IT 5:36 Perception of Eye Contact 8:14 Performance and Delivery 9:57 Reference to Patrick King’s Work

In this channel, professional narrator Russell Newton dives into the world of personal development through captivating audiobooks and insightful discussions on understanding human behavior. Whether you’re learning about baseline behavior and behavioral tells or mastering the art of reading people through eye contact patterns and microexpressions, Russell offers profound life wisdom that can transform your interactions in social dynamics and group settings.

Years before I ever narrated a word of Patrick King’s work, I was sitting in an IT conference room.
Engineer, not manager.
Not the most senior person in the room.
Watching a colleague try to take over a meeting that was mine.
He was the DBA, the database administrator.
Smart guy.
This was my project.
My system on the table.
And he had an agenda that had nothing to do with what we were there to discuss.
I didn’t know then what visual dominance ratio was.
I didn’t know what baselining meant.
I just knew something was off.
And I knew it because I knew him.
I told him to leave those opinions out and stay on topic.
And 30 years later,
I’m in a recording booth narrating Patrick King’s behavioral tells, and I kept stopping because Patrick King just handed me the vocabulary for something I’ve been doing my entire professional life without knowing what to call it.
Now, I’ve narrated hundreds and hundreds of books, and most of the time, to be honest about this, I’m in narration mode.
I’m tracking performance, pacing, breath, delivery.
I’m not reading for comprehension, but every so often, a book gets through anyway, and sections of behavioral tells got through.
Patrick King writes about how to read people, not through dramatic tells like you see in crime dramas, but through the quiet, consistent signals that people broadcast without knowing it.
What stopped me wasn’t one big idea, it was a recognition.
Now, I spent 15 years as a school teacher and counselor reading kids.
I’ve spent almost as many years in corporate IT watching how power actually moves through a room, which is number who you would expect most of the time.
And I spent the last stretch of my career voicing characters, performing status and intention from text alone.
Patrick King gave all of that a framework.
today, I want to talk about two ideas from this book that hit me the hardest and why they hit harder coming from where I’ve been.
Let’s go back to that conference room.
The DBA was smart.
He was vocal.
By any conventional read of the room, he looked like he was running it, but that he wasn’t.
And the tell, though I didn’t have the word for it then, was in his eyes.
Patrick King writes about something called the visual dominance ratio.
Got to do it straight forward once you hear it.
But it reframes everything.
Most people make more eye contact when they’re listening than when they’re speaking.
That’s the default.
That’s submission to the conversation.
High status individuals flip that ratio.
They hold eye contact while they’re talking.
They look away while others speak.
The ratio of eye contact during speaking versus listening is one of the clearest indicators of where the actual power sits in a group.
Now in that IT meeting, the DBA was making eye contact with everyone while he talked.
He was performing authority he hadn’t been given.
And what I read instinctively without the framework was that his eye contact pattern didn’t match his role.
He was speaking like someone who owned the room, but it wasn’t his room.
That gap between performed authority and actual authority is exactly what VDR helps you see.
Now remember, you’re not looking for eye contact as a single data point.
We’ve talked about that before.
You’re looking for the ratio and whether that ratio matches what you’d expect from this person in this context.
When those don’t line up, you’re seeing a tell.
I spent many years in corporate IT watching technical people get talked over by louder, more politically connected, non-technical people.
The technical person had the knowledge.
The other person had the VDR.
Knowing that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, but it means you’re not confused about what’s happening.
Here’s the takeaway when we discuss visual dominance ratio.
It is the ratio of eye contact while speaking versus listening.
High status individuals hold eye contact while they talk.
Watch for the gap between performed authority and the actual role.
Now, like so many body language reading tips, VDR only works if you know what someone’s normal looks like.
And that’s where baselining comes in.
And this is the concept that hit me hardest as a former school counselor.
Baselining is the practice of establishing what a person’s normal behavior looks like.
Before you tried to read anything into their behavior,
You can’t call something a deviation if you don’t know what baseline you’re measuring from.
When I was a school counselor, a kid could walk into my office and say they were fine.
And I know they weren’t.
Not because of any dramatic signal, because I knew what fine looked like for that kid specifically.
The way they sat, the way they looked, how much they talked before I said anything.
Whether they filled silence or let it sit.
Every one of those things was calibrated against a baseline I’d built over weeks or months of ordinary interactions.
That’s not intuition, it’s data.
I just never heard a word for the process.
The Petra King makes the point that most people tried to read behavior without ever establishing a baseline.
They see someone cross their arms and decide that person is defensive,
They see someone avoid eye contact and decide that person is dishonest.
But if that person always crosses their arms, if that’s just how they sit, then the crossed arms mean nothing.
The behavior only becomes a tell when it deviates from what you know is normal.
Now, once again, back to the IT meeting.
The reason I could read the DBA wasn’t that I was unusually perceptive.
It was that I’d worked with him.
I knew his baseline.
I knew the difference between him engaged and him performing.
That gap was the tell.
And this is what I kept thinking about in the booth.
As a narrator, you can do a version of basslining constantly.
When I’m voicing a character across a full book, I have to establish what that character’s normal vocal register sounds like before I can make any deviation meaningful.
Anger only reads as anger if the listener knows what that character sounds like when they’re calm.
Patrick King is describing something that applies just as much to performance as it does to perception.
Here’s the takeaway for baselining.
Establish what’s normal before you try to read anything.
Deviation from baseline is the tell, not the behavior itself.
You can’t read a room you haven’t been watching.
Um, I want to be honest about something.
I narrated this book in professional mode.
Performance, pacing, delivery.
But these two ideas got through anyway.
Because they weren’t new information.
They were recognition.
And that’s what the best non-fiction does.
It doesn’t tell you things you never thought.
It gives you language for things you already know.
If you’ve managed people, counseled people, coached, taught, negotiated with people, or just paid close attention in any room for any length of time, you’ve been doing versions of VDR and base-lining already.
What Patrick King gives you is the framework to do it intentionally, to walk into a room and ask,
What’s the baseline here?
To watch the ratios and ask, who actually holds power regardless of what the org chart says?
So before your next important meeting, your next difficult conversation, any interaction where the stakes are real, establish the baseline first, watch the ratios, look for the gap between what someone is performing and what their history tells you is real.
That gap is where the information lives.
I’ve been in three careers, teacher counselor, IT engineer, narrator,
The one thing consistent across all three is that the people who read Broom’s well are almost never doing anything mysterious.
We’re just paying attention to the right things.
Patrick King tells you what those things are.
The Behavioral Tales is a Patrick King book, and Patrick King’s work lives in depth over on the Social Skills Coaching Channel.
Full structured breakdowns, complete concept frameworks, the link is in the description here on this channel.
I’ll keep doing what we did today, what lands from inside the material, from inside the booth, from wherever my three careers happen to connect.
If that’s worth your time, subscribe.