Did you just touch my elbow?

There was a stretch in my twenties where I had a very specific soundtrack.

Not music. More like cassette tapes. Then CDs. The kind you’d pick up at a real estate conference, usually sold in a box set by someone American with very white teeth and a voice that made everything sound like the opening of a film about Navy SEALs.

Top producers. Peak performers. The psychology of influence. How to close. How to hold eye contact for exactly three seconds before looking away. How to mirror body language without the other person noticing.

The elbow touch.

That’s the one I remember most. A brief, light graze on the outer arm, timed to a moment of emphasis. Not weird. Just… present. It’s meant to create subconscious rapport. A warmth. A signal that says: I see you. I’m with you. Trust me.

And for a period, I used all of it. Because it worked. Or at least it seemed to. I was trying to be good at what I did, and so I borrowed every tool that came with instructions.

At some point, though, and I couldn’t tell you exactly when, I started to feel the seams.

Not in the people I was talking to. In myself. There was a gap between what I was doing and why I was doing it. And the gap was getting harder to ignore.

I wasn’t connecting with people. I was running a process at them.

So I backed away from it. Slowly, then all at once. And I leaned harder into the stuff that didn’t come with a framework. Asking questions I actually wanted the answers to. Sitting in the silence instead of filling it. Saying the thing I meant instead of the thing that landed best.

It turns out that’s harder. But it also turns out that’s the bit that lasts.

Anyway. That’s the preamble.

The reason I’m writing this is that I keep noticing something lately. And I’m only now finding the words for why it bothers me slightly more than it should.

I’ll be in a conversation, a meeting, a coffee, a catch-up, and I’ll feel it. The elbow touch is rarer now. But the rest of it is everywhere. The leaning in at exactly the right moment. The slow nod while I’m talking. The name, placed deliberately into the sentence. Chris. That’s a really interesting way to look at it, Chris. The pause after I speak, held just long enough to signal deep consideration.

And I want to be clear: I’m not sitting here saying any of these people are bad. Some of them are smart, curious, and I genuinely enjoy talking to them. Most of the time I don’t think they’re even fully aware they’re doing it.

But once you know what you’re looking at, you can’t unknow it. It’s like being shown the trick before the magician performs it. The mechanics still work. The competence is still there.

The magic is gone.

There’s something a bit sad about that. Not because they’re trying to manipulate me, that’s not usually what’s happening. But because the instinct underneath it is to perform connection rather than just have it. Which means at some level, they don’t trust that the real version of them is going to be enough.

I know that instinct. I had it for years.

The podcast era has been particularly good at packaging this stuff up and sending it back out into the world. Fourteen tools for building instant trust. The three body language cues that signal openness. How to make anyone feel heard in under sixty seconds. It’s delivered with sincerity and reasonable production values, and it probably does help some people get started.

But I think it also creates a strange thing: we mistake the performance of connection for connection itself. We get good at the signals. We get worse at the thing the signals were meant to represent.

The conversations I actually value, the ones I still think about, almost always involve someone not trying. A moment where someone dropped the frame. Said something slightly unguarded. Admitted they didn’t have the answer. Let the silence sit without filling it.

It doesn’t look like rapport-building. It looks like a person just being a person.

And that is, genuinely, a much harder thing to do. Especially if you’ve spent years learning to do the other thing. Because the other thing has a framework, a feedback loop, and something to practise. The real thing has none of that. It just has the mildly uncomfortable experience of being seen without preparation.

So I’m probably not the right person to be handing out advice on authenticity. I spent enough time being a professional shape-shifter to know how good you can get at it, and how hollow it eventually feels.

But if someone touches your elbow at a coffee meeting and you feel vaguely like you’re in a training video, you’re not imagining it.

And if you’ve ever been the one doing the touching: same. Most of us were, at some point.

You don’t have to keep doing it.