Janine Driver Learned to Read People Long Before TV Called Her

Janine Driver's first audience didn't clap. As a young investigator for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, she walked into pawnshops, explosives plants and hundreds of gun dealers' homes, often alone and rarely welcome. She had a badge and no gun.

She described those years in her book You Say More Than You Think, excerpted by TODAY in 2010. "My only weapon — and I carried it with me at all times — was confidence," she wrote. That confidence came from reading people quickly and adjusting in real time, and it turned into the career that followed.

I.From the training center to the network desk

By 24, Driver was one of the bureau's youngest instructors, and she went on to teach at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. By 31, she wrote, she was teaching body language to more than thirty thousand law enforcement officers and U.S. attorneys across North America. When CNBC featured her in 2008, it introduced her as "the human lie-detector" who had "spent more than a decade with the Department of Justice," and noted she had trained more than 30,000 police officers in how to read people.

Along the way she worked with some of the best-known names in the field, including her mentor J. J. Newberry, a retired ATF special agent known as the "Human Lie Detector," and Dr. Paul Ekman, the researcher known for his work on microexpressions. In the same book she wrote that she had worked with "more than fifty thousand people — from hardened cops to senior-level executives to pampered heiresses" to help them improve their body language.

From there she became a regular media voice. She has shared body-language advice on TODAY, written for Oprah.com, and published a second book, You Can't Lie to Me.

II.The tells she teaches

Driver's advice tends to be concrete. Her best-known rule is about the torso. "People align their belly buttons with the objects of their interest," she told Oprah.com in 2014. If someone starts a conversation facing you and ends it twisted toward the door, they want out.

She is just as interested in how power changes behavior. In the excerpt from You Can't Lie to Me that TODAY published, she wrote that "when people in power lie, they focus on rewards more than on costs," which is part of why confident liars can be harder to spot than nervous ones. For anyone who sits across the table from executives, that's a useful warning.

III.On the IMPACT Effect

In 2024, Driver joined Jim Morris for a long conversation on the IMPACT Effect Podcast. She traced her interest in reading people back to an attempted kidnapping when she was 16, riding her bike to pick up a paycheck before dawn. She got away, and she credits skills she started building at six years old. "And today what I teach is how to be one or two steps ahead," she said, around the 19-minute mark.

She explained the advantage in a single sentence. "Body language happens five seconds before thought." If you can read it, she said, you have a five-second head start in the boardroom, the sale, the negotiation and the job interview.

She also told the story of how she left government work. After watching a Dan Kennedy marketing tape on a Tuesday night, she decided she was going to be an author and a TV expert, and she filed paperwork with the ATF to approve outside work that included books and television. "They thought my ego was so big, they approved it," she recalled. Two weeks later, by her account, she was on Fox News with Tony Snow.

IV.Why it matters to leaders

There is a temptation to treat body language as a party trick. Driver's career argues otherwise. Her methods were built for interviews where the stakes were real, then carried into boardrooms and sales floors where the stakes are different but the people are the same.

Her deeper point is about attention. Most of what people tell us arrives before they speak, and most of us are too busy preparing our next line to notice. Driver has spent decades teaching people to look up first.

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Janine Driver