In your professional and personal life, you will be facing, very sadly, people lying to you. And this is a very difficult situation, not easy, not nice to be with people that are lying to you.

So the key point here is how to identify when someone is lying to you.

Well, we have many different techniques, right, from observing body language to many different things.

But let me share with you the three key points they think, three techniques that could be extremely concrete, extremely useful, from my experience working for the last years in different types of negotiations worldwide.

1. Thing number one, what we could do when we are facing someone and you think you feel that someone is lying. Thing number one, you can ask for proofs or evidence. You can say, well, I’m surprised about this. Could you help me to understand the situation? Do you have any proof, any evidence to show what you’re saying?
   So thing number one, feel confident that you can ask for proof and evidence. Remember that in a negotiation, in a communication process, it’s not what you are saying, it’s how you are saying. So of course, if you are aggressive saying you are lying, then it’s wrong, right? But if you are saying something like, please, could you help me to understand the situation and could you help me to have more information about this, then it’s nice. So tip number one, how to identify someone’s lying.
   You can ask for proven evidence. […]
2. Number two. Tip number two, you can ask the same question in different ways during the conversation and then you can check if all of the answers are the same or if all of the answers maybe are different, then this means something wrong is going on, right? So let me give an example about this tip number two, which is, again, asking the same question in a different way during the same conversation. And I’m taking an example, sorry for my friends from Italy, but let’s imagine this situation.
   You ask to someone, do you like Italian food? And a few minutes later, what do you think about Mediterranean food? And a few minutes later, do you like pizza? Do you like pasta? And then by the end, you need to see if everything makes sense or not.
   Just imagine someone saying I love Italian food, but I hate Mediterranean food, I hate pizza, I hate pasta. Well, there’s a little bit of attention in the answers, right? So point number two is why not asking the same question during the same negotiation just to see if things make sense or not. […]
3. Tip number three, we can why not ask something that we know the answer, just to check the good faith or bad faith about the person that we are negotiating with? Let me give you an example.
   The difficult thing about people lying is that we don’t know if they are lying because we don’t know the truth. We don’t know the answer so if I’m asking you what you had for dinner last night, I have no idea. You can say whatever you want. I don’t need to trust you. Right?
   But if I’m asking something that I know, I can check if you are good faith or bad faith with me. Let me give you another example. You are in a business meeting and you didn’t attend the previous meeting last week, but you got the minutes of the meeting. So you know exactly what happened in the meeting last week. And then you ask to the person, well, I see that we never discussed this topic before, right?If the person said no, never, he’s lying. Because last week you know that they discussed this with your colleague. Do you see my point? If he’s lying about this point, be cautious. Bad faith.
   Potentially he’s lying on more things.So by the end, again, when you are facing a situation and you are feeling that maybe they are lying, three things to do. Number one, you can ask for proof or evidence about what they are saying. Thing number two to do is that you can ask the same thing with different questions around the same topic. Thing number three you can ask something that you know just to check if the answer is good or not and to check the good faith or bad faith of the person that you are negotiating with.