The Invisible Assassin

How Tone Hijacks Your Thoughts, Decisions, and the World You Create

The most powerful influence in any room is often the one nobody notices: tone.

Before you have time to weigh the words, tone is already shaping whether an interaction feels safe, believable, threatening or true. Tone can make a stranger seem trustworthy, a leader sound convincing, a friend’s voice bring relief, or a politician's speech stir loyalty or fear.

In The Invisible Assassin, forensic psychologist Dr Nashater Deu Solheim reveals how tone, working beneath conscious awareness, affects the nervous system and shapes judgement, relationships, and decisions. Tone can build trust, calm conflict, and bring people together. It can also close minds, distort meaning, and lead us towards choices we believe are entirely our own.

Not only are we affected by tone, we are also emitting it all the time. In our homes, workplaces, and public life, the signals we pass between us help co-create the trust or tension, openness or division, that follows.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, negotiation, and decades of studying behaviour, influence, and performance—including her most unexpected classroom, a dolphin pool where there were no words and nowhere to hide—Dr Deu Solheim makes this hidden force visible. Through the 4 Tonal Signals and Attunement Circle, she shows how to read what is shaping you, resist what works against you, and choose what you co-create.

Once you can see the signal beneath the words, you cannot unsee it. And everything changes.

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ISBN: 979-8-90026-134-8
Imprint: Amplify Publishing
SKU: 18-1609-01
Categories:Amplify Publishing, Leadership and Management, Health, Medicine, and Wellness

“Every conversation in your life is read by your nervous system before your mind catches up, and the tone underneath it means everything if building strong relationships is a priority for you. This book speaks to an area that has stayed unknown for too long – one that could have a big impact on your life.”

—TJ Power, neuroscientist and Sunday Times Bestselling Author of The Dose Effect

“In The Invisible Assassin, Nashater shows how we can drive performance through co-creating connection – and how tone in all its forms can build a connected team or undo one. I still fall back on her teachings regularly from our time working together.”

—Eddi E Jones, Elite International Rugby Coach, Japan Rugby

“A really brilliant ground-breaking book both in its own right and as a follow-up to The Leadership PIN Code. . . . To all who are truly aware that communication defines relationship quality, this book is an absolute must-read and regular reread.”

—Frank Dick, OBE, Motivational Speaker and Former Olympic Coach

“A must-read for those who want to understand what you bring with you and who want to co-create a strong path forward for themselves and the ones around them. Start to own your tone and create your world.”

—Tor Olave Schibevaag, CEO, Sar As

“As a leader, The Invisible Assassin gave me countless aha moments. By breaking down the hidden power of tone and situational signals, Dr Deu Solheim provides the ultimate toolkit for building powerful high-value relationships. Essential reading.”

—Anne Stine Johnson, Head of Technology, Nye Veier As

Dr. Nashater Deu Solheim

CEO & Psychologist

Dr Nashater Deu Solheim has spent over thirty years in some of the most demanding human environments—from locked wards in maximum-security prisons, to elite sporting arenas, crisis negotiation rooms, and the boardrooms of global corporations under pressure.

A clinical and forensic psychologist, her doctoral research in the neuropsychology of offenders explored how the brain plans and executes complex behaviour—a question that later took her from the UK Ministry of Defence to the coaching staff of an international rugby team, and to a TEDx stage where her talk on what psychopaths taught her about leadership has reached more than one million viewers.

Her most unexpected classroom was a dolphin pool. Training dolphins in communication without words, she watched tone operate as a pure signal—and understood, finally, why it does what it does in every human exchange.

She is an expert negotiator trained at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, a member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, a registered psychologist in Norway, and a member of the British Psychological Society.

The Invisible Assassin is her second book. Her first, The Leadership PIN Code, introduced her framework for persuasion, influence, and negotiation in leadership. This book goes deeper—into the signals that travel between us and around us, shaping everything before a word is spoken. 

Based in Norway, she works with leaders and organisations worldwide.

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