12 Body Language Tips For Career Success:
When
properly used, body language can be your key to greater success. It can help
you develop positive business relationships, influence and motivate the people
who report to you, improve productivity, bond with members of your team, and
present your ideas with more impact. Here are a dozen tips for using body
language to project confidence, credibility, and your personal brand of
charisma:
1.
Stand tall and take up space. Power,
status, and confidence are nonverbally displayed through the use of height and
space. Keeping your posture erect, your shoulders back, and your head held high
makes you look sure of yourself.
If you stand you will look more powerful and
assured to those who are seated. If you move around, the additional space you
take up adds to that impression. If you are sitting, you can look more
confident by putting both feet flat on the floor, widening your arms away from
your body (or hooking one elbow on the back of your chair), and spreading out
your belongings on the conference table to claim more territory.
2.
Widen your stance. When you stand with
your feet close together, you can seem hesitant or unsure of what you are
saying. But when you widen your stance, relax your knees and center your weight
in your lower body, you look more “solid” and confident.
3.
Lower your vocal pitch. In the workplace, the
quality of your voice can be a deciding factor in how you are perceived.
Speakers with higher-pitched voices are judged to be less empathic, less
powerful and more nervous than speakers with lower pitched voices. One easy technique I learned from a speech
therapist was to put your lips together and say “Um hum, um hum, um hum.” Doing
so relaxes your voice into its optimal pitch. This is especially helpful before
you get on an important phone call – where the sound of your voice is so
critical.
4.
Try Power Priming. To display confidence
and be perceived as upbeat and positive, think of a past success that fills you
with pride and confidence. (This doesn’t have to be taken from your
professional life – although I do encourage clients to keep a “success log” so
that they can easily find an event.) Then recall the feeling of power and
certainty – and remember or imagine how you looked and sounded. Recalling that
genuine emotion will help you embody it as you enter the meeting room or walk
up to the podium.
5.
Strike a Power Pose. Research into the
effects of body posture on confidence, conducted at Harvard and Columbia Business Schools,
has shown that simply holding your body in expansive, “high-power” poses
(leaning back with hands behind the head and feet up on a desk, or standing
with legs and arms stretched wide open) for as little as two minutes stimulates
higher levels of testosterone — the hormone linked to power and dominance — and
lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.
Try this before your next important business
meeting, and I guarantee you will look and feel more confident and certain. In
addition to causing hormonal shifts in both males and females, these poses lead
to increased feelings of power and a higher tolerance for risk. The study also
corroborated my observation that people are more often influenced by how they
feel about you than by what you’re saying.
6.
Maintain positive eye contact. You
may be an introvert, you may be shy, or your cultural background may have
taught you that extended eye contact with a superior is not appropriate, but
business people from the U.S., Europe, Australia (and many other parts of the
world), will expect you to maintain eye contact 50-60% of the time. Here’s a
simple technique to improve eye contact: Whenever you greet a business
colleague, look into his or her eyes long enough to notice what color they are.
7. Talk
with your hands. Brain imaging has
shown that a region called Broca’s area, which is important for speech production,
is active not only when we’re talking, but also when we wave our hands. Since
gesture is integrally linked to speech, gesturing as you talk can actually
power up your thinking. Whenever I encourage clients to incorporate gestures
into their deliveries, I find that their verbal content improves, their speech
is less hesitant, and their use of fillers (“ums” and “uhs”) decreases.
Experiment with this and you’ll find that the physical act of gesturing helps
you form clearer thoughts and speak in tighter sentences with more declarative
language.
8.
Use open gestures. Keeping your
movements relaxed, using open arm gestures, and showing the palms of your hands
— the ultimate “see, I have nothing to hide” gesture — are silent signals of
credibility and candor. Individuals with open gestures are perceived more
positively and are more persuasive than those with closed gestures (arms
crossed, hands hidden or held close to the body, etc.) Also, if you hold your
arms at waist level, and gesture within that plane, most audiences will
perceive you as assured and credible.
9.
Try a steeple. You see lecturers,
politicians and executives use this hand gesture when they are quite certain
about a point they are making. This power signal is where your hands make a
“steeple” — where the tips of your fingers touch, but the palms are separated.
When you want to project conviction and sincerity about a point you’re making,
try steepling.
10.
Reduce nervous gestures. When
we’re nervous or stressed, we all pacify with some form of self-touching,
nonverbal behavior: We rub our hands together, bounce our feet, drum our
fingers on the desk, play with our jewelry, twirl our hair, fidget — and when
we do any of these things, we immediately rob our statements of credibility. If
you catch yourself indulging in any of these behaviors, take a deep breath and
steady yourself by placing your feet firmly on the floor and your hands palm
down in your lap, on the desk or on the conference table. Stillness sends a
message that you’re calm and confident.
11.
Smile. Smiles have a powerful
effect on us. The human brain prefers happy faces, and we can spot a smile at
300 feet – the length of a football field. Smiling not only stimulates your own
sense of well being it also tells those around you that you are approachable
and trustworthy.
Research
from Duke University proves that we like and remember
those who smile at us – and shows why we find them more memorable. Using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the Duke researchers found that
the orbito frontal cortices (a “reward center” in the brain) were more active
when subjects were learning and recalling the names of smiling individuals.
Most importantly, smiling directly influences how other people respond to you.
When you smile at someone, they almost always smile in return. And, because
facial expressions trigger corresponding feelings, the smile you get back
actually changes that person’s emotional state in a positive way.
12.
Perfect your handshake. Since
touch is the most powerful and primitive nonverbal cue, it’s worth devoting
time to cultivating a great handshake. The right handshake can give you instant
credibility and the wrong one can cost you the job or the contract. So, no
“dead fish” or “bone-crusher” grips, please. The first makes you appear to be a
wimp and the second signals that you are a bully.
Handshake behavior has cultural variations, but
the ideal handshake in North America means facing the other person squarely,
making firm palm to palm contact with the web of your hand (the skin between
the thumb and first finger) touching the web of the other person’s hand, and
matching hand pressure as closely as possible without compromising your own
idea of a proper professional grip.
By the way: While a great
handshake is important for all professionals, it is especially key for women –
whose confidence is evaluated by the quality of their handshake even more than
it is with their male counterparts.
Thanks to FORBES...
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