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Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.
Your body language shapes who you are
The mind shapes the body, and the body shapes the mind.
Don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.
Our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.
When we're sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless.
Practice smiling by holding a pencil between your teeth for twenty minutes.
Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.
You have to buy what you're selling. If you don't buy what you're selling, nobody will.
Our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior and our behavior can change our outcomes.
I want people to be able to influence themselves. We convince ourselves, and that allows us to convince others.
Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.
People have a lot of control over their ability to rise to the occasion and to show their best or their aspirational selves.
A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across.
Trust comes before strength, and it becomes a conduit of influence. Your strength is a little bit threatening before people trust you.
I would never encourage anyone to adopt a contractive posture. It's not good for you physically. It's not good for you psychologically.
I'm good enough; I'm smart enough. Self-affirmation is where people list their core values. These are things that really make them who they are.
It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.
When we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others. … We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals: ourselves.
Authenticity doesn't just mean you're not filtering what you're saying, it's about being able to know and access the best parts of yourself and bring them forward.
What I most want you to understand is that your body is continuously and convincingly sending messages to your brain, and you get to control the content of those messages.
Too many of us suffer from pervasive feelings of personal powerlessness. We have a terrible habit of obstructing our own paths forward, especially at the worst possible moments.
There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.
When we close ourselves off, we're not just closing ourselves off to other people, we're closing ourselves off from ourselves and impeding ourselves. When you open up, you allow yourself to be who you are.
If you're going into finance, you might be dealing with a lot of sexism and a lot of alpha behavior. How are you going to deal with that? How are you going to feel powerful and comfortable with being who you are?
Although our body language governs the way other people perceive us, our body language also governs how we perceive ourselves and how those perceptions become reinforced through our own behavior, our interactions, and even our physiology.
Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the 'iHunch.' I've also heard people call it 'text neck,' and in my work, I sometimes refer to it as 'iPosture.'
When you walk into those situations that have a lot of conflict in them, the first thing to do is to be present enough to allow the other person to speak first. You're not giving power away; you're actually allowing them to feel seen and understood.
Everyone is walking around with these self doubts, so there's something reassuring about that. And self-doubt in one or a few areas doesn't mean that you have generally low self-esteem. And you have the power to get yourself out of feeling that way.
There is no one who is present all the time, but you work on becoming present when you are interacting with people who are working for you, being able to hear them without a sense of threat, to go into those meetings with confidence and not arrogance.
Politicians are very experienced - maybe too experienced - at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.
I sometimes work with a communications and media training firm called KNP Communications. It's nice to bring the research to the practitioners; I learn a lot watching how they put it into practice, and I know they like to be on top of what's happening on the research front.
Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.
My primary goal is really to get people to open up and when they feel themselves contracting and collapsing to reduce that, and to know when that happens, "Oh, something's going on that's making me feel this way, and if I force my body open a bit, I will feel less powerless."
Entrepreneurs are more likely to be successful if they're able to be present while pitching their ideas. It's about maintaining presence during big challenges - very high stakes moments with some component of social judgment. Everyone has them, whether they're entrepreneurs or not.
Power is generally defined as control over resources and control over access to resources, which often means control over other people because we're thinking about things like financial resources or shelter, or even love and affection, but we also possess resources that we sometimes can't access.
I hear from so many women who really started to pay attention to it at all times and stopped, you know, touching their faces and necks and playing with their hair and twisting their legs. I think women become more aware of it when they learn about this stuff, and you see their body language change.
I would say there is a conversation happening between your body and mind all the time. Even when you're sleeping, your body is communicating the information to your mind. And so to me it feels like, why not harness that? If it's happening all the time, why not control the content of the conversation?
A mountain of evidence shows that our bodies are pushing, shaping, even leading our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That the body affects the mind is, it's fair to say, incontestable. And it's doing so in ways that either facilitate or impede our ability to bring our authentic best selves to our biggest challenges.
I've been studying sexism for many years, and it's much easier to document the existence of sexism than it is to document the existence of interventions that reduce it. It's really hard to find ways to change the way people see people in different groups. It should be our goal, and we're working for that, but it's hard.
Charisma seems to be more about the intoxicating quality that you have on other people, as opposed to presence, which is more about the self in relation to others, and how you feel you represented yourself in a situation, and how you were able to engage. So it's less about how others see you and more about how you see yourself.
People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.
The whole body-mind thing comes into play, when you are feeling that self-doubt and your body is not going to help you if you're not paying attention. Your body's going to go with the self-doubt and make you feel worse, so by making the adjustments - pulling your shoulders back, standing up straight, walking in a more sort of expansive way - all sorts of little things will help pull you out of that self-doubt.
That's the dream scenario: when people approach these stressful situations not focused on that concrete outcome but just focused on being there and being themselves and enjoying connecting with people. You're not going to be present all the time, but if you can figure out how to connect with yourself and bring that self forth in those moments, you will probably be feeling a lot better over time, and it's likely that even though you're not focused on the outcome, the outcomes will be better.
Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.