ETIQUETTE OF NON-VERBALS

Non-verbal behavior is a language so we speak about COMMUNICATION. What is your body communicating to me? What is mine communicating to you? It leads to our judgment of people and effects the process of building our relationships.

Our greetings to everyone!

Could we just make a guess: if you wanted to give a piece of advice to your friend preparing for a date or a job interview, you would probably ask him/her to mind his/her BODY LANGUAGE, isn’t that true? You realize the importance of face expression, posture and gestures, don’t you? Good for you then.

Let’s look a bit deeper on this topic. Non-verbal behavior is a language so we speak about COMMUNICATION. What is your body communicating to me? What is mine communicating to you? It leads to our judgment of people and effects the process of building our relationships on a subconscious level. For example, judgment of faces in just one second may predict 70% of conclusions we make whether to trust a person or not.

Non-verbals influence our thoughts, feelings and physiology. Our non-verbals govern how others think and feel about us. When you feel powerful, you do certain things. Non-verbal expressions of power and dominance are about expanding, making yourself big, stretching out, taking up space, opening up. If we feel powerless, we do exactly the opposite. We close up, rap ourselves up, make ourselves small.

So called alphas exhibit full range of powerful non-verbals: they come in the middle of the room, occupy space, when they sit down they spread out raising their hands. Other people are collapsing when they come in – you can see it on their faces and their bodies. They sit and make themselves tiny. When we put together high and low power – we compliment the other’s non-verbals. If someone is being powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don’t mirror them – we do the opposite of them.

Please keep it mind that there are low-power poses and high power poses. When you are being evaluated by your manager, speaking at a meeting, giving a pitch or a TED talk or doing a job interview, you live through so called social threat situations. If you demonstrate high power in your poses and gestures, people would rather make the decision in your favour. Their subconscious would prompt them that powerful people are more assertive and confident, more optimistic. They feel they could win, even the games of chance. They think more abstractly. They take more risks. They are different from powerless. They can be effective leaders, they are less stress reactive.

It is not your well-structured speech or qualification that matters – no. The meaningful things are: presence that you are bringing to the speech, confidence, authenticity, passion, enthusiasm. That’s what is driving the effect.

Physiology is one of the determinants of our state. It is proven that our non-verbals can not only influence other people’s impression, but also they govern how we think about ourselves. Just putting your shoulders back and chest out you start feeling more confident. Physiology plays a great role in our state, in how we experience day-to-day life. When you do things pretending to be more powerful you start feeling more powerful.

We at the LSCE devote much time to training self-confidence by changing your habits. Our mind can change our body. But it is also true that our body can change our mind - thoughts and feelings. We help to configure your brain to cope the best in your situation. We teach you power posing – we give you the tools which can significantly change the outcomes of your life.

Come and join us - Invest in yourself!