altapraxis/wp-admin/post.php?post=126&action=edit&message=6 New Post: The Three Fundamentals of Body Language Fluency As your mentor, we will immediately begin working on three fundamentals to body language fluency: (1) honestly assessing how you think about yourself, your relationships with others, and your relationship with money; (2) a willingness honestly assess how you think about yourself, your relationship with others, and with money; and (3) a willingness to pay attention to your movements and figure out what thought in your brain caused you to make a certain gesture and knowing how to alter those movements if necessary. Before going further, some of you may be thinking that looking at yourself and your relationships is way too much drama to merely tweak your body language a little so that you can persuade more people to say, Yes! to an idea you are presenting. In fact, you may believe that if you just learn enough body language to act your way through a presentation, youll be fine. That is not true. Even the most well-trained liars cannot control their body language forever, and, eventually, their thoughts and emotions betray their story by sending body-language signals that expose the lie. Becoming a well-trained liar requires far more training, pain, and discomfort than merely being willing to assess your relationships, to change how you think about them, and to pay attention to why you make the movements that you do. So, lets look at the three fundamentals, and, remember, the chief cause of failure is believing that the fundamentals dont apply in your case. First, being able to honestly assess how you think about yourself, your relationships with others, and your relationships with money is important to body-language fluency because of this important formula: Thoughts + Emotions = Actions. When you interact with other humans, you hear and/or see their actions. As a survival mechanism, your brain is wired to make a judgment as to whether the human interaction you are experiencing is safe or dangerous. Unfortunately, your brain does not have a neutral and detached third-party judge to check its judgment. So, if your brain does not have enough facts to determine safety or danger from the facts that it is witnessing, it will usually fill in the factual gaps with its own story. Once the brain finishes coming up with a story--complete with a full explanation as to the motives and objectives of the person with whom youre interacting--you feel an emotion. Once we feel an emotion, we act. And, of course, our actions generate consequences. For example, lets suppose that you go shopping for a used car, and a salesperson approaches you and asks, Can I help you? The facts that you have regarding your interaction with the salesperson are: (1) you are shopping for a used car; (2) you are at a used car lot; and (3) a salesperson has just asked if he can help you. Even though the facts you have about your interaction with the salesman are scant, your brain goes into action and cranks out a story long before the salesperson has completed his question. The story your brain comes up with relies upon what it knows about salespeople, especially those selling used cars. Based on this knowledge, your brain imputes a motive to the salesperson and tells you what kind of person the salesperson probably is. Your thoughts about the salespersons purported motives and what kind of person he is will cause your brain to produce an emotion toward his motives and character. If your emotion is negative, your brain is most likely also processing the norms of society,which require a polite response even if you believe that interacting any further with the salesperson would be dangerous. Given all of this brain activity between the end of the salespersons question and the response that you need to quickly give, your tone and body language will reveal much of this internal dialogue despite the words that you choose to say. If your brain engages in this much processing even with this simple, low-risk interaction with a used car salesperson, how much more processing will your brain go through when you are presenting yourself and your product to a perfect stranger, trying to keep a current client interested, or inviting the person you are dating to become something more in your life than a date? But, as the famous scientist Marie Curie said, Nothing in life is to be feared. It is to be understood. I will help you understand how you view yourself, your relationships with other, and your relationship with money because understanding how your brain perceives these things will go a long way to explaining how your body acts. Second, given that how you think will greatly influence how you act, changing how you act will naturally occur if you change how you think. As our illustration with the used car salesperson illustrates above, your body language will likely reveal any thought conflict you are having. If your mind is in conflict about yourself or about those to whom you are presenting, your body language will likewise show conflict despite how eloquent you are. I include relationship with self and others in the same sentence because an enormous amount of research strongly suggests that our social relationships increase self-esteem, happiness, physical health, and longevity and that close personal ties generally enhance the quality of peoples lives. Vourauer, J., Cameron, J., Holmes, J., & Pearce D., Invisible Overtures: Fears of Rejection and the Signal Amplification Bias, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 84, No. 4, 793 (2003). Accordingly, so much of how we view ourselves is learned from the relationships we keep. If your thinking about your relationships is unproductive, chances are, your thoughts about yourself will be too. Likewise, those who think less of themselves also seem to have poorer quality relationships, which perpetuates a mental cycle of defeat. As your body-language mentor, I will work with you so that you can honestly assess how you think about yourself and your relationships with others. Although this may be uncomfortable at times, where you stand with yourself and others and being willing to change those thoughts will do wonders by itself for how you speak body language in your presentations to others. Finally, once you understand how you view yourself and others, I will work with you so that you can begin to pick up on your body movements and then question why you are making that particular movement during that particular part of your presentation. The best way to figure this out is when you become aware of a gesture, stop and think about what was your last thought and emotion that triggered you to move the way you did. For example if I am having a conversation with a client and she asks me a question that I cant answer, I need to pay attention to how I physically reacted. Did I scratch my head, tug my ear, move my eyes in a particular direction, smooth an eyebrow? If so, my client will subconsciously know something isnt right, and her brain will start telling her that I lack credibility, which will make closing the deal much harder. What if I held my hands quiet and told them I didnt know the answer but would find out and get back to them as soon as possible? If my body language shows my confidence in finding out and answer and getting back to my client, I am going to have far more credibility with the client than if my body language shows uncertainty and it appears that the answer I came up with was a fabrication made up to get out of a tough situation. Recognizing how you speak body language and why you are speaking it that way will provide you physical evidence of the changes you need to make to your thinking. This, in turn, will lead to changes in success. I will help you get there. Stay connected to us as we dive deeper into understanding these three fundamentals and the tools and techniques that go with them. *Please Note: When you share the post you may get a warning that a possible link maybe bad and a code is needed to continue the share process. This is a problem with FB, and there is no bad link; many business pages are facing this problem. Please type in code to continue share and supporting our articles. 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Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 06:08:17 +0000
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