By Noelle Capobianco
Body language can communicate a lot more than what comes out of your mouth. This can be done through body movements, stares and minimal gestures often unconsciously when people communicate. When used effectively, body movements can actually be a key to success to build positive business relationships, influence and motivate yourself and those around you.
These are 5 fascinating insights into what people communicate with their eyes, shoulders, hands, thumbs, and legs. Make the most of the body language to allude confidence and charisma.
1. Contact through Eye- contact
Maintaing positive eye- contact when meeting new people or when venturing out into the business sphere is a sign of respect and can increase the quality of your face to face contact. When people make eye contact they seem confident, dominant, personable, qualified, skilled, competent, trustworthy and emotionally stable. All this from one point of contact through maintaing positive eye contact can ensure that you have made a mark on the recruiter as they will see that you have been paying attention whilst revealing thoughts and feelings at the same time. Its no wonder that they say the eyes are the window to our soul as they reveal what were thinking through a shift of eye movement or dilation of the pupils.
2. Spot a liar by his shoulders
As you may have noticed, we use shoulder shrugs to indicate lack of knowledge or doubt. But when only one side rises, the message is dubious and partial shoulder shrugs indicate lack of commitment or insecurity. Take a note of this during conversation; if you see a person’s shoulders only partially rise or if only one shoulder rises, chances are the person is not committed to what he or she is saying and is probably being evasive or even deceptive. This means that their body is giving away their lack of commitment to you or that they are lying. People don’t know that they have such visible body language, so if you learn how to spot this it will enable you not to do this and to be conscious of it when meeting a recruiter or wanting to build relationships when networking.
3. Have trust in your fingertips
Our finger tips may well be the most powerful high-confidence signal. The Steeple is a hand gesture that involves touching the spread fingertips of both hands, in a gesture similar to ‘praying hands,’ where the fingers are not interlocked and the palms may not be touching. Test it out. This signals confidence. The steeple is arguably an indicator of self-assurance, competence, and confidence. These are traits most individuals would want to be recognized as possessing. Practice it. Once you get used to doing it during meetings and in conversation, you will not only come across more confident, but also feel it.
4. Talk with your hands
Talking with your hands comes naturally to many people as it is linked to speech. By using hands when talking it powers up speech allowing speech production to gain momentum. Verbal content improves when hands are used through the formation of clearer thoughts and tighter sentence structure with very little ums, buts and arghs. When using your hands, use open gestures that invite the audience or person you are speaking to in. It indicates that you have nothing to hide and are more positive and persuasive. By doing this it will show that you are more credible and self- assured than tight.
5. Legs
We normally cross our legs when we feel comfortable and leg crossing is a particularly accurate sign of how comfortable we feel around another person. The sudden appearance of someone we don’t like will cause us to uncross our legs. Not only are people communicating better when they sit next to each other, they also cross their legs accordingly. Open or uncrossed legs are said to show a positive attitude, whilst crossed legs are said to reveal uncertainty and negativity.
“Here’s an interesting feature of leg crossing. We usually do it subconsciously in favor of the person we like the most.” Brad Phillips is the author of “The Media Training Bible: 101 Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know Before Your Next Interview.” He blogs at Mr. Media Training, where a version of this story first appeared. Similarly, a seated person directs their knee or knees towards the point of interest. The converse is true also – legs tend to point away from something or someone which is uninteresting or threatening. Leg signals also tend to be supported by corresponding arms signals, for example crossed arms and crossed legs, which aside from comfort reasons generally indicate detachment, disinterest, rejection or insecurity, etc.
Be aware of what your body language is unconsciously giving off and take control to allude confidence and charisma.
