Body Language Can Make People Think You Aren't Sincere

Beyond memory, gesturing has been shown to enhance understanding as well. Have your hands visible at your sides. If this width feels too weird for you, at least stand a couple inches wider than you normally do. When you’re sitting, adopt a relaxed but open position. Just like standing, keep your shoulders back and your posture straight, even if you’re leaning against the back of a chair. Keep your hands visible. It gives the impression that you’re trying to protect yourself, implying fear rather than confidence. Additionally, closed body language can make people think you aren’t sincere or don’t know what you’re talking about. You could be the foremost expert on a topic, but people won’t listen to you if your posture is timid and unsure. To make sure you’re not giving off the wrong impression, you should also be mindful of the angle of your body in relation to the person you’re speaking to. We tend to turn our bodies subconsciously to where our mind wants to go. So, if you’re nervous during a conversation and escape is on your mind, you may angle your body towards the door without realizing it.

One Jump Ahead Of The Storm

Even if you’re not aware of it yourself, it’s been shown that our brains tend to pick up on this nonverbal cue when we see it in another person. That means angling away from someone can signal your disinterest in speaking to them, and they might perceive you as rude. This is fine if you’re at a party and a stranger is talking your ear off, but not ideal when you’re trying to build professional relationships. If you keep your shoulders and torso turned toward your conversation partner, you’ll look engaged and interested in what they have to say, which will help you make faster and stronger connections. This is one of the simplest and most underutilized ways to help others view you as a leader. At first, it might feel odd and unnatural. You’ll probably find yourself reverting to your usual positions until it becomes more familiar. This is to be expected. Many of us have terrible posture from hunching over our phones and computers all day, so your muscles likely aren’t used to this enhanced body language. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to adjust, and this posture will feel more natural each time you do it. If you like to sit in a gangsta lean type of posture every so often while crushing Netflix, I would never take that away from you. Just keep in mind that the more consistent you are, the quicker it will become a habit.

Beyond The Blue

If you often find yourself forgetting about your posture, put a small sticky note next to your computer and any other place you spend a lot of time working. Use the sticky notes as little visual cues to remind you to sit up straight with your shoulders down and back. You will get there, even if you’re not there yet. You don’t even have to write anything on the sticky notes. Confident body language written on a little piece of bright neon paper might invite questions. No one will know what a blank sticky note means, but you will, and that’s all that matters. This is an incredibly effective hack to change the way you feel and how others treat you. You will consistently find yourself in a better mood, feeling more confident in every situation, and having more energy. Others will take you more seriously, listen closely to your ideas, and respond more positively to you. It was a dismissive way of telling someone that you weren’t interested in what they were saying. Sassy teens seemed to enjoy this phrase, particularly when they added, Cause the face ain’t listening. With just a small adjustment to that phrase, you get a compelling technique that makes people pay more attention to you.

Coming Up

Vanessa discovered that the volunteers who watched the videos on mute and without subtitles rated the videos the same as those who watched the videos with sound. She always knew body language was important, but this proved that nonverbal communication has more impact on an audience’s perception of a speaker than anything else. Quantity mattered, the type of gestures they used was also important. Vanessa explains, The best speakers used congruent gestures. Those were gestures that added meaning or depth to words. If a speaker said they had three ideas, they held up three fingers. She cautions that while gestures can improve comprehension and help with charisma and fluency, they can also backfire. Too much gesturing can make you seem fake. Instead, she advises people to watch videos of themselves when speaking to see where they normally add gestures and then dial it up a notch. The more the speaker smiled, the more views the video received. Vanessa admitted that this discovery helped her become a better speaker. In the past, I thought if I’m speaking about a serious topic, I’d better look serious, she explained. After all, not everyone does it. As it turns out, humans are born talking with our hands, and this can affect our ability to use language. Researchers discovered that at 18 months old, the infants who used more gestures developed better language abilities. He discovered that even blind people use hand gestures when talking to other blind people. Kelly also found that people listen more closely when you use hand gestures because they encourage people to listen to the deeper acoustics of speech. His research has led him to believe that gestures may be a fundamental part of language instead of just a supporting act. More studies have shown that gesturing plays a role during the memory encoding process. Using them helps our brain form lasting memories and store information. They also increase our retention and make it easier to access memories. Oddly enough, retention and recall improve even more when the speaker cannot see their own gestures. The box I’m referring to is the safe zone for hand gestures.