Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are

 

 
Amy Cuddy wasn’t supposed to become a successful scientist. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to finish her undergraduate degree. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish her undergraduate degree.
But she proved them wrong. Today, Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom. And her training as a classical dancer (another skill she regained after her injury) is evident in her fascinating work on "power posing" -- how your body position influences others and even your own brain.

"Using a few simple tweaks to body language, Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy discovers ways to help people become more powerful."

TIME Game Changers, March 19, 2012

Some Add-Ons for Non-verbal Communications

In the previous post, we mentioned about there are many parts of your body that add to the non-verbal message. This type of non-verbal communication is called kinesic code. It is made up of emblems, illustrators, regulators, affect displays and adapters. These behaviours are each communicated in different behaviours and movements of your body.

Posture

The first important aspect of kinesics is posture. Standing or sitting in a relaxed professional manner is a positive posture non-verbal. Also, being comfortably upright, squarely facing an audience, and evenly distributing your weight are all aspects of posture that communicate professionalism, confidence, attention to detail and organization.

Gesture

Non-verbal communicated by moving the trunk of your body are called body gestures. Several different body gesture strategies are to move to change mood or pace, draw attention, or reinforce and idea. Some examples are stepping aside for a transition or stepping forward to emphasize a point.

Hand gestures are what are most often identified as non-verbal communication. One reason is because they are so obvious to a receiver and seen to be partly conscious. It is important to let your gestures flow naturally as if in conversation with a close friend. You may also use gestures to specifically describe shape and size, emphasize a point, enumerate a list, or picking out a specific item.

Haptics

In conjunction with hand gestures is touching or a more scientific term known as haptics. This is a very powerful communicator especially for establishing a link to a receiver or conveying emotion. However, touching is dangerous because it invades a persons intimate space and may be perceived as unwanted or breaking norms. It is important to pay attention to the other person’s non-verbal cues before deciding to initiate a touch.

Facial Expression

Another area of physical non-verbal communication is facial expression. Facial expression is partly innate and also partly learned. Because of the number of muscles and features, such as mouth, nose, lips, cheeks, in your face, it is extremely expressive. A face can ask questions, show doubt, surprise, sadness, happiness and a wealth of other messages.

Proxemics

Proxemics is the amount of space around or between us and others. How closely people position themselves to a person during a discussion communicates what type of relationship exists between the two people. This space and meaning differs from culture to culture but in American culture the following standards exist.

• 0-18 inches is intimate space reserved for family and close friends

• 18 inches to 4 feet is personal space used in most interpersonal interactions

• 4-12 feet is social-consultative space used in more formal interactions

Appearance

Appearance is a relatively important factor involved with nonverbal communication. In today’s society, the purpose of clothing has changed from fulfilling a need to expressing oneself. Teens use fashion to determine cliques such as prep, jock, punk, or gangster. Clothing communication is continued later in life by identifying someone in a suit as a businessperson, someone wearing a black robe as a judge, doctors wearing lab coats and stethoscopes or various other positions wearing required uniforms of dress. Adornments are another form of appearance. Wearing expensive jewelery communicates one message while wearing ceremonial ornaments communicates a completely different message. Appearance also takes into account personal grooming such as cleanliness, doing one’s hair, nail trimming or wearing make-up. Overall appearance is the non-verbal that people are most aware of and manipulate the most. Appearance communicates how we feel and how we want to be viewed.

Eye Gaze

Many sayings hold that the eye is the window to the mind. This is very true to illustrating the power of eye contact in non-verbal communication. Eye contact can maintain, yield, deny and request communication between people. People who use eye contact are viewed as confident, credible and having nothing to hide.

Some important do’s and do not’s of eye contact are:

• If you have trouble staring someone in the eye, simply focus at something on their face

• When speaking to a group look at everyone

• Look at people who are key decision makers or hold power

• Look at reactive listeners

• Don’t look at the floor, scripts or anything that causes you to tilt your head away form the receiver

• Don’t look at bad listeners that may distract you

Hope you guys picked up a bit more about non-verbal communications. Want to know more about them , you can actually read more on some references such as the followings.

      

Body Language

We may not have noticed that in our daily face-to-face conversations, the words we speak is only constitute for less than 10% of the message we are conveying, the rest would be coming from our body language (non-verbal behaviour) and paralinguistic cues. According to Albert Mehrabian, a researcher in the 60s, the more precise of the composition of the information we picked up from a conversation would be 7% from the word itself, 38 % from tone, inflection and the speed of voice, lastly 55% from the body language, or more scientifically known as non-verbal signals.

Body language is important when we are interacting with people everyday. Our body let out messages constantly and usually we don't recognise that we are communicating a lot more than we realise. If we are feeling happy it can easily show in how we 'compute' on our body languages. When we talk, if we look at someone else’s body we can often tell how they are feeling by the signals their body is giving. Say if your words say one thing but your body says another, your counterpart is more likely to believe the message your body is sending out to be more reliable. It is useful to be able to read people’s body language, but it is equally useful to learn how to get our body to send the right signals and minimise the wrong signals. In this blog, we will explore more on how to start using body language to improve daily communications and to improve the quality of life.

'If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then the body is the mirror of our feelings.'

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