Make your body work

Sometimes the most powerful things you can say don’t take any words at all.

Body language, good or bad, says a lot more about how you really feel than words alone so you have to make sure your body is speaking the same message your lips are, says keynote speaker and author Carol Kinsey Goman.

In her book, The Non-Verbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work, Goman offers research, insights and tips to ensure your body language computes with the message you want to convey.

Body language is hard-wired and more primal than the spoken word, Goman says, because long before actual language took root, early humans had to use the visual cues in body language to understand and communicate with other people.

Today, Goman says the key to projecting good body language is to visualize your best behaviour beforehand and make a choice to project a good mood.

“You may have had a lousy day, but you’d better be able to choose what attitude you want to bring into the room. People will pick up on your attitude almost instantly,” Goman said.

Most importantly, Goman says projecting a good attitude with your body language can have a powerful uplifting effect on your actual emotional state.

“The same way how if you change your emotions your body language will change, if you change your body language your emotions will change too,” she said.

Nothing is easier than a smile to get things rolling.

“A smile is probably the cheapest thing you can do to trigger the reward-stimuli part of the brain. You can spot it across a football field,” Goman said.

Touch also taps in deeply to a person’s primal instinct, making handshakes a powerful tool in communication.

“Absolutely shake hands with everyone you meet and make sure you have a nice, firm, solid handshake. It takes three hours of interaction to equal the amount of rapport you can get with one hand shake,” she said.

Eye contact is of course crucial to good body language, but you don’t want to stare so long that it starts to get creepy. Goman suggests a little trick to do it right.

“When you make eye contact (with someone), make sure to look long enough to notice what colour their eyes are,” she said.

Ultimately, body language has much more influence on how people perceive you than just your words or actions alone, so make sure you’re sending the right signals.

“In body language, it’s not so much what you intend but what the person observing you believes you intend. You need to rethink your non-verbal signals through the eyes of the recipient and make sure your body language is congruent with the message you want to send,” Goman said.