Your Body Language Speaks for You in Meetings

by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos | 1:00 PM September 19, 2012

 

Besides our choice of words and the volume and tone of a voice, gestures, posture and facial expressions all convey powerful messages to the people we are talking to, which is precisely why everyone pays close attention to other people's body language. What's more, some research suggests that your body language can even affect your hormones, which affects your decisions and attitudes to risk. In other words, how we say what we say to people is at least as important as what we say to them.

Yet for all the care we take to read other people's body language, we're remarkably unconscious when it comes to our own. This is largely, I think, because knowledge of our true selves is hard and does not come naturally to us. Most of us are not what we think we are and therefore we need to question our self-image, which all too often is an idealized version of our true selves.

 

I have found over the course of a long career that the best way to become more aware of myself and of the impact of my own largely unconscious behavior is to systematically run through some standard drivers of negative body language. Before you go into a meeting, for example, make a habit of asking yourself the following...

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http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/your_body_language_speaks_for.html