The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [65]
The Power Lift
To keep control of where a person is looking, use a pen to point to the presentation and, at the same time, verbalize what he sees. Next, lift the pen from the presentation and hold it between his eyes and your eyes. This has the magnetic effect of lifting his head so that now he is looking at you and he sees and hears what you are saying, achieving maximum absorption of your message. Keep the palm of your other hand open when you are speaking.
The Power Lift—using the pen to control where a
person looks during a presentation
We also found that women hold more direct eye contact than men during presentations, especially when they are not talking. When women are talking, however, they avert their eyes more than men do.
Men stare more at women than vice versa and men give less direct eye contact when listening to other men than when listening to women.
Summary
Where you direct your gaze has a powerful impact on the outcome of a face-to-face encounter. If you were a manager who was going to reprimand an errant subordinate or a parent reprimanding a child, which gaze would you use? If you use Social Gazing, the sting would be taken out of your words, regardless of how loud or threatening you might try to sound. Social Gazing would weaken your words but Intimate Gazing could either intimidate or embarrass them. Power Gazing, however, has a powerful effect on the receiver and tells them you mean business.
Using the right gaze gives credibility.
What men describe as the “come-on” look that women use relates to a sideways glance, dilated pupils, and Intimate Gazing. If a woman wants to play hard to get, she needs to avoid using an Intimate Gaze and use Social Gazing instead. But most men miss a lot of it anyway. To use a Power Gaze during courting would leave a man or woman labeled as cold or unfriendly. When you use an Intimate Gaze on a potential partner, however, you give the game away. Women are expert at sending and receiving this gaze but, unfortunately, most men are not. When men use the Intimate Gaze it's usually blatantly obvious to women and men are generally unaware of having been given an Intimate Gaze by a woman, much to the frustration of the woman who gave it.
Chapter 9
SPACE INVADERS—
TERRITORIES AND
PERSONAL SPACE
“Excuse me… but you're sitting in my seat!”
Thousands of books and articles have been written about the staking out and guarding of territories by animals, birds, fish, and primates, but only in recent years has it been discovered that man also has territories. When you understand the implications of this, you can gain enormous insights into your own behavior, and the face-to-face reactions of others can be predicted. American anthropologist Edward Hall was one of the pioneers in the study of man's spatial needs and in the early 1960's he coined the word “proxemics,” from “proximity” or nearness. His research into this field led to new understanding about our relationships with each other.
Every country is a territory staked out by clearly defined boundaries and sometimes protected by armed guards. Within each country there are usually smaller territories in the form of states and counties. Within these are even smaller territories called cities and towns, within which are suburbs, containing many streets that, in themselves, represent a closed territory to those who live there. In the cinema it's an armrest where we do silent battle with strangers who try to claim it. The inhabitants of each territory share an intangible allegiance to it and have been known to turn to savagery and killing in order to protect it.
A territory