• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 742 0

language. So much of the time body language is reactive Your boss criticizes a tactic you take and your shoulders slump. A boisterous male colleague monopolizes a meeting and you start sinking into your seat. A client you're meeting with seems bored with what you're saying and you start playing with your hair. Develop an awareness of your body language: Is it in overdrive (you're using lots of hand signals and imaginary quotation marks)? Has it turned wimpy? Once you're more aware of it, you can modify it. Nancy Austin once told me she noticed over time that whenever she used one finger to point during a presentation, the men in the room became uncomfortable. She experimented and found that they didn't seem threatened if she pointed with two fingers.

2. Dare to hold someone's gaze. In his classic book Body Language, Julius Fast said that of all parts of the human body that are used to transmit information, the eyes are the most important and can convey the most subtle nuances. And the most important technique of what he called eye management is the look or the stare. I learned the power of holding someone's gaze in a fabulous experiment. When I was a writer at Glamour, I was often given wacky assignments, like spending a night at a sex-toy party or seeing if I could meet a man at a health club (I refused to do “My Week at a Nudist Camp”). One of the most fascinating assignments was writing a piece about “eye power” because part of the research involved keeping a “staring diary” for two weeks. I had to stare at friends, colleagues, men on the subway, men in bars, even men coming out of porno movie houses, all in an attempt to see how people reacted. I learned from my research with Dr. Alan Mazur, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at Syracuse University, that staring rituals are part of our biological makeup and there are several rules about staring that we unconsciously obey (just the way baboons do).For instance, in a conversation between two people, the listener always feels an obligation to look at the speaker but the speaker often glances away as he or she talks, so as not to make the listener uncomfortable. One exception: The listener is less likely to maintain a steady gaze at the speaker if he has substantially more power.When a man and a woman meet or encounter each other, says Mazur, women are much more apt to be the first to avert their eyes because it's an instinctive way we display submissiveness. As part of my assignment I had to resist the good-girl urge to look away first. Instead, I would hold a person's gaze until he broke eye contact. What I learned from all this startled me. Maintaining eye contact didn't make me uncomfortable, as I had expected it might. Rather it made me feel powerful, in control— and people seemed mesmerized.Try this experiment for a day or two. As you greet people at work, pass them in the hallway, or talk to them at meetings, watch yourself and note how much of the time you are the first to avert your eyes. Then begin to change that pattern. When you shake someone's hand, hold their gaze as long as possible, allowing them to avert their eyes first. If you're about to speak at a meeting, let your eyes sweep around the table and briefly hold the gaze of each person. You'll discover that holding someone's gaze not only gives you a sense of power, but it also forges a stronger connection.One of the things that struck me about Ivana Trump when she came to lunch at McCall's after writing a piece for us was how strongly she held my gaze during lunch. She seemed to really relate to me. I laughed when, later, someone on my staff who sat at the other end of the table told me, “I felt like Ivana really connected with me. She looked at me through the entire lunch.”One caution about staring: be careful with your boss. Think of him as the dominant baboon in the colony and never attempt to stare him down.

HOW TO ENTER A ROOM AS IF YOU OWN IT

Whether you're walking into a conference room with ten people already seated or walking onto a stage to take part in a panel, it's hard not to feel awkward