Body Language and Modern Life
On a daily basis, most people overestimate the power of electronic media and speech. Although telephones, mobiles, pagers and computers are incredibly useful and provide instantaneous conveyance of information, sometimes they are substandard in that the main key of conversation is missing: emotion.
Typing an email to a friend, or sending a report to your boss, it is incredibly difficult to express yourself correctly with the written word, and more and more so with the typed word as the need for handwriting is fading out.
As having conversations face-to-face is becoming a thing of the past for many remote-offices and working from home businesses, people are missing out on the human contact that can be so beneficial, on both a professional and personal level.
Not only does speaking indicate how people are feeling about a situation, more importantly, body language affects a conversation. Body language is a term for communication that transcends conscious contact and works instead of, or additionally to sounds and language.
This can be anything from subtle creasing of the eyes if someone finds something amusing, to the strong gesture of crossing arms when someone feels vulnerable or enraged.
By utilising and fully comprehending this paralanguage, master communicators – those who are trained to understand the significance of body language – can foresee how people will react to certain information and how they are feeling, although they often haven`t said anything.
This is of course beneficial for personal relationships as one can tell when people are becoming aggressive or angered by a situation, or when friends and relatives need extra attention and motivation.
You can also use flirty body language to make an impression on someone you are interested in, and to judge if they respond accordingly. This skill is also incredibly useful in a professional environment, as one can sense when to push a difficult topic – like a pay rise, or a work-related query – farther and when to stop.
It also means one can determine what kind of impression they are making. If you enter an interview with open gestures, good posture and unfolded arms, you are bound to present yourself as a more amiable potential colleague than someone hunched over with closed gestures and no eye contact.
Robert Phipps is a `master communicator`, a nationally renowned body language expert who can help you to gain the ability to present yourself in a confident way. Having already worked for the BBC, Sky News and other major channels as a political body language expert, Phipps is also the resident expert for Trisha Goddard show on channel five.
He has recently brought out a DVD set which means that you can find out the details of this skill for yourself; it is now available as a digital download. By understanding and utilising body language, you can unlock the secret to presenting yourself as a confident and agreeable person and ensure you make a great first impression and the right lasting impression.