Provocation

Provocation

Why is it presumed that the physical language of business Webcasts should be like that of a studio news broadcast and not, say, that of a current affairs programme an outside broadcast, or even a prime-time game show—using the more entertaining and connected nonverbal style that goes with those genres?

If some of those potential styles don’t feel businesslike to you, ask the questions, “What is entertainment,” “What is business?” and “What would a body do to win at both of these?” 2 What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate Shedding the Common Body Language of Bad Business If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help. —John F. Kennedy In this chapter you’ll learn: • Why being an optimist is overrated • How you’re naturally hardwired for paranoia • The chemistry of fear—and its mismanagement • The biggest body language don’t when presenting • Top nonverbal ways to put an audience to sleep and lose business! • 19 • When we communicate, we are often unknowingly creating a potent feeling of distrust in others. Sadly, even established public speaking and presentation coaches worldwide consistently teach a common mistake that, more than any other factor, can overwhelmingly cause a speaker or business presenter to be viewed negatively by any audience. But before you learn how to never ever make that mistake yourself, and in so doing improve your mastery of nonverbal influence immediately, you must first understand this.

Why Have We Made It This Far? There is a really good reason that you are looking at this page right now and reading these words, and it is not just that you want to improve your ability in human communication. You are right here, right now, alive and reading this because your brain has a very special way of thinking that naturally increases your chances of survival, and you inherited this routine process the very moment you were conceived. It is also responsible for the vast majority of the negative body language in business today. So, let me give you the simple unconscious thought process that is naturally hardwired into your brain that helps to deliver you from potential threats: First and foremost, take a negative view. Optimists Are Frequently Surprised Here is the way in which this preexisting programming works to your advantage. Imagine that you are an early human around about 200,000 years ago. It is the dead of night, and you are comfortable in your warm cave, asleep with your small family unit. Suddenly, your prehistoric part20 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE ner wakes you up with a start and indicates that she has heard an ominous noise outside the cave entrance. You are mentally predisposed to take the negative view, to instantly react pessimistically— “Uh-oh! It’s a wildcat!”—and without blinking you quickly rouse the group, pick up the big stick that is lying next to you and move cautiously to the exit of your cave to potentially flee or defend yourself and your family from attack and possible death. Now, it could indeed be a vicious animal, or it could just be the wind. If it is the first, you and your family stand a better chance of survival because you are ready and able to run or defend yourself and your genetic line as best you can; you were wise to be immediately and unconsciously wary, or pessimistic about the unknown sound. If it turns out to be only the wind in the trees, then you have lost nothing but a little sleep, but you have gained a statistically better chance of survival than, say, the prehistoric optimist, who in this selfsame situation thinks, “I bet it’s nothing,” and rolls over and goes back to sleep. The optimistic mindset lets the person sleep soundly, but quite significantly lowers the chances of his genetic line surviving! The optimistic outlook leaves the sleeper unprepared to defend himself and his family should the chances that it’s a predator go against him. So you can quite see how in a dog-eat-dog— or rather a large cat–eat-human—world, the optimists and their families were all soon dinner and the pessimists reproduced and survived. The optimistic mindset has mostly been ironed out of our unconscious mind over time by the evolutionary process of natural selection. Darwinism at a neurological level has made the optimistic unconscious, for the most part, very nearly extinct. Only the programming for pessimism has predominantly survived within the unconscious mind. As we already know, it is that unconscious mind that rules our life on a daily basis, often for the sake of our personal survival and that of our species. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 21 A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots Now, think of all those colleagues, bosses, and gurus over the years who, when it comes to business communication, have advised you, “Hey, don’t be so negative—be optimistic! Be positive! Once you get in front of the group, you’ll be fine!” Upon closer examination, it turns out that they were expecting a leopard to change its spots, because in reality, our default mindset is acutely paranoid. Remember this, because you are going to discover later in this chapter just how the vast majority of communication and presentation training available to date ironically works fruitlessly against several million years of this natural survival programming. Being optimistic without being prepared dramatically increases the sense of unease in communicators and audiences alike by failing to recognize and respect how the mind and body fundamentally work when under pressure. What’s the proof? There is a plethora of communication/presentation training out there, and everyone in business seems to have attended course after course—yet we are all constantly bored, confused, disengaged, stupefied, and too often condescended to or even offended by the majority of what we see and hear. The bar on business communication is set so low that there are almost no entry-level requirements other than being a living human being (and even then some seem to have slipped through the net!). Statistics from Andy Lopata and Peter Roper’s 2006 book on business communications, And Death Came Third, state that “81% of organizations were ing halls, in corridors, at networking meetings, and at lunches. And you can be sure that for the billions of people who are communicating under pressure right now, this simple, primeval routine programming of their unconscious minds to act on the negative forecast of any event is playing loudly in the background. They come to present, and because there is very little hard information on how the communication will pan out for sure, positively or negatively, their ancient brain takes over and the primal pessimism kicks in to ensure their best chance of survival—or so it thinks. You see, the primitive mind also sees everything in terms of black or white, good or bad—there is no gray area of thinking, no “maybe.” If something looks potentially bad, then the primitive brain categorizes it as just bad, and the body’s resulting reactions are those deemed appropriate by preorganized response routines. Even anything that is unpredictable or uncertain will be categorized as a threat, in turn causing a retreat response—just to be safe and never sorry. This means that presenters worldwide are in front of their audiences, thinking at a deep unconscious level, “There are other people here, and I don’t know for sure what is going to happen, so I’ll treat this as a threat— chances are that this will make me more likely to survive it.” Of course, all they consciously experience is the feeling of “Oh, *@#!!!” Just like the prehistoric people of all our brains’ pasts, the sympathetic nervous system, a control mechanism for our body’s fundamental functions, initiates a response that is as familiar to us as it was to the first vertebrates on this planet—a response that can be traced back through our mammalian ancestors and reptiles, and right back to fish: fight or flight. Danger When sensory data hit the brain stem, or, as some call it, the R complex or the reptilian brain, in a pattern that is registered and perceived as “danger,” the rate of our adrenal activity is quickly increased. This, in What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 23 turn, facilitates reliance on set behaviors that are often related to alertness, defense, and combat, along with the physical readiness to execute these tactics effectively—our fight-or-flight response is activated. Also our simple reptilian mindset categorizes anything that we can’t predict easily or is uncertain as a risk, and so stimulates our most fundamental nervous system to take in lots more data while closing down the number of categories to label and understand it by in order to allow quick computation and analysis. At the same time, our bodies fill up with adrenalin so that we can be physically ready for effective aggression toward the threat if running in the opposite direction has proved ineffective. Presentation Anxiety No surprise that business communicators at all levels often end up talking to their audiences in a frozen state, or one of submission or aggression. Their unconscious minds assume that they are not able to predict with any great certainty the exact outcome of this most critical and complex of human interactions. The more humans there are in the mix and the more imperative a positive outcome is, the more unpredictable and uncertain the situation appears to be to the unconscious mind. Complexity and importance bring about the unconscious imagination of a whole heap of possible threats and potential disappointments. A presenter just has to get up in front of a group of people (any more than four is categorized as “many” by the unconscious mind), and in kicks the impulse to freeze, flee, fight, or finally faint—the “play dead” response. All of these begin by sending adrenalin coursing through the bloodstream, rapidly preparing the body for reaction and appropriate action in an immediate emergency situation. (In fact, even just one person can push the presenter’s unpredictability button—“Will this person like my pitch or not?”) 24 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE Acute anxiety—the result of all this stress—can eventually stimulate the release of a chemical called norepinephrine into the brain. This is the body’s own antidepressant. (You’ll recognize this as the high you feel when you finally get off the white-knuckle ride to make up for the terror you felt when you were on it, or the elated over-confidence of a poor presenter after a car crash of a corporate communication.) Further symptoms that you may recognize in others include a panic attack, a drained complexion, extreme fluctuations in temperature, sweating, dryness of the mouth and choking sensations, dizziness, feelings of “unreality” and confusion, introspection, and loss of concentration and memory. These reactions are all a perfectly reasonable response to being attacked by a hungry lion; perhaps, however, rationally they could be considered a little over the top for reading from a PowerPoint slide in front of a small committee. Animal Instinct So presenters are freezing, fleeing, or fighting their audiences in fright (and maybe even feinting too, or at least taking a sick day) because they cannot safely predict the outcome of an important communication exchange. And how can we tell that the majority of them are doing this as they speak? Next time you are watching a series of business presentations, watch the presenters closely. Do you see their hands down by their sides, their stomachs crunched in, and their shoulders down (hunched over), chin tucked in, forehead down and eyes narrowed? Do you see some repetitive movement from side to side? This is the human body getting ready either to avoid attack, to be attacked, or to attack. And this is unfortunately how the vast, vast majority of business communicators meet their audiences to a lesser or greater degree. What exactly is happening here? This posture drops the person’s center of gravity to facilitate balance and power when ducking and running, to What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 25 absorb the energy of an attack, or to spring into offensive action. The hands are below the waist to facilitate movement, as the arms are needed as pendulumlike weights (to walk or run, we need the swinging motion of our arms to help move us forward) to propel the body away from or toward a threat. The stomach is crunched in to shield the soft vital organs in that area, protected only by a muscle wall because of the body’s design, which allows a diverse range of movement at the body’s center (instead of protecting the core with skeletal tissue and suppressing mobility). Along with the repetitive shifting of weight to remain a moving target and the tuckedin chin to protect both the trachea and carotid artery, supplying oxygen to the body and blood to the brain and head down with narrowed eyes to protect sight, this is the posture of someone who is tremendously frightened or potentially highly aggressive. Can you recall the last time you had something of a similar posture when you made a presentation? View to a Kill So it is the vulnerable “vital” or “kill” points of the body that we unconsciously protect when we feel anxious. The human race’s business culture has introduced the format of “giving presentations” as a positive commercial tool, yet our old brains can’t recognize the personal benefit. When we get up there to present, we still feel that age-old fear of danger. So we protect ourselves with posture. Furthermore, we will angle ourselves side on to the audience to decrease the vulnerable surface area to attack, or maybe hide a little behind an object such as a podium, chair, or table, touching this object for security and positioning ourselves in relation to it as we would to a shield or a weapon. We can also unconsciously gravitate toward windows and doors to be sure that we are close to an exit. Watch this behavior the next time you attend a presentation. More important, watch this behav26 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE ior in yourself—it is natural, and you are predisposed to it. First recognize it, then, as you will find, you will be able to change it with the specific physical techniques coming up in the next chapter of this book. Most important, how do you feel about the speaker when she presents to you in this way? Do you have confidence in her? Do you trust her? Do you feel that she is calm and assertive and able to deal with pressure as a leader? Is she credible to you as a potential provider? Or is she creating a feeling of distrust in you because what you see is someone who is showing all the fundamental signs of attack or retreat? Think about the hypothetical scenario of our CFO telling us, “It’s been a great year!”: it may be this fight-or-flight posturing that is responsible for the incongruent nonverbal signals—the mixed messages that cause us not to trust the statement because of the physical impression that the CFO is prepping to flee or attack, is “stuck in the headlights,” or is just rolling over and dying in front of us! Pack Mentality What’s more, the pack copies the leader. The audience copies the presenter. Part of our brain is free of any logical thought process and is more emotionally based. It is sympathetic at an unconscious level with strong signals that it receives when watching and listening to other human beings. Not only do we have more faith in what we see, but we also have more faith in what we feel emotionally. Therefore, when we “connect” with another person on an emotional level, we trust the feelings that are communicated because they feel like they are ours too. We “mirror” or copy others’ actions and feelings and have faith in them through our own physical and emotional experience of them. It is theorized that the chemical that is most responsible for emotional bonding in humans, oxytocin, is involved in the human mirroring system, What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 27 producing increased empathy and rapport and influencing generosity within partnerships and social groups. This chemical instills trust, increases loyalty, and promotes the “tend and befriend” response by diminishing fear—a response that is great for business in so many ways. When human beings get together, they can often display a complex and rapid exchange of largely nonverbal information regarding their emotional states. In other words, we can detect what others are feeling and rapidly adjust our own thinking, feeling, physiology, and actions to precisely match the situation. Part of your mind works alongside the sympathetic nervous system to release oxytocin for a deep, personal connection below the level of consciousness. It draws the emotions of a group into congruence. Human beings at all ages are active in this sense. It is this reaction that causes any audience to mirror or mimic the messages that a presenter sends nonverbally. And in the case of the presenter displaying the symptom of fight or flight—well, the audience members just join right in. Only there are normally more of them than the speaker, so this can quickly spiral into a feedback loop of fear, aggression, and submission. “Tough crowd. . . . I got eaten alive!” Mimic Training in physical and visual theater opened up a huge vocabulary of movement for me, and I found that I was adept. I ate, drank, and slept the world of performance, and my eyes were opened to the extreme power in the body to understand and change psychological and emotional states. (More so than thought, intention and feeling 28 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE can ever do by themselves.) Take, for example, the exercise of “pastiche,” in which I would mimic another’s personal movement rhythms and idiosyncratic gestures. This was most exciting when, in performing the other person, I could gain insights into her innate mindset through being receptive to the thoughts and feelings that copying her movement induced in me. One piece of vocabulary I would use when studying an individual was to discern whether he was “above the table” or “below the table”; this referred to the “TablePlane,” (see Appendix) an imaginary surface that cuts through the body horizontally at the navel. If you take your center of gravity below that plane, you become sluggish, heavy, and often a little depressed in feeling— quite “passive.” If you take your center of gravity above it, you became lighter, more airy, and a little more nimble mentally—quite “active.” I would also see whether people were in front of the “door frame” or behind it. By imagining a surface that cuts through the body laterally and stepping your center of gravity either forward of this or behind it, you become psychologically more extroverted or introverted respectively. It is possible to go so far behind the door frame that you become so self-conscious that it is impossible for you to speak; you can also see this in others and shift them physically to give them instant confidence. By using combinations of these positions, one can literally step into another mental state while still being “authentic” because it is you doing it and so it is your genuine emotional state in that moment. For example, above the table and in front of the door frame can become hyper and aggressive—totally “in your face!” Try it out next time you want to clear a room quickly. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 29 The Big Don’t: Dropping Your Hands Not only are you predisposed to drop your hands down by your sides when you present, but the majority of traditional and present business presentation training tells you to do this! These presentation manuals and trainers not only tell you to keep your hands loose by your sides, but also tell you to stand still. Let me make this quite clear: you cannot do anything worse! Dropping your hands and standing still in front of an audience causes your unconscious mind to wonder why you have made yourself a static target. At this stage, your body will most likely respond by “playing dead.” This is the mechanism that says that if we are in danger and we are not going to move, we had better pretend to be very weak or even dead so that we don’t get eaten. That’s when you get the weak body, dull voice, and, worst of all, a lifeless look in the eyes. The audience will see you as roadkill—highly unappetizing! This fright response can also lead to an almost narcoleptic sleep response or cataplexy (a muscular weakness brought on by strong emotion)—a feint response in the most acute cases of a stress response to public speaking. The GrotesquePlane I call the region of the body below the waistline the GrotesquePlane. (Grotesque comes from the same Latin root as grotto, meaning a small cave or hollow.) In modern English, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for something ugly, incongruous, or unpleasant, and thus it is often used to describe distorted forms. Not only this, but a cave is associated with dark, covert, and untrustworthy areas, where much is hidden from sight. The cave is where our prehistoric ancestors, and thus our animalistic instinct Embodied Cognition Let’s now go through exactly what dropping your arms does to your body and your mind. In nature, there are really only two reasons for you to drop your arms: to rest or to move. We have talked about how with your arms dropped and your adrenalin pumping, you will start to shift your weight in front of an audience, literally looking shifty—not easy for those who are watching you to trust. This shifting can easily escalate to pacing up and down. The brain says that if we have our arms by our sides, we should be moving—especially with all those people looking at and judging us. But when you stand still with your arms hanging down, the body takes this as a signal to rest, or even sleep. Yes, that’s the biggest reason why the audience gets sleepy in a presentation: you are standing still with your arms hanging down. The audience members quickly copy the leader and let their arms relax in their chairs, sit back, and trance out. They become the living dead, just like the presenter. With the arms hanging down and the body still, a person’s heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure and levels of oxygen to the body and brain can decline quite rapidly taking the brain’s electrical activity to a state that is getting dangerously near to the theta wave rhythmic cycle of sleep. When the arms hang down and the body is still, the voice follows and drops significantly in tone (another nonverbal indicator of the meaning behind a message). This deeper voice then tends to drop even further at the end of each thought. Sighs and “ers” have a downward intonation, and there are really only three reasons for a downward intonation: sleep, depression, and command— the dormant presenter, the despondent speaker, and the despotic leader. The Dormant Presenter If you wish to send a child to sleep with a story, just send the tone of your voice down at the end of each line of text, and start the next line at the deep tone you ended the last one on. So your voice What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 31 drops down and down like a flight of stairs. The tone of voice informs the old brain that it is time to relax the body and decrease the breathing rate, heart rate, blood pressure and brain’s activity. Certain chemicals are sent around the body to tell the brain to start shutting down some of the nonvital functions, most importantly the conscious mind. The child’s skin begins to go paler and waxy in tone as his eyes begin to glaze over and his limbs begin to go limp. You see, it is not the story that sends us to sleep, but the tonality of the reading that gives us the instruction at a deep, deep level. And you have certainly witnessed speakers and presenters who have put both themselves and their audience to sleep in seconds with their downwardinflected tonality. Putting the hands down by the sides and being still is the culprit that is largely responsible for this tranquilizing tonality. The Despondent Presenter Next is the depressed downward tonality—the chief financial officer who tells us, “It’s been a great year!” but in a tonality that says, “I am close to hanging myself. . . . Dump my stock right now.” As Dr. Mehrabian’s studies concluded, given a choice between believing the content and believing the nonverbal messages, the unconscious mind will go with the nonverbal as being more trustworthy. Once again, hands down by the sides is a sure-fire route to creating a downturn in credibility. The Despotic Presenter Finally, there is the loud-voiced downward tonality, which is more prone to happen when the hands are down at the sides and the body is pacing. Pacing up and down in the space creates the overconfidence of being a moving target and puts more air into the lungs; the brain functions better with more oxygen intake and processes some of the fight-or-flight chemicals so as not to depress and poison the system. However the extra air volume in the lungs gives a loud, forceful downward inflection that can sound overtly commanding, especially when mixed with 32 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE ----· an adrenalin fueled attitude —a product of the aggressive “fight” response. This may be acceptable to an audience that feels that it is clearly under threat from somewhere else and can sense that dangerous uncertainty personally; such people will be attracted to a strong command structure in the tone of the voice. It will feel more certain and so safer to them. More often than not, however, in the modern business world the commanding voice seems too aggressive and often just crazy. Trust disappears because the audience members cannot see for themselves the imminent threat to which the leader seems to be having a strong response. Armed forces use the command tonality to great effect in training to stop the soldiers from questioning what the threat is when they cannot see it. It can take months of repetitive drill and other “incentives” to emotionally desensitize combatants so that they will respond to orders without question in all

circumstances, obeying commands during periods of stress or when they are under no perceived stress. To illustrate, consider a military combat situation. When a soldier encounters an initial sign of threat, the socially appropriate response, i.e., the response demanded by his military training and reinforced by other members of his unit, is usually the “stop, watch, and listen” heightened-alertness response. This behavior is consistent with the biological predisposition toward the freeze response.

 But as the reality of a firefight grows imminent, the biological and situational demands are no longer so aligned. The evolved hardwired instinctual response to flee is in conflict with military training, and this conflict can further increase the intensity of this already stressful experience. This is why the military has some unique and highly effective training methods to manage and desensitize soldiers to operation stress and counteract their natural instincts to flight rather than fight. However, these

training techniques are frankly a little extreme for the business communicator’s needs. We will leave them well alone. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 33 For most of us who are neither giving nor receiving military orders, in our daily business dealings, barking commands can often kill rapport and get you a name for being an insensitive idiot, potentially quashing lucrative deals in your wake. “I love the smell of napalm in the boardroom!”
Lead with Your Body Given this new insight, if you have any publications or training manuals that tell you to keep your hands by your sides when you speak, do yourself a favor now, and tear those pages out and burn them! Indeed, burn the whole book or training manual, because if that is some of its best advice, what is its worst like? What these trainers do not know is the fundamental effect of certain movements on the brains of both the person who is moving and anyone viewing that movement. They have no knowledge of the powerful effect that even small movements of the body have on the emotional impulses of the mind. Of course, masters of the performing arts have known these secrets for thousands of years, and more recently behavioral psychologists and neurologists have recognized the significance of the motor system in influencing cognitive and affective processes. As George Lakoff, a champion of theories on embodied cognition, states in his 2002 work Moral Politics, “Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything—only what our embodied brains permit.” Specific movements may become so strongly associated with a cognitive or affective state that their initiation consistently elicits that corresponding state. As the simplest example, take the way arm flexion is habitually used 34 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE for pulling something toward oneself, and arm extension for pushing something away. As a result, these movements have become associated with positive and negative outcomes, respectively, and psychological researchers have proven that performing them tends to invoke corresponding reactions. For instance, conscious use of such approach and repel arm movements can influence an individuals’ feelings of liking or dislike respectively. His Master’s Voice Movement experts such as the world-renowned Moshé Feldenkrais (physicist, World War II spy, judo expert and teacher at the Esalen Institute), in his book Awareness through Movement (1972), recognize that since the nervous system is mainly occupied with movement, “Correction of movement is the best means of self improvement.” As in the European schools of acting stemming from Michael Chekhov and the modern American methods from Sanford Meisner, the idea of “impulse” is key to creating “authentic” performance. Spontaneous instinct drives human behavior, and so emotional impulses and not sense memory or emotional memory inform the most dynamic of acting techniques. Authentic feelings arise from activities and reactions to “the moment” or “the now,” This is fundamentally why actors are called actors—they do action. If thinking where of primary importance in the moment of performance they would be called philosophers. Not only this, but as Europe’s foremost mask theater acting expert John Wright puts it, “That same impulse can be sustained and have influence on the voice.” The world’s greatest vocal performance teachers, such as Frankie Armstrong, Cicily Berry, and Patsy Rodenberg, concur that the body and the voice are inextricably linked. For the average business professional, this means that body language works not only when the audience can see you, What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 35 but even when it can’t! Because even a subtle physical impulse affects the vocal muscles to such a strong degree, when you use body language over the telephone, your audience can hear your intention more clearly when you concentrate on physically projecting that intention rather than merely intending it psychologically. As one great acting trainer was often heard to say to students “you are boring me—an audience cannot hear or see you thinking however hard you are doing it, you must show them.” Of course, if you are not aware of any negative body language when you talk over the telephone, you will be equally unaware of the negative tonality that your audience is hearing from you. What Did I Tell You This book is a unique combination of ancient secrets and new science, so remember that I said, “If at any moment you begin to feel like questioning a technique or its rationale—step backward, take a breath, trust, and just do it!” Understand that literally stepping backward (a traditional method for taking stock and thinking about a situation) has been shown in psychological tests to significantly enhance cognitive performance in moments of stress (this avoidance pattern of movement decreases anxiety). Indeed backward motion appears to be a very powerful trigger to mobilize cognitive resources. In fact, it was found conclusively in tests at Radboud University, Netherlands, in 2008 that whenever you encounter a difficult mental situation, stepping backward may boost your capability to deal with it effectively. We will look at exactly what taking a breath can do for you and your business audience in a further chapter—but first, if you would like to know and master the secret of exactly where to place your hands in order to take countermeasures to calm your fight-or-flight response system, and instantly win a feeling of trust from your audience, then read on. 36 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE Chapter 2 Quick Study The GrotesqueGesturePlane: When you drop your hands down by your sides in a stressful situation, your body is designed to execute its extreme stress response. Your audience is prone to mirror or copy this response and feel uneasy, confused, or sleepy. Since for the majority of businesspeople, communication is their biggest problem and often has the most impact on relationships and on business, it is best, when communicating, to avoid doing anything that can exacerbate the fear of speaking. And some business content being just plain boring (sorry, but it is)—it’s best not to encourage sleep. Just Do This Now 1. Keep your hands above your waistline (see next chapter for specifics) and so out of the GrotesquePlane when you communicate to avoid negative engagement with your audience. 2. Should you wish to lower the energy of your audience (maybe they are too excited), let your hands drop down by your sides and stand still. 3. Allow your voice to follow the impulse of your body to reduce strain on it. Let your voice do what it naturally wants to do in alignment with your chosen physicality. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate • 37 38 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE Chapter 2 Case Study Theory to Practice: Literally Breathtaking In a seventh-grade classroom, Mr. Williams interrupts John’s public speaking delivery as John becomes faint. On the verge of collapse from lack of oxygen, John takes an empty front-row seat. His friend David soon escorts him to the bathroom. In a project update, Shawn’s speech begins to slow and a slight gasp/swallow motion begins to pepper his presentation with alarming frequency. He reduces the “Key Take-Away” portion of his talk to simply reading the bullet points on the presentation slide. He regains his composure after stumbling through an answer to the first audience question looking for clarification on much of the content. In both cases, audience members are aware that something is amiss, and are completely distracted from the presentation. Nobody says anything, and there is limited positive discussion following the episode. Insight Certain body positions send clear messages that start some quite extreme physiological and psychological responses. What was just described is a natural—and relatively frequent—occurrence when people address groups (e.g., more than four other people). It is very likely that both these presenters stood still, kept their hands in the GrotesquePlane and literally starved their brains of oxygen. Provocation In seventh grade, the teacher can come to your aid. What kind of impression are you making in the workplace when this happens? 3 Winning Trust with a Wave of Your Hand Truth Fears No Question Life happens at the level of events. Trust only movement. —Alfred Adler In this chapter you’ll learn: • The TruthPlane and how to be there • The world’s top technique for using the body to win trust • The biggest key to nonverbal excellence • How to calm stage fright—with your hands • Ancient techniques for talking to the reptilian brain • 39 • I f you were not feeling confident about your standing in a social group, you would not wish to show this vulnerability on purpose, would you? If you felt weak and exposed around a group, you would not go out of your way to display that weakness and expose yourself more, right? In the body language you use in a business context, the last thing you might think it wise to do is to expose and display your own Achilles’ heel. It seems as though you are better off putting on a mask of boldly assertive body language that shows that you are strong—the alpha person in the room, with an air of invincibility, yes? No! You are about to learn the key piece of nonverbal communication that is understood in every culture around the world and shows that you are nonconfrontational, open, available, and accepting of others. Some of you will be thinking, “Well, that’s a weak strategy,” but you’d be quite wrong. The people in any business audience—at a presentation or a meeting, or standing around the water cooler for a chat—are not looking for someone who is going to harm them—they are looking for someone who is going to help them. They need to feel sure that the leader in the room is going to give them sustenance, not deplete their resources. Most of all, they must be assured that you accept them. If you look as if you will “feed them,” they will approach you. If you look as if you are going to “take away,” then they will retreat or attack. The Gesture That Time Forgot The following simple piece of body language, hundreds of thousands of years old and still applicable today, is totally overlooked in understanding by nonverbal communication “experts” and business presentation trainers around the globe. It has, however, been handed down within the community of visual communicators for centuries. Until this point, it has never 40 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE been put into writing for any business audience, with any full explanation of its powerful properties. So here is that signal that instantly lets the members of an audience know that you are genuine in intention and can be trusted: Gestures on a horizontal plane extending from the navel. OK, so what you may be thinking now is, it can’t be that simple! Yet, as you are about to experience and learn for yourself, it really is. All you have to do to let the audience know that you are here to give rather than to take away is to make hand gestures along the horizontal plane from your navel, because what those gestures are is not as important as where they are when it comes to showing your honest intentions toward others. So let’s do some practical work to help you understand and experience the incredibly influential and persuasive powers of working within this gesture position, which I have named the TruthPlane. Hands-On First if you stand tall and upright now but allow your hands to hang down by your sides (below the waistline) in the GrotesquePlane of gesture you should start to pay attention to your breathing rate. Note the pace and the quality of the breaths in and out that you are taking. For example, is your breathing slow-paced, fast-paced, or what you might describe as midpaced? Do you feel as if you are taking in deep breaths, shallow breaths, or something you might describe as somewhere in between the two? Do you feel that you are taking in more breath than you are breathing out, or vice versa, that you are breathing out more air than you are breathing in? Winning Trust with a Wave of Your Hand • 41 As you stand, notice some details of your physical stance as a whole when your arms are hanging down on each side of your torso. How stable are your legs? How erect is your spine? How does your head feel right now on the top of your neck? How does your face feel? What are the muscles in your face doing, and what do you think is the nature of the expression of your mouth, your eyes, your forehead, and across your face as a whole? In addition to this, how do you feel right now? Describe that feeling to yourself, or even name it if you can. Many people get a considerable feeling of “heaviness” in the physical, mental, and emotional sense. Consider whether that is what you are feeling as well. Finally, note anything you experience beyond that which has been outlined, and remember it all for comparison later. TruthPlane Again, tall and upright, but now bring your hands up to your belly button, and just gently interlace the fingers of your left and right hands so that they are held comfortably and lightly over your navel, with your palms softly touching your stomach. Can you immediately feel a difference in the way you are breathing? Is your breathing faster or slower than before? Has your breathing become deeper or shallower, or even perhaps more balanced? Do you feel that you are breathing out more than you are breathing in, or is there a sense of equilibrium to your breathing? How does your breathing generally compare to the breathing that you experienced with your arms hanging at your sides? Note the difference for yourself right now. Bring your attention to your body as a whole. How are you standing right now? For example, how secure do you now feel in your feet and legs? How does this compare to your stance in the GrotesquePlane of gesture? What do you feel and think about the position of your spine and how your head 42 • WINNING BODY LANGUAGE now sits on your neck? Can you feel a difference, and if so, what makes up that important difference for you? Again, pay attention to your face. How do the muscles around your mouth, eyes, and forehead feel to you? What is the expression that you now feel that you have, and what is the feeling that goes with that expression on your face? Can you describe the feeling that having your hands gently in the plane extending from your navel gives you, and can you give that feeling a name? Also take note of anything else that you have experienced or thought since taking up this second position of the hands, especially in relation to your earlier experience of the GrotesquePlane. Quickly drop your hands down by your sides into the GrotesquePlane or keep the fingers interlaced so that your hands fall in front of your groin. How fast do you revert to the original breathing pattern, stance, positioning, and feelings that go with this position? Now bring your hands up to your navel area and allow them to gesture anywhere in horizontal plane that extends 180° from a centre that is your navel. Be open with your gesture, giving clear access to the stomach. How quickly does the feeling that goes with the new physical position change? The Result? A Feeling of Calm Many people describe the feeling that they get from having their hands in the navel or belly-button area as being “centered,” “controlled,” “collected,” “composed,” or “calm” (generally a lot of things beginning with the letter c); but also, just as you will have experienced, they get a sensation of levelheadedness, balance, and abundent energy. Why do we get a feeling of security and calm when we place our hands in this navel area, bringing attention and access to it as opposed to the feeling of lethargy, apathy, and sometimes aggression that comes when our hands are hanging in the GrotesquePlane—either to the sides, across our Winning Trust with a Wave of Your Hand • 43 front or clasped together around the back? To answer this, let’s first look at what centuries-old Eastern thought tells us about this area of the body. Red Mercury In traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts, the area just a couple of fingers width below the belly button is known as the lower dantien, which translates loosely as “red field” and is a storage center and powerhouse for pure energy. Also, and for the purposes of understanding the physical importance of this area and its initial relevance to nonverbal communication, the lower dantien is taken as roughly the point where the sagittal, coronal and transverse planes of the human body intersect, or “the one point.” In Chinese and Japanese tradition (along with much Western sports practice), this is considered the physical center of gravity for the human body. (See Appendix) Scientific theories and practices about centers of gravity, formed first by the famous Greek physicist Archimedes in the second century BC, state that in any system of particles, there is a specific location at which the whole system’s mass behaves as if it were concentrated, and so the center of mass is the point at which the whole of a body can be acted upon by gravity. Therefore, if you act upon a body’s center of mass, you are very likely to act upon that whole body. The most productive input of energy to affect any mass is at its center.