Nonverbal Communication

There are different kinds of communication. In this article we are going to focus on one of the most important types of communication: the nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal communication can change how other people notice you even if you are not directly speaking to them. If you are in a meeting room with your head down and someone else have their head up the first thing people will think is that the person with the head up is your boss and that person might be in charge of the meeting.

Nonverbal communication is handled by our unconscious mind, so to improve this way of communication we need to take charge of our actions. First we need to know how we are behaving, what are we doing while talking? For that we need to develop the sense of Self Awareness. We must notice how we are behaving, how are we sitting, are we sitting straight with confidence? We also must notice others, how are people around you behaving? Social Awareness can help us understand other people.

Being aware of ourselves and others will help us understand how we should be acting. The next thing is to control our emotions because they are contagious, when talking to someone we must not leak our emotions, we need to be in charge and have the right emotion for the situation.

Having Positive Emotions is great, it might be really good in many situations, but we always need empathy first. We can’t go to the extreme opposite of someone’s else feeling because it won’t do any good.

Nonverbal communication can change how other people look at you. You can be seen in a completely different way by just behaving differently, that’s why it is important and we should be aware of it.

We should be posing in a confident way. In nature animals open up when they are feeling confident and close down when they aren’t. Humans are just like that, for example, when athletes finish a race they raise both arms expressing pride, happiness. They are likely going to do it even if they’ve never seen someone do it before.

Our mind changes our body and our body changes our mind. By improving our body language we are consequently going to change how we feel. If we pose in a confident way it will make us more confident.

There is a really good TED Talk about this topic and you should really watch it: http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are