How a simple acting experiment could give you more impact with your team and clients.
Have you ever wondered how to gain greater impact when communicating to others? Try this with a friend:
Stand opposite each other, shake hands and say “hello”. Now try it again and this time do something different with your eye contact.
In one instance, maintain eye contact with your partner while you say “hello”, then turn and walk away.
Now try it again, but this time break eye contact and look at the floor while you are saying “hello”, turn away and then glance back at your partner quickly. Make sure it’s a quick glance and not a look (as if you are checking to make sure they aren’t coming at you with a knife).
Do this several times and take your time to experience how either holding eye contact or breaking eye contact and glancing back feels.
The first thing to explore is “did changing what you did with your eye contact feel different?”. If so, how?
Pretty much 100% of people will experience more comfort with maintaining eye contact, while breaking eye contact and glancing back makes people feel less secure, or sneaky, or weak… Some will say they felt more in control or powerful holding eye contact and less so when breaking and glancing.
The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said. — Peter F. Drucker
The first key here, is that by simply changing what you do with your body (in this case your eyes), you can experience different feelings. This goes against what most people think about cause and effect in human communication. Most believe they must feel something in order to express it, but the opposite is also true. You can also express something in order to feel it. This is an incredible handy skill to have if, for instance, you are about to give an important presentation and you are beset by feelings of insecurity and fear. You can adjust your body to convey confidence and sure enough you’ll start feeling confident. It’s the old fake it until you make it adage and not only is it key for actors on stage or set, it also is an amazingly handy skill to have in the workplace and life.
The second key is the dynamic you are playing with when holding or breaking eye contact. In actor’s terms, it is called “status” and is one of the handiest tools in an actor’s toolkit. It is a simple body language tool and can be utilised by anyone to improve how they communicate in any situation. (More on this in later articles).
Remember to click the heart if you like this article, please comment if you tried the exercise and let me know how it made you feel.
“Body Language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words” — Deborah Bull
Matt Stewart is a professional actor and project manager with Peers and Players Corporate Actors. If you’d like to know more about how corporate actors can enhance your workplace training check out our website www.peersandplayers.com or email info@peersandplayers.com to arrange a chat.
