A Journey of Nonverbal Self-Improvement
In the past week, I have taken the initiative to experiment with different techniques to improve my body language and nonverbal communication skills. I made an effort to improve my posture as well as make more constant eye contact with people when we’re speaking to one another. In general, I’ve noticed that this has had a very positive impact on my life and the social situations I’ve been involved in.
An Improvement on Posture
When I was younger, I was relatively overweight compared to the other kids my age for several years and, as a result, tended to walk with my back hunched over and my shoulders kept slightly forward and rounded. After I hit my growth spurt and lost some of the excess weight, I continued these bad habits regardless, which had an overall negative effect on my posture and the image I projected to both myself and those around me.
This past week, I’ve made a conscious effort to keep my back straight, my shoulders back and my chest out. What I’ve noticed is that not only is this considered to be proper posture, but it also had a very positive effect on my self-confidence and my interactions with others around me. I noticed that by having a more open posture, I projected a more open, approachable personality, and I saw an exponential increase in casual conversations with strangers. I felt a huge improvement in my social skills and self-image just by doing something as simple as modifying how I carried myself ever so slightly.
Increasing Eye Contact
The second thing that I did to practice and improve my body language skills was that I made a deliberate effort to make and maintain more eye contact throughout conversations, whether I was the listener or the speaker. I’ve always had relatively poor eyesight, and although I was prescribed glasses in the fifth grade for being nearsighted, I never really started wearing them until last year. As a result, I ingrained a poor habit into myself of looking at the floor our in random places when myself or other people were talking, because I could never really make out people who were more than a few feet away from me well enough to truly visualize their face, let alone make eye contact.
Over the past week, however, I’ve made calculated attempts to change this poor habit. When having conversations, I have been making eye contact far more than normal. I make less eye contact when I am the speaker than when I am the listener. When I am listening to people talk, I’ve been trying to make eye contact with them about 80% of the time (that way it doesn’t look like I am just lifelessly staring a hole through their head). The result of this is that the speakers see me as more attentive and receptive to what they have to say, and they are more motivated and encouraged to carry on the conversation and open further.
Moving Forward
Based on this week’s practice, I feel as if I have certainly improved my kinesics abilities and I’ve become a more effective and more fluent nonverbal communicator. I can tell that this is the case because every social encounter I’ve had has been more engaging and positive, and I’ve noticed an overall increase in social engagements with both friends and strangers alike. My thinking has changed in the way that I am now more aware of my posture and eye contact in conversations, and make a conscious, deliberate effort to improve them for the better. Moving forward, I would like to work on improving other negative body language habits that I have, such as fidgeting, poor hand positioning (constantly having my hands in my pockets, for example), and by trying to mirror the body positions of others in a natural fashion.
