Powerful Body-Language

Body language for me is the way you act and the way you use your body. Like the gestures. Am I nervous with my hands or is it in flow? Am I upright? Do I make eye contact? So these things, but then I think it’s actually much more than body language. It’s really, or I think the interesting part is really do you have presence? And I think the difference is the insights. So if you feel good and if you really feel you know the space of your body, that’s when you have presence. And I think one example is, you know, these people who walk into a room and without saying or doing anything, they’re like a magnet. Like you feel drawn to them, they have authority. And, yeah, I think this is really the thing to aim for in a sense.

The beauty of body language is that it goes both ways. So it’s a great way to get attention, to get visibility and I think ultimately that’s when you have more impact on the people you communicate with or lead. And then it also goes inwards because let’s say you’re not feeling so well, you have a crappy day and by changing your body language or your posture or go focusing on going a bit more upright, you can actually really change also how you feel and I think that’s really nice, if you have the attention on that. So those both parts. What can you cultivate to have that presence we talked about. And, I like to use the exercise to act ‘as if’ and because of one of my coachees, I call it the Michelle Obama exercise. So what we did with her, she was before a negotiation situation and then people usually tend to be like, you know, crossed arms and they make themselves to little smaller and it’s really not helping. So, so she said she wanted to be more like Michelle Obama, okay great. How is Michelle Obama? Okay. She, you know, she’s elegant, she knows what she wants, she’s really straight. And then really helped her to prime herself into that situation and state, and actually you can do this too. So if you think for a moment, is there, it could be an idol, it could also be someone that you admire or someone you know from the work environment that has this presence and then, you know, just observe them a little bit. How do they act, how do they carry themselves? And then you can see is there something that maybe you can integrate a little bit. So I think this is really an invitation to play and see what the effect is.