Books on Happiness / The Definitive Book Of Body Language- 2 students
.pdfEye Signals
Looking down towards the ground during conversation serves different purposes for men and women. For a man, it lets him give a woman the once over. For a woman, it has the dual purpose of letting her check him out and at the same time send a submissive signal of looking away and down.
Why do men have trouble making eye contact?
Breasts don't have eyes.
3.The Power Gaze
Imagine the person has a third eye in the centre of their forehead and look in a triangular area between the person's 'three' eyes. The impact this gaze has on the other person has to be experienced to be believed.
Not only does it change the atmosphere to very serious, it can stop a bore dead in their tracks. By keeping your gaze directed at this
area, you keep the screws firmly on them.
Provided your gaze doesn't drop below the level of their eyes, the pressure will stay on them. Never use this in friendly or romantic encounters. But it works a treat on the person who you want to intimidate or on the person who simply won't shut up.
The Power Stare
If you have soft, weak or wimpy eyes practise using the Power Stare to give yourself more authority. When you are under attack from someone, try not to blink while maintaining eye contact. When you look at the attacker, narrow your eyelids and focus closely on the person. This is what predatory animals do just before they strike their prey. When you pan your eyes from one person to another without blinking it has an unnerving effect on anyone who watches you do it.
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Don't mess with the
Terminator
To do this, move your eyeballs first and then let your head follow, but your shoulders should remain still. The Power Stare was used by Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator and can strike fear into the hearts of would-be intimidators. Better still, have a policy of dealing only with pleasant people so you'll never need to whip out your Power Stare.
The Politician's Story
When someone looks around from side to side or won't look us in the eye when they talk, our trust in their credibility diminishes dramatically, even though they may be doing it because of shyness. We had a politician client who was a novice at being interviewed on television and he constantly flicked his eyes between the reporters and the cameras when he was being interviewed. This had the effect of making him look shifty-eyed on the screen and each time he appeared on television his popularity decreased. By training him simply to look at only the reporter and ignore the cameras, his credibility increased. We trained another politician to address his answers mainly to the lens of the television camera when he participated in a televised political debate. While this alienated the 150 studio audience guests it impressed millions of television viewers, who felt as 11 the politician was talking directly to them.
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Look Deep Into My Eyes, Baby
For a television show, we conducted an experiment using a dating agency. A selected number of men were told that their next date was well matched to them and that they should expect to have a successful, fun time. We explained to each man that his date had suffered an injury to one eye as a child and that she was very sensitive about it because the eye didn't track properly. We said we weren't sure which eye it was, but if he looked closely he'd be able to pick it. Each woman was also told the same story about her date and that if she too looked closely she'd be able to spot the slow eye. On their dates, the couples spent the evening gazing into each other's eyes searching in vain for the 'problem eye'. The outcome was that each couple reported high levels of intimacy and romance on their dates and the likelihood of the couple meeting again for a second date was 200% higher than the agency average.
Extended gazing can create intimate feelings.
You can also drive couples apart by telling them that their date has a hearing problem and that they'd need to talk about 10% louder than their date to be heard. This results in a couple talking louder and louder as the evening progresses to the point where they are yelling at each other.
The First 20 Seconds of an Interview
Many people are taught that, in a sales or job interview, you should maintain strong eye contact with the other person and keep it up until you are seated. This creates problems for both the interviewer and interviewee because it's contrary to the process we like to go through when we meet someone new. A man wants to check out a woman's hair, legs, body shape and overall presentation. If she maintains eye contact it restricts
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this process so he's left trying to steal glances at her during the interview without getting caught and so he becomes distracted from the actual job of interviewing. Some women are disappointed that, in a supposedly equal business world, men still do this, but hidden cameras show this to be a fact of business life whether we like it or not.
Like it or not, everyone steals a look at a woman's rear when she leaves a room, even if they don't like her front view.
Video cameras also reveal that women interviewers go through the same evaluation process with both male and female interviewees but women's wider peripheral vision means they rarely get caught. Women are also more critical than men of female interviewees whose appearance doesn't stack up. Women look at a male candidate's hair length, clothes design and co-ordi- nation, the creases in his trousers and shine on his shoes. Most men are completely unaware that women look at the condition of the back of his shoes as he walks out.
Solution
When you go for an interview, shake hands and then give the interviewer a twoto three-second frame of uninterrupted time for them to complete the process of looking you over. Look down to open your briefcase or folder, or to arrange any papers you might need, turn to hang up your coat, or move your chair in closer, and then look up. In filming sales interviews, we found that not only did the interviews feel better for the salespeople who used this strategy, it added up to a better outcome in sales results.
What Channel Are You Tuned to?
A person's eye movements can reveal what their mind is focusing on by telling you whether they are remembering something
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they have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. This technique is a development of American psychologists Grinder and Bandler and is known as Neurolinguistic Programming, or
NLP.
In simple terms, if a person is remembering something that they saw, their eyes will move upward. If they are recalling something they heard, they look to the side and tilt their head as if listening. If they are recalling a feeling or emotion, they'll look down and to the right. When a person is mentally talking to themselves, they look down and to the left.
A. Recalling a picture |
B. Recalling a sound |
C. Recalling a feeling |
D. Talking to oneself |
The difficulty is that these eye movements can occur in a fraction of a second and come in clusters making it harder to read 'live'. A videotape replay, however, can let you see discrepan-
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cies between what a person says and what they really think. Thirty-five per cent of people prefer the visual information
channel and will use phrases such as 'I see what you mean' 'Can you look into that?', 'That's perfectly clear' or 'Can you show me that?' and you will get their attention by showing them photos, charts and graphs and asking if they 'Get the picture'.
Twenty-five per cent prefer the auditory channel and use words such as 'That rings a bell', 'I hear you', 'That doesn't sound right' and that they want to be 'in tune' with you. The other 40% prefer the feelings channel and will say 'Let's kick that idea around', 'Our department needs a shot in the arm', 'I can't quite grasp what you're saying'. They love to test drive things and be involved in a demonstration so that they can 'grasp the idea'.
NLP is a remarkable discovery and a powerful communications tool that should be addressed as separate subject. We suggest you follow up by reading the work by Grinder and Bandler mentioned in the reference section at the back of this book.
How to Hold Eye Contact with an Audience
As professional conference speakers, we developed a technique for keeping an audience's attention and letting them feel involved. In groups of up to 50 people it's possible to meet the gaze of each individual. In larger groups you usually stand further back, so a different approach is needed. By pegging a real or imaginary point or person at each corner of the group and one in the centre, when you stand at a distance of 10 yards (10m) from the front row, approximately 20 people in a group of up to 50 will feel you are looking at them individually as you speak and so you can create an intimate bond with most of your audience.
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How to Present Visual Information
When you are giving a visual presentation using books, charts, graphs or a laptop it's important to know how to control where the other person is looking. Research shows that of the information relayed to the brain in visual presentations, 83% comes via the eyes, 11% via the ears, and 6% through the other senses.
Impact on the brain of information from the senses during a visual presentation
The Wharton study in the United States found that the retention of verbal presentations was only 10%. This means that a verbal presentation requires frequent repetition of key points to be effective. By comparison, the retention rate of combined verbal and visual presentations is 50%. This means you will achieve a 400% increase in efficiency through the use of visual aids. The study also found that using visual aids cuts the average business meeting time from 25.7 minutes to 18.6 minutes - a 28% time saving.
The Power Lift
To keep control of where a person is looking, use a pen to Point to the presentation and, at the same time, verbalise what he sees. Next, lift the pen from the presentation and hold it
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between his eyes and your eyes. This has the magnetic effect of lifting his head so that now he is looking at you and he sees and hears what you are saying, achieving maximum absorption of your message. Keep the palm of your other hand open when you are speaking.
The Power Lift — using the pen to control where a person looks during a presentation
We also found that women hold more direct eye contact than men during presentations, especially when they are not talking. When women are talking, however, they avert their eyes more than men do.
Men stare more at women than vice versa and men give less direct eye contact when listening to other men than when listening to women.
Summary
Where you direct your gaze has a powerful impact on the outcome of a face-to-face encounter. If you were a manager who was going to reprimand an errant subordinate or a parent reprimanding a child, which gaze would you use? If you use Social Gazing, the sting would be taken out of your words, regardless of how loud or threatening you might try to sound. Social Gazing would weaken your words but Intimate Gazing could either intimidate or embarrass them. Power Gazing, however, has a powerful effect on the receiver and tells them you mean business.
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Using the right gaze gives credibility.
What men describe as the 'come-on' look that women use relates to a sideways glance, dilated pupils and Intimate Gazing. If a woman wants to play hard to get, she needs to avoid using an Intimate Gaze and use Social Gazing instead. But most men miss a lot of it anyway. To use a Power Gaze during courting would leave a man or woman labelled as cold or unfriendly. When you use an Intimate Gaze on a potential partner, however, you give the game away. Women are expert at sending and receiving this gaze but, unfortunately, most men are not. When men use the Intimate Gaze it's usually blatantly obvious to women and men are generally unaware of having been given an Intimate Gaze by a woman, much to the frustration of the woman who gave it.
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Chapter 9
SPACE INVADERS -
TERRITORIES AND
PERSONAL SPACE
'Excuse me...but you're sitting in my seat!'
Thousands of books and articles have been written about the staking out and guarding of territories by animals, birds, fish and primates, but only in recent years has it been discovered that man also has territories. When you understand the implications of this, you can gain enormous insights into your own behaviour, and the face-to-face reactions of others can be predicted. American anthropologist Edward Hall was one of the pioneers in the study of man's spatial needs and in the early 1960s he coined the word 'proxemics', from 'proximity' or nearness. His research into this field led to new understanding about our relationships with each other.
Every country is a territory staked out by clearly defined boundaries and sometimes protected by armed guards. Within each country there are usually smaller territories in the form of states and counties. Within these are even smaller territories
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