Top Communication Skills

Body language is one of your unconscious communication skills. What that means is that like your breathing or your heartbeat you are unaware of it until you focus on it. It is the part of your mind where rational and “irrational” meet.

Much of the information that your mind receives is done so in a way that allows you to cope. If you were to consciously process all of the input from all of your senses you would very rapidly go crazy from sensory overload while your brain melts and smoke comes from your ears. Is this one of the reasons that around 80%, or more, of all human communication is done unconsciously?

What I mean by unconscious is that we are unaware of  much of our communication and as a result of that we may give confusing or even conflicting messages.

Back to Body language….as I’ve already said it’s mostly unconscious until such times that you’re trained.

Now I’m not going to start training you here as there are only so many days in a week. What I would like to do is to get you thinking about all of the ways that you use Body language, without you even realizing it.

Simply by being aware of what your gestures are and how you stand, you will increase your awareness of your body language. As time goes on you can also practise facial gestures as well, perhaps in the mirror before you do it publicly.

Something that you can use to improve your body language is to decide what is the result you want. Once you are clear on that, put yourself into an environment where other people are looking for the same results that you are. Simply sit and observe what the other people are doing and observe which gestures, postures and expressions are most effective in getting the results that you also want.

This is this is known as modeling and while what I’ve just described is only part of the modeling process it is enough for you to be able to practise copying the physiology of success.

Once you are sure that you have got the movements etc off pat, then practise at home until you are ready to try your new skills out on someone you trust. Get them to give you honest feedback on how you are now coming across and if necessary repeat the practise until you are 100% confident.

Like all good things in your life you weren’t born with the gift of excellent body language. It is something that you had to learn and those that you may envy for their confidence simply had better role models than you did.
Work smart and use them as role models to follow and you may be surprised at how quickly you start to get similar results to them.