Hey there if you like me I've been wondering where did all the hippies go I
mean there was a lot of them around in the 60s right well recently I found out
in preparing this video on body language I found them
there on the ground spelling things with their bodies things like joy love peace
tax the 1% say no to coal stop whaling and the future is in your hands well
that's a relief they're just a little bit older now and
they're putting their napping to good use hi there Kelsey Tonner here from Be a
Better Guide and today we're talking about how we as tour guides can use body
language effectively to communicate that were confident capable and that your
guests have nothing to worry about with you in charge your posture and your
position are gonna be one of the first things that your guests notice and we
want to communicate confidence but at the same time make them feel at ease and
comfortable with you so let's dive right in with six tips on how we can use our
body language more effectively 1 maintain eye contact with your audience
high contact is one of the most important elements of body language no
question it shows respect and interest in your guests so when speaking to your
group ideally you want to focus on individuals within the crowd you'll
spend 2 to 3 seconds making eye contact with someone here and then move on to
making eye contact with somebody here and you kind of scan the crowd like this
things that you don't want to do are fixating on one individual for a long
period of time because this can very quickly become awkward and it makes
other people feel excluded and also you don't want to be looking at the ground
in front of your audience when speaking this can affect your projection but also
communicates a lack of confidence to keep an upright but relaxed posture
whether you're sitting or standing keep your back straight and your shoulders
relaxed imagine someone lifting you up from the
top of your head and try and keep your chin about parallel to the floor now
this is just a guideline if you're obviously taller or shorter this can
change a little bit that this is a position that will make
you appear most confident some things not to do are never ever turn your back
to your audience this is really really common and a big mistake always be aware
of your group and if anyone kind of sneaks behind you immediately reposition
yourself so that everybody can see you three practice a firm handshake in many
cultures the handshake is from the more important nonverbal communication cues
because it happens rate at the introduction or at the beginning of our
tour now a firm handshake can give you instant credibility while we can shake
and make you a peer of fragile so we want to avoid being too strong crushing
a person's hand that's sometimes called the death grip we also don't want to be
too flaccid all right another common mistake is gripping the fingers too soon
so you're way out here like this honestly the best thing that you can do
is to ask for feedback on your Hendrix go to your friends your family
colleagues and ask them how they would break rate your handshake
then practice with them and see where you fall on that scale 4 make
affirmative movements and actions you can show empathy when someone else is
speaking to you as the guide by nodding your head and smiling at that person
these are nonverbal cues that would fall into the category of active listening at
a really important body language when you work with people quite a bit now
this instantly communicates that you are engaged that you're listening you're
interested in what they've got to say some things you want to avoid doing are
looking over the shoulders of the person that's speaking this is like an instant
sign that disrespect secondly pulling out your phone while someone is talking
and you're listening leave the phone in your pocket and lastly avoid
multitasking in your head because there's a lot of sort of subconscious
things that get expressed through our faces through our eyes and mouth that
the people very often pick up the fact that you're not listening that closely 5
emphasize words with your hands talking with your hands and using gestures makes
you a much more effective communicator all of us could probably use more
practice on being more intentional with our
gestures in fact it was such an important topic that we made entirely
separate be a better guide video on the exact types of gestures that you can use
but just know that using your hands makes you appear more assured and
confident some things not to do don't keep your arms locked to your side
as this can kind of make you appear nervous a little bit stressed sometimes
too and avoid these sort of a dance party we'll call it these sort of
excessive or random hand movements will just distract your audience now if you'd
like more information on some specific hand gestures you can use check out our
video what to do with our hands when we're speaking six mind your movement
most of the time you should stand confidently and one place versus sort of
pacing or wandering aimlessly if you do need to move it should probably be for a
purpose like maybe to go over and point something out or maybe to walk to the
front of the group and lead them to the next stage of the tour some other things
we want to avoid are shifting our weight one foot together ideally we're balanced
between the two secondly we want to avoid fidgeting right you know I was
really bad at this honestly if I ever had anything in my hand I would be
playing with it sometimes I would wring my hands like this sometimes the best
thing to do is just take things out of your hands so there's nothing there for
you to fidget with and lastly avoid any sort of overly robotic gestures that
seem really forced all of your movements should seem very natural and sort of
flow now we covered a lot really quickly but because this is such an important
topic we wanted to offer you a little bit more so we went out into the web and
we research the best body language experts that we could find and put
together five of our favorite instructional videos now these are
awesome in these videos these experts are going
to give you some extra tips they're going to show you how to use your body
language to be a more effective leader you can get access to all five of those
videos in the PDF download below but before you go we'd love to hear from you
what advice do you have for using body language on tour where there's some may
be mistakes that you made in the past that you corrected or other advice for
new tealy tour leaders are out there getting started thanks so much for being
here please pass this video along to anyone
you think might find it useful and we'll see you next time
I just spent a couple moments looking up jokes relating to body language and
there are none so I figured we just end on an awkward pause yeah should do it