The body is like a house.
Like a house, people make judgments from the outside when they look at the house.
The same is true with non-verbal communication.
People see us and they assess us right away.
Now, Malcom Gladwell says that people make those assessments in less than one blink of
an eye, when we’re in their presence.
That doesn’t give us a whole lot of time to do well in our communication.
You don’t have to do a lot of public speaking to know how valuable non-verbal communication is.
But you do need to buy into the idea that by improving your hand gestures, your facial expressions,
your eye contact, that you’re going to have a greater impact on your audience.
Today, I want to show you the difference between communicating with no facial expressions or
hand gestures,
and using hand gestures, using facial expressions, getting yourself to add to the actual words
that you’re saying.
We want to do this without being distracting.
So, I’m going to tell you a little story.
And I’m going to go back and forth between using gestures and not using gestures.
As I do that, I want you to imagine yourself doing a similar exercise.
I find it's really helpful if you think about an adventure.
Something that’s adventurous, something that you would want to be a little animated.
Here we go.
When I was 20 years old I lived in Los Angeles.
I was pursuing a career as an actress.
One of my peers in acting class challenged me to go to the William Morris Agency where
I happen to know one of the agents.
The agent used to come into our restaurant and so I knew him a little bit.
I didn’t really know him very well but the challenge was go there, get a meeting with
him and sit down in front of him and ask him if he’ll be your agent.
I took the challenge.
I remember getting in the car and driving over there.
All the way over I was pumping myself up.
Pumping myself up with all these great exercises that I’ve been giving to you.
When I got there, I said to the front desk, “I have a meeting with so-and-so”.
And she called upstairs and the assistant upstairs said, “I’m sorry but we don’t have you
on the calendar”.
I persisted and I persisted by telling the woman at the front desk that, "I had a meeting.
I do, I have a meeting.
He knows me”.
I mentioned the name of the restaurant.
When I mentioned the name of the restaurant, they let me upstairs.
I just remember being in the elevator the whole ride up.
I was so excited.
I didn’t know how to contain my excitement.
When I got upstairs everybody was smiling, everybody was welcoming.
Now they knew I didn’t have an appointment with him but they wanted to appease me and
they welcomed me in.
I sat down and I had a conversation with the agent.
I’ll never forget what I said when I walked out the door.
I said, “I’ll be back and when I come back you’re going to be my agent”.
Now an exercise like that again is meant to be fun, it’s meant to be exaggerated and
it's meant to make you miss your non-verbal communication.
According to the Association for Talent Development, your cognitive readiness as a leader requires
advanced communication skills and strong, effective, appropriate non-verbal communication really
is going to give you the executive presence that you need.
I want to thank you for watching today.
I want to encourage you to consider executive coaching, fine tune your communication skills
and like, share, subscribe to my channel.
Come on back for another communication skills principle.
That will be up soon.