Have you ever thought about the effect of your posture, movements, gestures, facial expressions, and the volume and tone of your voice?
Approximately 60-65% of all interpersonal communication is comprised of nonverbal behavior.
Knowing what your body is saying at all times is essential if you want to effectively communicate with others, especial if those people are of importance or authority. When you are speaking to a job interviewer, you should make an effort to appear confident, honest, and calm.
Relax, sit (or stand) up straight, and think before you speak. These things can go a long way to help you look more confident.
Have you figured out your pacifying behaviors?
Learn to suppress your pacifiers.
You'll know stress when you feel it. Since you also know what your pacifiers are, you are capable to hide your stress. If you figured out that you like to massage your ears under stress, just don't! It's that simple: if you can see it coming, you can stop it. If your interviewer can't see that you are visibly stressed, you will appear more confident in what you are saying. This also frees up your hands to help you along your appearance.
So what should your hands be doing?
Here's a trick: when a person answers a question with absolute confidence, he often does what is called hand steepling. This is when you put your hands together only at the tip of your fingers with space between your palms (elbows may be resting on a surface). Hand steepling is a sign of high confidence to an experienced observer, such as an interviewer!
If you want to express emotional neutrality, just leave your hands visible on the applicable surface (knees or table works just fine). This gestures ensures your interviewer that you have nothing to hide, and you can also use the visibility to express your emotional stability as well. When you leave your hands openly visible, however, you will want to hide any signs of emotional change. This includes fist-clenching, trying to grab onto the surface, rubbing hands together, and interlocking fingers (praying hands). Being able to hide these signs can also express your confidence.
Trained observers of body language look for the changes you exhibit in response to a stimulus, such as a difficult question. As long as you learn how to keep your body consistently calm and relaxed, you will have an easier time impressing your potential employer!
Terms to remember:
Hand steepling
Praying hands
Navarro, J. (2008). What Every BODY Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People. New York: Harper Collins.
Navarro, J. (2008). What Every BODY Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People. New York: Harper Collins.
I really enjoyed reading this post. I appreciate how you broke up blocks of text with different-colored subheadings. I also like how you include "Terms to remember." However, I think it'd be beneficial if you put the "terms to remember" section at the beginning of the post — that way, your readers will know exactly what you'll be covering before you define each term. As far as reading goes, though, I never found myself wondering when the post would be over. Your formatting is very nice.
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