12 Body Language Tips for Career Success

12 Body Language Tips for Career Success

When properly used, body language can be your key to greater success. It can help you develop positive business relationships, influence and motivate the people who report to you, improve productivity, bond with members of your team, and present your ideas with more impact. Here are a dozen tips for using body language to project confidence, credibility, and your personal brand of charisma:

1. Stand tall and take up space. Power, status, and confidence are nonverbally displayed through the use of height and space. Keeping your posture erect, your shoulders back, and your head held high makes you look sure of yourself.

2. Widen your stance. When you stand with your feet close together, you can seem hesitant or unsure of what you are saying. But when you widen your stance, relax your knees and center your weight in your lower body, you look more “solid” and confident.

3. Lower your vocal pitch. In the workplace, the quality of your voice can be a deciding factor in how you are perceived. Speakers with higher-pitched voices are judged to be less empathic, less powerful and more nervous than speakers with lower pitched voices.

4. Try Power Priming. To display confidence and be perceived as upbeat and positive, think of a past success that fills you with pride and confidence.

5. Strike a Power Pose. Research into the effects of body posture on confidence, has shown that simply holding your body in expansive, “high-power” poses (leaning back with hands behind the head and feet up on a desk, or standing with legs and arms stretched wide open) for as little as two minutes stimulates higher levels of testosterone — the hormone linked to power and dominance — and lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

6. Maintain positive eye contact. You may be an introvert, you may be shy, or your cultural background may have taught you that extended eye contact with a superior is not appropriate, but businesspeople from the U.S., Europe, Australia (and many other parts of the world), will expect you to maintain eye contact 50-60% of the time.

7. Talk with your hands. Brain imaging has shown that a region called Broca’s area, which is important for speech production, is active not only when we’re talking, but also when we wave our hands. Since gesture is integrally linked to speech, gesturing as you talk can actually power up your thinking.

8. Use open gestures. Keeping your movements relaxed, using open arm gestures, and showing the palms of your hands — the ultimate “see, I have nothing to hide” gesture — are silent signals of credibility and candor. Individuals with open gestures are perceived more positively and are more persuasive than those with closed gestures (arms crossed, hands hidden or held close to the body, etc.) Also, if you hold your arms at waist level, and gesture within that plane, most audiences will perceive you as assured and credible.

9. Try a steeple. You see lecturers, politicians and executives use this hand gesture when they are quite certain about a point they are making. This power signal is where your hands make a “steeple” — where the tips of your fingers touch, but the palms are separated. When you want to project conviction and sincerity about a point you’re making, try steepling.

10. Reduce nervous gestures. When we’re nervous or stressed, we all pacify with some form of self-touching, nonverbal behavior: We rub our hands together, bounce our feet, drum our fingers on the desk, play with our jewelry, twirl our hair, fidget — and when we do any of these things, we immediately rob our statements of credibility. If you catch yourself indulging in any of these behaviors, take a deep breath and steady yourself by placing your feet firmly on the floor and your hands palm down in your lap, on the desk or on the conference table. Stillness sends a message that you’re calm and confident.

11. Smile. Smiles have a powerful effect on us. The human brain prefers happy faces, and we can spot a smile at 300 feet – the length of a football field. Smiling not only stimulates your own sense of well-being it also tells those around you that you are approachable and trustworthy.

12. Perfect your handshake. Since touch is the most powerful and primitive nonverbal cue, it’s worth devoting time to cultivating a great handshake. The right handshake can give you instant credibility and the wrong one can cost you the job or the contract. So, no “dead fish” or “bone-crusher” grips, please. The first makes you appear to be a wimp and the second signals that you are a bully.