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Peak Performance Resources for Leaders by Leaders

Tag: Communication

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Dominance, Trustworthiness, and Competence in Body Motion During Speeches

Highlights

  • Body movements of politicians giving speeches were turned into stick-figure videos.
  • Stimuli were rated on dominance, trustworthiness, and competence.
  • Simple nonverbal cues were linked to perceptions of dominance and trustworthiness.
  • Male speakers from opposition parties received the highest ratings on dominance.
  • Body motion has ecological validity and is a nonverbal cue of social relevance.

People read dominance, trustworthiness, and competence into the faces of politicians but do they also perceive such social qualities in other nonverbal cues? We transferred the body movements of politicians giving a speech onto animated stick figures and presented these stimuli to participants in a rating experiment.

Analyses revealed single-body postures of maximal expansiveness as strong predictors of perceived dominance. Also, stick figures producing expansive movements and many movements throughout the encoded sequences were judged high on dominance and low on trustworthiness.

In a second step, we divided our sample into speakers from the opposition parties and speakers that were part of the government, and male and female speakers. Male speakers from the opposition were rated higher on dominance but lower on trustworthiness than speakers from all other groups.

In conclusion, people use simple cues to make equally simple social categorizations. Moreover, the party status of male politicians seems to become visible in their body motions.

woman pointing at sky on seashore

ZONE Tips > Hand Gestures Increase Influence

A team of researchers from the Netherlands found that hand gestures, when used strategically, influence how certain words are heard. 

Participants were 20% more likely to hear and interpret the words being spoken when accompanied by a matching hand gesture and 40% as likely to hear the wrong word when the gestures did not match

Previous research has suggested that certain hand gestures can signal extraversion and dominance and that speaking with gestures, in general, tends to lead to being evaluated as warm, agreeable, and energetic.

– Molly Hanson

Expressing yourself with your voice, body, and hands can help you to get into the zone. Animating your communication helps you feel your message and transfer this same feeling to your audience.

Sadly, most people speak in a monotone and use little to no gestures. Boring!

Let’s get into the zone and express ourselves!

10 Keys To Power Communication

I started my first business in 1994. I was young, inexperienced and had no idea just how dramatic the roller-coaster of business would be. What I lacked in experience, I made up for with hard work, enthusiasm, grit, and determination. My partners certainly had their hands full because I was also stubborn, perhaps a little hardheaded.

The business expanded rapidly, and we generated $3.3 million (in 2017 dollars) in our first 8 months.

We hired lots of salespeople and created a sales manual for them to have tools, tips, and guidelines at their fingertips. In this article, you will find an excerpt directly out of our original manual. It is as relevant today as it was back in 1994!

World’s Apart: How To Build Bridges, Not Walls

Finding areas of disagreement is easy. We all have them. Have you ever tried to convince someone of the merits of your position and argued over it for hours, only to find that you both became more entrenched in your point-of-view?

ZONE TIPS > Resolving Upsets

With the frequency of communication via text message and email increasing, it is common to develop misunderstandings and end up with one or both parties upset. The result is a loss of affinity, less collaboration, and a feeling of disconnection.

There are four primary ways people respond to this type of upset:

Communication

As you communicate more, your Lifeforce increases. Communication is the method through which Lifeforce is channeled and directed in a particular direction for a particular purpose.

Self-expression is about our ability to express ourselves through our clothing, personal grooming, language, tone of voice, laughter, playfulness, articulation, music, dance, art, exercise, etc. Being able to express how we feel is central to our ability to communicate and relate to other people.

As a leader, if we can’t express how we feel, then we can’t move people to action (without threats or demands).

Personal Power is the ability to express and move people – without authority or force.

Acknowledgment

How many times do you tell people around you (workers, employees, family, etc.) what they have done wrong or the mistakes they have made? Many times we spend more time making corrections and pointing out what is wrong than we do pointing out what is right and acknowledging a job well done.

Think back to when you were a child… How many times did you hear “yes” for every “no”? Most people are craving for acknowledgement and encouragement. As a leader, your job is to support people to get things right – focusing on what is right and acknowledging a job well done will give you many times more results that pointing out what is wrong.

How to Get People to Say YES

If you don’t like people saying “No” to you – then don’t ask questions that require a NO answer. The secret is to only ask questions that people can say YES to. This requires a different mindset, and language than most people are familiar with.

If you see only black and white, consider what would happen if you could see many more alternatives (shades of grey) and possible ways of saying something than you use right now. This requires creative thinking…

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