5 Ways To Use Your Body Language In Public Speaking

World renowned couple counsellor and family therapist Virginia Satir identified five key “Postures” that her clients adopted.  Stereotypes, which powerfully communicate non-verbal messages.

You can use these postures to increase your “presence” both on stage and off.  Powerfully use your physiology (the 55% of any communication) to send non-verbal messages that back up your verbal one, thereby doing what I call “Communicating at 100%”.  You can also use these to control the energy in the room, raising it, lowering it or maintaining it depending on your outcome.  They increase your authority and assertiveness, and women in business can use them possibly more effectively than men can.

On stage they help you deal with hecklers, or to invoke states in your audience.  They also answer the question of “How do you stand, what do you do with your hands?”  Most speakers do the Fig leaf, the Prince Charles, with their hands clasped in front or behind, or worse, hands in pockets.  These are much more powerful.

There’s nothing worse than a distracting speaker who paces around, or fiddles, or whose attention is clearly in his or her own head and not on you in the audience.  You end up watching them for their weird behaviours and not for what they’re teaching.  Ooops!

Non Verbal Communication

The five Satir categories are the answer to “what do I do with my hands?” or “How do I stand?”.  Each category is an instantly recognised stereotype, and you’re doing one or more of them unconsciously anyway!  They affect your state, and that of the audience.  Remember that physiology is 55% of the message.  You often see these on book covers as the author has been coached in how to pose for the camera.  Here’s how to do them, and what they do.

THE COMPUTER

Weight on one leg or evenly distributed

Arms folded, one hand on your chin

The thinking pose

Looks authoritative, like you are the wise one. Helps you

Deal with a threat so it’s harmless.

Says “I’m pensive, thinking it through, I’m the expert, I’m the authority”

Thoughtful, cool, calm and collected.  You can hide your

Self-worth behind big words and intellectual ideas

Completely rational.

Good to use when people ask you questions.

Common in Cerebral people

Be reasonable beyond limit, and use polysyllabic words

Statement tonality – fairly monotone

THE LEVELLER

Weight evenly distributed, feet shoulder width apart

Hands sweep down and out as if you were sweeping snow off a wall

Says “Here’s the deal, this is how it’s going to be”

Asserts authority and calms things down, especially if you leave a pause after it

Commanding tonality, straight talker

Brings energy down

Common in Kinesthetic people

Congruent, the body matches the words, telling the truth

Good for apologising whilst maintaining your dignity

THE PLACATER

Weight evenly distributed, feet shoulder width apart

Palms up hands moving up, open and vulnerable

Says “Help me out here, please?” and “I’m sorry” and “Tell me what to do”

Suggests openness and trying to please, so that the other person doesn’t get angry with you.

Useful to open a questions and answers session.

Makes the energy more emotional, safe, gentle

Questioning tonality, higher pitched voice

Common in Kinesthetic people

Agree with the other person – be a “yes” man or

Woman

Remember the helpless “Smeagol” character in

The Lord Of The Rings movies

THE BLAMER

Weight on one leg

One foot in front of the other, pointing the finger

Says “It’s your fault, on your head be it” or “I’m in charge, right?!”  Usually disagrees with people and accuses.

This is the accuser, acting superior, looking strong

Useful for ramming a message home, emphasising, or telling someone they’ve done really well

Brings energy up

Loud command tonality

Common in visual people

THE DISTRACTER

Weight on one leg, or lock your knees together

Everything moving, angular, diagonal, arms and

legs going out in all directions.

Says “Don’t ask me, I’m an airhead, I’m dizzy”

Think dumb bunny, bimbo.

Useful for defusing tension, distracting hecklers, or adding comedy.  Comedians often use Distracter with their punch line.

Ignores any threat in the hope that it’ll vanish

Releases stuck energy

Voice going up and down

Common in Auditory people

Words make no sense

EXERCISE

I want it to be that when you do move it has intention, and it has impact!  Try talking about your hobby or your career for a few minutes, or something you know a lot about.  Adopt each category for 30 seconds at a time, so 30 seconds in Computer, then 30 seconds in Leveller, then 30 seconds using them all together

You might start doing this in normal life.  These still work while you’re sitting down, as you use the top half of your body.  But think about it.  What if you became more assertive?

Women in business – try and avoid Placater and Distracter.  They make you look vulnerable and weak.  Instead use Leveller and Computer.  You’ll come over far more assertive, and you’ll probably freak the men out with your authority!

Remember that you cannot not communicate, so make sure what you’re screaming non verbally agrees with what you’re saying with your mouth.  And train up the ones that feel awkward and unfamiliar, to increase your behavioural flexibility.

What kinds of feelings do you want more of?

You’ve probably heard of Ivan Pavlov – you know the guy who rang a bell and the dogs salivated?  Cos they were hungry?  He’d show them some meat and while they were gagging for it he’d ring a bell.  Eventually he could just ring the bell and have no meat present, and the dogs would salivate.  Yeah?  (It was actually a tuning fork but let’s not be picky).  That was an anchor – the bell became the anchor. 

At school the bell was an anchor. t was either time for you to get back in there and into your class, or it was time for you to get out of there and get home as quickly as possible.  Or maybe you were late, and the bell became an anchor for how little time you’ve got to get down the road and into school.  Remember this stuff?

     We can all think of things that act as triggers in our lives- that whenever they happen they fire off certain states.  Maybe a song that you hear that puts you into a sad state, cos last time you heard that song you were in a sad state, and the two became neurologically linked.  Or maybe there’s a particular smell (and the perfume industry knows this one) that whenever you smell it you go into a nice, pleasant state.

     These are anchors – triggers that are hard wired into your neurology, so you have no conscious control when they’re fired off – you’ll go into that state automatically.  Imagine that!  Now if it’s a nice state than we’ll leave it alone, but if it’s a negative one, there are ways to collapse the anchor, or neutralise it, so it doesn’t control you anymore. We show you how to do that, which means no longer are you one of Pavlov’s dogs – you’re no longer a conditioned animal, you actually have a choice about it & you can choose not to react.

     In my history there was a village that I’d drive through, and every time I did I went into a negative state, because of what I associated to that place, even though those events happened 20 years ago!  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to cancel it out so it doesn’t affect you?  You can probably think of some triggers like that, yes?  Songs or pictures or things that maybe flash into your head….

     Equally it’s very useful to be able to set positive anchors.  Maybe you’d like to be more excited more often, or more driven more often.  Imagine if you could basically have that state “on tap” and anytime you wanted to feel that way you could fire it off, and you’d go into that state.  That then begs the question – what kinds of emotional states would you like to feel more often?  Because we can show you how to anchor them into yourself so you can go into those feelings anytime you want to.

Here’s how you can do this

     The way I do this is, I give you the entire course up-front on audio CD.  So, you can listen to that at your own pace before you come on the training-course.  That’s actually your apprenticeship.  You know, you listen to the CDs at your own leisure and you can learn what you want to learn, read the manual, get your head around the concepts, re-listen to it as many times as you want.  So, by the time you actually come to the course, your conscious mind’s like a formatted disc, it’s got the basic ground-rules all laid down.

     What’s going to happen now is that you’re going to spend the 8 days actually doing the stuff and being taken through it by myself and by HGE™ Practitioners and Master Practitioners who already use these methods.  So, your conscious mind is fully prepared, and your unconscious mind can then just learn like a learning-machine. 

  You will be really surprised how well you’ll pick it up, because on some level you’ve already heard it before.  It also deepens your knowledge, because you can leave the course and re-listen to the CD set, which, as you probably know, the more often you hear the deeper it sticks.  It means you also have a permanent reference library, you can always go back if you want to brush up on re-framing for instance, or something else.  You can dig the discs out again and listen to them, just to keep your skills up. 

If this has piqued your curiosity – give me a call or email me and we can have a chat first.

So this is Jonathan Clark.  Thanks for watching the video, take care, bye!

Proven Ways To Gain Self Confidence, Boost Your Self Esteem and End Self Doubt

For the last three weeks I’ve been running a survey asking people about their levels of confidence and self-esteem.  I promised I would share my findings now that the results are in.

The average survey respondent described themselves as appearing quietly confident, but deep down 48% tend towards self-doubt.  In fact they see themselves as sympathetic and warm with other people, but they are often unsure of their own thoughts – and often don’t trust their own feelings.  Ever felt like that?

When unexpected problems occur, they don’t always tackle them as well as they’d like.  In fact, one quarter said they feel completely useless in these situations.   

52% of responders wished they were more confident at work, as well as in everyday disagreements like at the shops, or over parking spaces.  Curiously the majority were happy to speak to groups or in public, but only provided they knew what they were going to be talking about.

A whopping 61% of those surveyed say that they are very critical of themselves and dread looking like a fool front of other, and after dealing with a person they will go away mentally analysing everything they themselves did and said, focussing mainly on their mistakes than what they did well.  Does this sound like you?

One third of responders had previously been told by someone close to them “Oh you’re just being overly sensitive”.

To build their confidence people have tried self-help material, visualisation, asking a partner who will “prop them up”, but that mostly didn’t work.

Where people have felt a boost in self-esteem was where they got support from other people, including going for counselling and hypnotherapy.  Just getting out there and meeting people seemed to help massively, if they could get themselves to do it.

When you surf the web searching for terms like “how to be confident” and “confidence building”, you tend to get dictionary definitions, or dumb platitudes like “Think nice thoughts” or “Shower more often” accompanied by childish cartoons.

I don’t care if you’re an HR Manager of a self-confessed nerd, there will be times when you feel small and powerless, and scared to open your mouth.

I spent most of primary and secondary school feeling TORTURED like that – wound up tight, avoiding eye contact, trusting only a very small number of trusted friends, and by the time I was 19 years old I was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, brought on by toxic thoughts of shyness and worry.  And then worrying about the worrying, if you know what I mean.

Where it changed for me, when I dig back far enough into my past, was reading my brother’s psychology books for his degree – I was fascinated to realise that I’d managed to burn a hole in my stomach with my own brain.  A crap superpower.  But what power!  What could you do if you turned it outwards?

And that started me on a journey in positive thinking, visualisation, then more advanced mind tools like NLP and Hypnosis.  The good news is that there ARE practical, useful things that work in the real world, that are easy to learn and really change how you feel, think and move.  Now I have an optimistic outlook, a healthy self-image, a usually supportive internal voice and I know how to move, breathe and speak to feel strong and in control most of the time.  And my stomach ulcer disappeared.

On September 23rd I’ll be running a free 1 hour webinar on how to go from timid mouse to superhero [at least in your own head] and you can learn all about that HERE.  I’m going to share 6 quick steps – real practical “how to” techniques – to make you feel more assertive and stronger inside.  And you can “lurk” and not even have to speak!

I hope you’ll join us J