Power Cues. Nick Morgan
the connection between these aspects of communications. But for now, I just want you to get a sense of your gesturing style, frequency, and intensity as part of the complete self-inventory.
When you have a moment, fill out the questionnaire at the end of this chapter to help you begin the process of gestural self-awareness.
Keep a Body Language Diary: Try to Catch Yourself Being Yourself
Try to catch yourself in unconscious behavior. You need to know how you’re behaving when you think no one’s watching—especially you. Try not to judge yourself. Choice and change can come later. For now, just be compassionate and nonjudgmental, and try to get a picture of how you inhabit space.
Your body is the physical embodiment of your unconscious attitudes, intents, and desires. As the old saying goes, in your youth, you have the face—and body—you’re born with; by the time you’re middle-aged, you have the face—and body—you deserve. So take the sting out of that saying and simply observe yourself and learn what those observations tell you about your attitudes, intents, and desires.
Be nonjudgmental. Just notice what you do.
If you have a hard time catching yourself unawares, then think about setting up a video camera when you’re in a meeting or undertaking some routine chores. At first, you’ll be self-conscious, and your behavior will be distorted from your usual mode of being, but after a few minutes you’ll forget the camera is there. So be patient and use the video for what it can tell you about your habitual behavior, beginning a few minutes in.
As you watch, ask yourself, how am I showing up? Expressive or bottled up? Happy or sad? Active or passive? Strong or weak? What kind of person do I look like—to me? Someone who would be fun to meet? Someone imposing, or a wallflower? A nerd or a leader? And so on.
Keep a daily diary of your physical presence and emotional attitudes. Try to stick to this faithfully for about a week. Stop yourself once an hour or so and simply note what you’re doing physically—sitting straight, slouching, fidgeting, smiling, frowning, and so on. Try to be as objective and nonjudgmental as you can. The process might take a few weeks, depending on how easy or difficult it is for you.
How do your gestures show up? Do you gesture a lot? A little? Are your gestures strong or weak? Are they expressive and fluid, or rigid and limited?
If you can take personal inventory in even a moderately detached way, you can take the first step to understanding yourself as an active presence in the world and decide what you want to do about it.
If you’re having trouble being objective about yourself, then ask trusted (and supportive) family and friends to help. Ask them to rate you on a scale of one to ten for basic confidence, mood, charisma, leadership—how you show up. It’s better to ask them specific questions like, “On a scale of one to ten, how normally cheerful would you say I am?” If you ask them, “How do I show up?” they probably won’t have a helpful answer, because they’re not used to thinking consciously in this way.
Ask your friends and family, but don’t take too much stock in particular answers. Look instead for patterns. It’s very hard for us to be objective about our closest friends and family, so don’t expect too much. If you get a consistent pattern of comments across a number of people, then those observations are more likely to be accurate.
If you’re lucky enough to be a rising executive in a company that regularly conducts 360-degree evaluations, they may be extremely helpful in this regard. Once again, don’t put a lot of stock in particular comments; rather, look for patterns of comments about your usual mood, attitudes, or mode of being toward employees or colleagues. Remember, people are very good at unconsciously reading the emotional attitudes of people they know well daily.13 We recognize when Bob comes in for work in a lousy mood, or Jane is excited about something. So look for patterns where people say that you’re tough on colleagues, strong with employees, warm toward everyone, or the like. Those repeated patterns of estimations of your attitudes will tell you a lot about your physical presence, because it’s from that physical presence that people figure out your attitudes.
How Big Are Your Butterflies?
Once you’ve completed this first step, becoming more aware of how you inhabit space nonjudgmentally, then it’s time to begin to analyze your own body language more closely and definitively. Try it this way first. Ask yourself, am I a confident person? Note how many times you’ve rated yourself as nervous or self-conscious in your diary: any time you’re behaving less than optimally because the pressure is on you in some way or you feel like you’re performing.
Performance anxiety is probably the most common social fear that humans have. But people experience widely different degrees of this anxiety, and it’s good to get a sense of where you are along the spectrum of normal behavior. Do you get nervous for most meetings or only the ones where something important is at stake? Do you get butterflies when you have to present to a team of six people or fewer, or only when you’re presenting to a hundred people or more? Do you get nervous just for the first few minutes of your presentation or does your heart hammer for the whole session?
It’s common to begin a presentation with butterflies in your stomach. Most people settle down after a few minutes; if you stay nervous for all or most of your talk, then you’ve got above-average anxiety. Similarly, if you get nervous even for routine meetings with small groups, then you’ve got above-average anxiety. It’s normal to experience some nervousness for high-stakes meetings and large, special gatherings, but you’re at the high end of the anxiety range if you get nerves when the stakes are lower and the numbers modest.
How Well Do You Understand the Second Conversation?
Once you’ve determined where you are on the confidence spectrum, then analyze yourself for your level of intuition. Do you generally know what other people are thinking, or do they regularly surprise you? Do you easily read other people’s moods, or do you have trouble doing so? Do you notice a difference in the ease with which you read people in your intimate circles—family, close friends, coworkers you’ve known well for a long time—and people you know less well?
It’s normal for us to be able to read people we know intimately, but not less close acquaintances. If even those in your closest circles of family, friends, and coworkers are often a mystery to you, then you have below-average intuition.
Men tend to be less intuitive than women, but on the whole most of us are not very intuitive, especially with people we haven’t known very long. That gives those who are an edge over the rest; one of the purposes of this book is to show you how to increase the strength and precision of your intuition. I’ll cover that in more detail in chapter 3.
When You Talk, Do People Listen?
Once you’ve estimated your intuitive abilities, then it’s time to get a rough sense of your charisma quotient. The danger of self-deception here is very real, but do the best you can. Look at your diary and notice yourself when you’re with others. How often are you the center of attention? When you speak, like the E. F. Hutton TV advertisement from the 1970s had it, does everyone listen, or not so much?14 How often do you dominate a meeting, without much apparent effort, just feeling in the zone as you put your ideas across?
Do people hear you out, or do they stop listening before you’re done? Here, it may be useful to imagine a range, where ten is some guru whose disciples hang on his every word, and one is a crazy homeless person in the street whom few people actually listen to. How do you rate yourself?
How about your own emotions? Are they close to the surface and easily accessed, or are you slow to ignite? Do your emotions mostly leave you alone, or are they constantly nagging at you, demanding your attention and reaction?
Most of us are not actually the center of attention most of the time. Those of us who do command attention more than occasionally belong to that select group of people the rest of us think of as charismatic. Most