Reflection Shorts - "Win that Communication" - episode #7

Your Body Language and Voice can make you a confident communicator!

If you’ve watched the 2024 Olympics and its emerging memes with Kim Yeji and Yusuf Dikec, you know you don’t need any fancy external gadgets or tools to look confident. The key thing about athletes is that beyond achieving great feats, what makes them fun to watch is that they make it look easy and confident.

To look confident, we need to emit positive, easy vibes. Let’s understand this:

• Your body is an energy store. To stand out as a great communicator, you need to manage how your body emits that energy.

• Most of the time, it is dissipated via your Body Language and Voice. Watch out for that! These are the only natural tools you need to work on.

Make the following positive changes to these two aspects of your personality, and you’ll be amazed by the results.

Body Language:

1. Avoid Closed body Language: If someone walks into a room with their arms folded, it may be perceived as negative, angry, or upset. Even though they may not be, maybe that’s their comfortable position. The goal with body language is to minimize the audience’s ability to misperceive you.

2. Sit Straight: If you sit all the way back in your chair, you risk being misperceived as bored or disengaged. It’s not a rule, but a weird observation. Slouching isn’t good for your back as well. Try to keep your spine vertical.

3. Use hands for gesture while standing straight: Why keep your hands apart? Upon contact, they will likely fidget, like massaging and wiping sweat. The same goes for standing on one leg. You will keep shifting your body weight and look foolish. Instead, use your hands for gestures that add positive emphasis to your expressions and reinforce your words.

4. Keep a charming face: When presenting information face-to-face, one of the keys is to smile. Many salesmen forget this fact and are then not trusted for their jobs because their faces look terrible when conveying a point. If you are told that you look angry while talking, a simple trick is to open your lips slightly, which helps soften the face.

Voice:

1. Slow Down your pace: Speak slowly and take pauses in between. When you speak too fast, you sound like you are apologizing for taking the audience’s time. When you don’t take pauses in between, you aren’t giving folks time to digest what you just said, and they will lose their train of thought.

2. Adjust Volume: Always speak at the volume needed to reach the person farthest from you. Be just loud enough. Beyond that, raising your voice will add urgency. Do it only when needed. Use modulations in volume.

3. Speak with Positive Tone & Clear Inflection: If you speak with a smile, your voice reflects that. That’s why teams with customer service folks have mirrors or “Smile” signs in front of them. Along with smiling, use sharp, clear, and definitive hand gestures. Together, this makes your tone positive.

That’s it for today. If you are wondering “What’s a Reflection Short?” Read here.

References

• Simply Said: Communicating Better at Work and Beyond

Interesting Reads

• How I grew this newsletter from 0 to 18K in one year by Tom Orbach

• Going Slow Is the #1 Sign of a Truly Successful Person Living a Badass Life by Tim Denning

• Is Consistency Hurting Your Sustainability? by Akash Mukherjee

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👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

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