How Body Language Changes Perception
Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: The Power of Body LanguageVanessa Van Edwards
How Body Language Changes Perception
Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: The Power of Body LanguageVanessa Van Edwards
Lesson Info
3. How Body Language Changes Perception
Lessons
Body Language Quiz & First Impressions
09:54 2Elevator Pitch Clinic
02:41 3How Body Language Changes Perception
07:35 4Microaggressions: Decoding The Face
10:09 5Microexpressions Continued
05:53 6How Your Body Reacts
05:14 7Power Body Language
08:06 8Perfect Elevator Pitch
16:29Lesson Info
How Body Language Changes Perception
So let's talk about how body language changes what people think about us. So this study was done at Harvard business school. What they wanted to know was if you change your body language, can it affect how other people perceive you? I'm sure that you're all guessing the answer is yes, but I want to explain exactly how so what they did is they brought participants in the lab and they split them up into two different groups in one group, they had them prepare for presentation, just prepare the presentation in the second group, they have them prepare for presentation but they also taught them Power Body Language, which we're going to learn a little bit later. So these two different groups, they went into a room of evaluators, they gave their presentation and they all got evaluated. So what's interesting is here are the three things that the evaluators were judging from that performance from that presentation. They were looking at higher ability. So would the person be good to hire? They w...
ere looking at presentation quality and they were looking at overall performance. Those are the three areas they were they were judging on. Now if you were to think about how body language would change these ratings, the experimenters guests that Power Body language would help with the overall performance. Maybe the presentation quality. Those would be maybe the things that would change actually what happened in group number to the group that did the presentation with the Power Body language got rated higher in all three areas. Um This is an interesting effect that body language has where just having confident body language can affect every aspect of your presence of how you interact with other people. What I think is really interesting about this is uh that they actually felt more confidence. What they did after the interviews is they pulled all the presidents, they asked them how did that feel to you, How did it feel to do the presentation? And everyone who had done the power Body language not only got rated higher, they didn't know that yet. They also said that they felt better. Their overall ratings of their own performance and how they felt in the performance were also higher. And what was interesting, this peaked something for the researchers when they thought maybe there's something more to body language, it's not just about how other people perceive you, but it's also something about how you internally feel, It actually helps you get concurrent. So we're gonna learn exactly how that works in a little bit. Um, I always thought this study was interesting because in school were given technical skills like for your job, whether you're a photographer or you work in an internet company or developer, you have technical skills and were taught those throughout school and college but were never taught people skills. We're not really taught how to interact with people in a concrete way. So you have these amazing technical skills, but you're not really taught how to sell them sales seems like a secondary thing that people can take extra Corson. And so I think it's interesting that we miss this, that we don't have both the technical skills as well as the people skills because what this study shows is you can go in and give a fantastic presentation, verbally, all the facts are there, but if you don't know how to sell it, no one's gonna hire you, no one's gonna believe you. Um What I learned was how to take back control of what I was doing, take control of my message. I also want you to learn how to sell your skill whatever skill you have and everyone in this audience, everyone watching has a talent or a skill that they want to share. You have to know how to sell it. You could be awesome at what you do, but you have to know how to share the others. So they want to learn from you. Um and also third I want to teach you how to connect with people, um connect with them on a deeper level, have a deeper understanding of them. I've made the most amazing relationships, both business and social e learning how to read people on a, on a new level Is our 4th law and it is that you don't have to be born with it. We're not Maybelline right? You don't have to be born with it. We can grow and improve our body language skills. Um This is a very easy thing to do and it's all based on our brain and our behavior and how we learn. So let me talk very briefly about body language and the brain and I promise I will not get too specific into these science terms. Um But very briefly we interpret and read body language in our occipital lobe and our parietal lobe, those are in the back of the head right here. That's where we do most of our body language interpretation. Of course it happens all over our brain but that's where a lot of it is. And the interesting thing is our brain is like a muscle so we can stretch and strengthen our brain just like a bicep or a quad. So bear with me while I explain this and that if you never exercise your quads they're going to get very loose. But the second that you start lifting weights with them they get strong and stronger and stronger and stronger. The brain is the same way with our neurons. So the more that we activate those areas that we need the parietal and occipital load the more that we activate them, we actually grow the neurons that we need to be able to do better at reading body language. So right now at the very beginning of the course there maybe not so strong but I have designed the course to make sure that we're building them up incrementally. So by the end hopefully we'll have that nice brain headache in the back because we're gonna be building them up so that what seems hard at the beginning, at the end of the course, you'll be like, I totally get this, this is so much easier than I thought it would be so much easier than it was at the beginning. That's actually cause we're building your brain like a muscle. And I want to show you a study that shows how this is an action. So dr Daniel Amen has an amazing brain research institute down in California and he looks at brain activity. That is his whole job. He does this amazing research and I want to show you a couple of scans of brains and how quickly they can change and grow. So on the screen right now is a scan of a healthy brain, this is the activity, how a healthy brain, how active it is. You can see it's pretty complete, pretty solid. Now, I want to show you a picture of a drug affected brain. This is a brain scan of a drug addict. Look at the difference, right, The activity in the brain actually changes. You can see there's those deep pockets of in activity because neurons actually die off when you're not using them properly damage and they die off because you're not using them. Here's another example of an alzheimer's brain, okay, this is someone who's struggling from Alzheimer's look at the missing gaps in their brain, they have lack of activity in their brain because they lose the neurons, they lose the ability to think in certain ways. Now, I want to show you an interesting brain scan of Duval Love. Dual Love is a former NFL player. Right after he left the NFL, he was having a lot of cognitive problems and he went to Dr Amen and he said, I think something's wrong, I you know, I think I've injured person, my brain, what can I do as they took a scan of his brain and this is what his brain looks like, which is incredible. I mean, it's almost like a drug affected brain. That's how many gaps there is compared to the healthy brain. So, Dr Amen put him through a brain training program um to rebuild the areas of his brain that had those gaps in those holes. And he spent three months, he spent a lot longer than that since then, but he spent the first three months actively engaging those areas of his brain that had lost activity. This is his brain. Three months later, after the scan, all those holes are actually starting to be filled in his only three months, he ended up staying with him. He still does those exercises. So I want I show this exercise because I want you to see that we can grow our brain. It happens very very quickly. So even if we have low activity because we've never thought about body language before. If it doesn't come naturally, we can grow it just like a muscle and what we need and how we want to fix it.
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