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Networking Body Language Tips

I know this is an honorable course, but when I talk about influence the number one part of being influential, being memorable, having great first impression is tapping into how you can help them making it all about them. Uh dale Carnegie is an amazing writer. He wrote a book early 19 hundreds How to Win friends and influence people and he says to be interesting, you have to be interested, right? People find you interesting when you are interested in them and that is we're gonna I'm gonna nonverbally show you how to be interested. That's exactly what we're gonna talk about. Luckily verbally. We're able to do that a little bit with the nonverbal said in the pitching that continues on with the networking. So m. I. T. Media lab does these amazing studies with people and they found that people don't remember what you look like, they don't even remember what you said, they remember what it felt like to be with you. That's why I put very little emphasis on that verbal because people don't rem...

ember that, I remember the feeling of being with you, that's why showing warmth, showing credibility. They get that feeling from you and that's what they remember. That's what makes you memorable. So our goals with this section, I want you to feel more confident. That is my number one goal. Because if you feel confident you're gonna make other people feel confident. I want that to be the emotion that is contagious when you walk in the room. My second goal is to inspire other people to feel more confident, how can you do that. Nonverbally step one prepare so nonverbally, you can prepare, you can verbally prepare and you can emotionally prepare for networking events when you're going into group or big group or small group events, here is how and I call it a success routine, this is one of my favorite things to teach, I want everyone watching to come up with your success routine, this is what you do while you're getting ready for on the way to our standing outside a networking event, to mentally emotionally and physically prepare yourself to be successful. There's a couple of ideas, everyone has a little bit different way they do it. Here are my ideas for things you can do for your success routine, I always encourage you to power pose, so everyone's to stand up. I want to give you a little power posing time um hopefully at home you can stand up to your computer, uh power posing, looks like this, pick any position you like, we're gonna go a lot of space expansion, get that testosterone going, I love it, I love your phone's right, we're expanding our body, we're getting our testosterone flowing and our cortisol levels are dropping. So this is the first thing that you can do to power pose. The other thing you can do, let's say that power posing, you try it or you want to do it instead of you can also do what's called a success log? So method acting actually max, do you know anything about method acting? Have you experienced as at all or it was an actor? Perhaps you thought about it well you can remember previous emotions that you've had and you can use them in whatever situation that you're about to have. Perfect. That is the exact definition of method acting by the way that everyone just catch my nervous giggle. Did anyone catch that? Right? So I did not know how to ask that question and so what it is, I nervously giggled because I didn't know what to do with myself. So that is an example of what we do nonverbally. Usually I can catch myself, but I was like how do I phrase this question? And that's what I did. So that's perfect method acting is when you tap into existing experiences to really feel the emotion that you need to portray. So a success logged by the way, this is just a great thing to do personally, I do them once a year. Look back on my successes for the year. Um keep a list of the times the things that people that have made you feel successful because when you read those, when you think about those that emotionally reminds your body and your mind, I can do this. That's another thing you do. I have a list on my phone of things that I'm really proud of that I've done that have done it worked really well that I put a lot of effort into. So you can keep them on your phone and keep it on your computer. I also have a friend who has a uh, email inbox folder and her eat in her in box that has emails from clients and people are friends and family that make her feel good when she's having a bad day or a loaner. She needs to kind of revive a little bit. That's part of her success routine as she goes back and reads through those emails. That's another thing that you can do as well. Youtube treasures. So I have a Youtube treasure list. These are videos that just get me laughing. There are the videos that most of them are puppy videos. Okay. If you want to get, you can always tweet me a puppy video. Always. I love them. And my husband sends me little gifts of every kind of puppy every morning when he gets to work. It's like my, my, it just makes me so happy. So I want you to create a Youtube channel of just those treasure videos. They can be funny, They can be inspiring. They can be music that you love. Music videos. Just get you going. A lot of people told me they have lady gaga on their channel. They just get you going. So make a list of those Youtube treasures that you can play in the background or on your phone when you're getting ready or you're about to go out music playlist. This is a really easy one, especially if you are walking. You don't have a lot of time. You're walking from event to event. Um or you, you could listen to your body a lot when you're driving, create a music playlist on mine. The rocky music. Right? There's nothing that gets I mean you can't be low confident when you hear that music. Um so movie theme songs are great for this music that gets you dancing, things that get your heart pumping. That gets you into that right mindset. And by the way, these are different. If you're a visual learner, Youtube treasures are gonna work really well for you for an auto audio learner, a music playlist is gonna be better for you. So you can also see what works that are for you. That's why I like to give lots of different options. Alright, Step number two is master. The handshake. Handshakes are so important. I cannot emphasize them enough. And in fact, I'm going to give you so many studies right now that you're not going to be able to ignore the science and the art of the perfect handshake. Um Studies have found that one single handshake is worth three hours of face to face time. So if you were to walk up to someone and not put out your hand, you would not have the amount of rapport until you have three hours of face to face time with them, That power of touch is so important. And that is our body language. Lot. Number 12. So if you want to pull out your hand out, the laws of body language is is in your free resources with the bonus materials. The law of the handshake. The handshake will make or break you. Um a bad handshake can really hurt your report. A good handshake can speed up your connection incredibly right. That is what the law of the handshake is all about. I'm gonna show you exactly what you need to do to make that handshake perfect number one vertical. We don't think about this when we do a handshake but it's very very important that there is the up and down motion, right? It's not a handshake. It's not a wiggle, right? It's a vertical up and down motion. That is because it is a power play. So if you watch youtube videos of presidents, former presidents shaking hands with um enemies, other presidents and other countries or the Prime minister in other countries, you will see that they will sometimes jockey for the power position. If you take someone's hand and you turn it down. You are saying I am more important than you. I am the dominant one in this relationship. So if you ever shaken someone's hand and they've turned your hand up. Take very very careful note. Don't ever do that to anyone. Even though it's a dominant move. It rankles them else. You really want to make an enemy, that's what you can do to make an enemy very, very quickly. So it's important that you keep it vertical and if someone tries to push your hand, you go ahead and push it right back, right, you want to stay in that vertical motion because it shows we are equal, we are equal. I've also had people give me their hand like this, they actually tell me I'm being submissive to you. I've had people do that and I will turn their hand and say no, we're equal, right? That's actually a way to say I want to be on the same on the same page as you. So vertical is very important and often overlooked. You can also judge how someone feels about you if they move your hand one way or the other. It's interesting tip dry. So if possible, it's very important. It's very courteous to try to keep your hand as dry as possible. Um I know that some people have very sweaty hands. Um If you're holding a wet drink, try to keep it in the hand that you don't shake with your dominant hand so you can keep it very dry. It's subconsciously rings uh it's kind of gross and it rings red flags in people's head if your hand is a little bit damp firm. So everyone has had the dead fish handshake. Uh This is a dead fish handshake when you give out your hand and it's totally limp. Um, This happened to me a few weeks ago, I was getting a massage and the massage was like, oh, it's, you know, it's nice to meet you. Um My name is, I don't remember her name. My name is Michelle and she gave me her hand and she gave me a dead fish handshake and I went to massage gonna be terrible, right? Just that. I was like, there's no way if she doesn't give me a firm handshake, there's no way that I was gonna be good. So we judge a lot about a person based on a handshake. So firmness is really important. You also want to hit the sweet spot. Remember how we talked about the law of the spectrum to firm is the death grip and I have been death grip by people where they try to crush your hand and they don't even realize it, but it hurts and it instantly makes you go, I don't want anything to do with this person. So you want a nice level of firmness. Unfortunately, the only way to know good firmness is to practice not too firm and a little bit of motion. So another mistake I see is people will do like a really big handshake and they like take your whole arm and you're like, hello, it's nice to meet you and your hand is like, oh, my shoulder. Um, so you want to make sure that you're having a little bit of motion but you don't want to have no emotion at all. Right? Again? That sweet spot. So a tiny bit of motion. A good way to measure. That is you want to go the distance of your hand Right? So Right that's about the distance of your hand. Anything more than that is a little bit too much and a little bit less is guarded. CNN's guarded. Step three. So we talk about the handshake and this goes right after the handshake is the power of touch. The reason why a handshake is so important is because we are talking about the power of touch. What that does for us. So when we touch someone, oxytocin is released in our brain. So very very briefly oxytocin helps us bond with people. It helps us connect with people. Um So it's really important to have that course in their brain because it helps us build connections. That's exactly what it helps us do. Um By the way the scientific word for touch is haptics. So if I use the word haptics, that's what I'm talking about. It's how we interact with people, how we touch them either from hand to shoulder to arm to hugging, we're gonna talk about the touch map in a second. So that power of touch is so important. And this is my Body Language Law # 13. So pull out your laws of body language and the law of touch is what's next. And this is that touch increases connection if done right. This is one of my only laws that hasn't if because the law of touch can be taken out of context sometimes. So it's only if it's done right? And I'm gonna tell you about how to do that, right? So how do we use haptics? How do we use them to our benefit? So, I want to give you the hierarchy of touching One is a fist bump. And I put this in parentheses because if you can ever give a handshake, don't settle for a fist bump. It's like you're robbing your brain of all that oxytocin. It could get right. That palm to palm. That connection is ingrained in us that we want to build that report. If you give someone a fist bump, you're saying like a kind of bond with you, right? So I really encourage you if you can please use the full handshake. Next is the handshake Number three. We have the double handshake. So would someone mind coming up with me? Who wants to take my hand sarah. Okay, come on up. So let's fist bump. We're never going to do this. But this is level number one. That's really growing up though. Oh gosh, Okay. Ready? Yeah. Okay, Thanks Sarah. That was good. Okay, so this bump. Try not to do that, but if you have to it's okay. All right. Next we got the good handshake. Right? Perfect. Alright. See that nice little motion. That was perfect. Double handshake. So this is a double handshake. Yeah, you want to do that. So it's so interesting when someone does a double handshake. It is in our instinct to double handshake them back if we like them. Yeah. So the double handshake is also called the politician handshake. That's the right. You always see politicians do this. It's double double bang for your buck. Right? If you get double money you're getting two kinds of hand touching. So it's more oxytocin, it's more control. You gotta be really careful with the double handshake though, it can come off as inauthentic. I almost never use it. What I will do is I will sometimes if I really am excited, see someone, I'll be like oh it's so good to see you. I will sometimes do that as almost like a half hug. That is okay as well. But be very careful. The double handshake. It's double bang for your buck. You can stay, you can say you can say don't go. Um So number four is the pat. Okay, so this is a little bit more intimate. That's higher up. So um padding could happen like this. Oh my God, it's so good to see you, right? It can also happen lower down. Almost. Men usually do that and women almost never do that to each other and never do that to each other. This is okay but it is more intimate, right? It's closer to the heart zone. It's closer to the torso. So if you're gonna do that with someone, I've also seen people take the hand and do this. That is also almost like a half hug. Right? So anywhere up the arm you're getting more and more intimate as you go hug the mama said okay did you see what happened there? Watch this? So Sarah went like this and I went up to, right so what's interesting is um typically we're almost the same height. How tall are you? 10 actually 5 9.5 but 5 10. Okay and I'm 58. So and I'm in hell. So we're almost the same height people of the same height. They have this sort of hug war. Have you ever seen this? So what you can do if you're the same height is you can actually go for the under. So if you want to hug me again you can go for the under. Right? So that's always the easy way to do if you want to avoid that back and forth awkwardness. How did you do that? Can I try that? Yeah. Ready. So come at me. Okay. All right so you really really do that. It takes that awkwardness out. I had someone ask me what do I do when I get in that awkward? Just go for the under. That's how you get it. That's how you avoid it. Yeah thanks there. So step four with making a good first impression is gazing. So studies show that people who maintain eye contact while they speak are seen as more persuasive. So we talked about in a normal conversation 60 - 70% of the time that is good eye contact. What's really important is that you make eye contact while you are speaking. So it's actually okay. It's socially acceptable to process someone's thoughts. Of course you wanna look them in the eye. But if you need to process someone thought oh that's interesting. How interesting you can look away. That is socially acceptable. What's really important is that when you are speaking to someone you don't look away? That is very very persuasive. So I contact builds connection faster. Can you guess when we hold eye contact with people? We also get a nice dose of oxytocin. It's the same as that handshake. It's a mutual sign of respect and it builds connection and report much much faster. So this brings me to body language. Law number um the law of gazing. So purposeful gazing increases your power. So Again if you want to look at the bonus materials you can get out the laws of body language. This is our law number 14. The right kind of gazing can increase your influence your power and your impact. And purposeful gazing is what's important here as I talked about. It's when you are speaking and then using the right kind of gazing. Remember yesterday we talked about The three different kinds of gazing. Remember um oh before I get into those different kinds of gazing, I also want to mention the spectrum here. So you have a question. Okay, so uh the spectrum was that we want to sit in that 60-70% sweet spot. Sometimes people over gays, you ever had that where someone's like boring into your eyes while they're talking to you like they won't drop their eye gaze. That is too much. That's on the high end low gaze. Obviously Overhead looking or shifty gays. I want you right in the middle. I don't want 100% I contact, we want to stay in that 60-70%. Okay, so here are three different kinds of gazing. First. Power gazing. So this is the pattern that your eyes make. When you look at someone. When you look someone in the face you go I I forehead and power gazing. That's the map that your eyes make on someone else's face. In business situations. This is exactly what you want to be doing. Your keeping it professional, you're keeping it powerful. You're using that pattern when you're more intimate with someone. But still like in social situations, friends or close colleagues, you can use social gazing. So this is when our eyes drop down I mouth. That's the pattern or eyes make, it's literally like you're dropping your barriers down. That's absolutely what it's like. So more social situations, you can use that the last one is intimate gazing II sternum or chest, so it's upper chest plus you. So it's what's really important here about intimate gazing is to know when it's being used on you, right? If you're in a professional environment and someone is intimate gazing with you that can send a wow, this person feels like maybe they're crossing a boundary, or maybe they dropped to social gazing. You see that they're looking at your mouth or dropping their, that means they want to have a closer relationship with you. That might be okay to say, hey, let's go get drinks. Step five is just avoiding the classic nonverbal networking mistakes. These are the biggest networking mistakes that I see, they're very easy to avoid first forgetting the law of engagement. So we learned the law of engagement yesterday. Does anyone remember what it is? It's a lot of engagement is about torso and toes, I think. Well actually today it's making sure that your torso and toes are aligned with. Remember we talked about that during the pitch section, that when you walk up to someone, you make sure your torso and toes are aligned, That's mistake. Number one is, people forget to line up their torso toes and they forget the law of engagement, interestingly, our toes subconsciously point towards what we want. We talked about this a little bit yesterday during body language trivia, that our toes were attracted to someone typically orient towards the person that we are most attracted to that is because our brain wants us to move forward towards that person. So when you go to networking events, try to guess in clumps or groups, who is the boss, who is the leader of the company, you will see that most people will point their feet towards their boss and you can test yourself with that by seeing who the boss is in the group. And the other thing that we point our toes towards is the exit. So when you're at now working events and you see someone point their toes towards the exit, it usually means they just have to go. So I am very attuned to someone's toes because I don't want to keep them longer than their there and I'll say oh if you have to go, don't worry about it. And sometimes they're like, oh thanks so much, my parking is almost up. That actually happened to me just the other day. So watching those toes to see those subconscious thoughts, mistake number two ignoring the map. So you can map out networking events, you can figure out what the natural flow of the room is. So most people, when they first get to networking event, they check in, they have a little check in table, maybe they drop off their coats wherever they first get into and this is the worst place to meet people, but it is a classic mistake. Often people stand, they kind of hover by the entrance and they meet people right as they're walking in. The problem with that psychologically is when people first get into networking event, they need to take in their surroundings, you have to give them a second to settle. So you want to avoid standing right at the entrance, you want to go into the room, let people get their bearings. The next place that people typically like to go is they stand out near the bathroom. This is also not a good place because usually as people were walking into the bathroom and then you stop them to meet them, that's all they're thinking about, right, that's another mistake. Place to stand the bar. So let's say I go hang out at the bar. Here is the problem with the bar. If you have someone who's just getting their drink, their mind is on one thing, getting their liquid courage, that's all they want is they want that drink. So if you meet them, while they're getting their drink their half with you, they're half distracted. So that's also not the best by the stand, don't worry. There's yellow places, Those are the good places to stand. The other mistake that I see is people stand by the food. They think, oh, I'll go stand by the buffet and ill child people, what do you think about the food? The problem with that is, again, people have one goal in mind, All they want is to feed themselves and if they have low blood sugar, they need to eat. The other problem with food is you get your big plate of food and you're like, oh yeah, hi, it's so nice to meet you and you have this kind of awkward and you often have to skip the handshake because they have food in their hand or they're trying to eat and listen to at the same time. Yeah, so the best places hand this sweet spot for networking events and this is where I always stand in crowded rooms is as people exit the bar. So when you get into a room, look at the flow of people, they often approach the bar in one direction, they get their drink and they usually exit in the same place and that is exactly where you want to stand, where people get when they've just gotten their drink, you'll notice, watch people approach a bar, it's always like, I'm goal oriented, they leave, they'll be like and they're ready to meet people. That is the sweet spot to stand right where they exit, where that flow happens. And the other place you can go is seats if there are seats for food so people can come and sit down and put their plate down. That is a great place to also situate yourself, especially if you're an introvert that can be a little bit easier. So you sit there, they put their plate down, you give them a handshake and then you can start talking, that's when they're really little sweet spot to do. Um mistake number three not knowing what to say. So I have for you in the free bonuses, my favorite conversation starters I have for you how to turn people on emotionally of course and I also have an article on how to be socially successful, so there's all for you in the free bonus section. Since we're talking a lot about nonverbal, I wanted to make sure I added a little bit of verbal in there as well. Um a couple of very quick tips for introverts and I have a whole article on this on my website and a video for you Is start small, go for an hour for introverts. Sometimes you don't have all that energy to waste. Just plan on going for half an hour, 45 minutes an hour right Next, avoid groups, so if you're gonna approach people you're gonna sit at a table in that sweet spot, go for small groups, 1-2 at the most three people, it's much easier to manage nonverbally with one or two people, three is too many and get a body language partner. So if you need someone to sort of be there with you um should watch this course with a friend and say okay we're gonna hold each other accountable on this, that's one of the, I see the greatest leaps when people can watch the courses together because then they can call each other and say, hey, like open up your torso a little bit or you know, like smile, you know, like talk about something you're excited about, right? You get someone who helps you with those things that you've both learned. They know what you're working on. Don't forget our laws of space, vocal power, hands and growth. So I want you to review your laws of body language because all of them are the foundations to good networking. And they all apply here.