10 posts tagged “kare anderson”
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Men aren't born passive. Women aren't born wild. We just have that effect on each other … too often.
When and why does a conversation become one-sided, or dissolve into conflict, and how can you turn it around and stay sane?
Here's some gut instincts research-based insights on:
- why things often go sour between the sexes, followed by
- four suggestions for smoother, more satisfying ways to stay connected:
At work, the man is often active, articulate, assertive, and usually successful in his conversations, especially with other men.
But at home he can become inactive, inarticulate, and withdrawn.
He becomes passive with his wife – especially in certain situation.
Yet even when the woman works outside the home she tends to communicate in a more active way at home - and instinctively wants the same style from her mate.
His apparent passivity drives her crazy.
In the face of his further retreat, she goes wild. *
Then he becomes more still, and escapes at the first opportunity.
In personal relationships women often want too much talk, as men sees it.
She feels resentful, complains, keeps asking questions, talks more, may even act bitter.
He feels he can’t meet her needs and ends up feeling guilty and sulks.
They both end up blaming each other.
He thinks: If only she’d shut up.
She thinks: If only he'd talk to me.
Here’s four ways women are more likely to engage men in the positive, lively conversation we crave:
Suggestion #1
“Stop Talking Sooner”
Or, less politely, "shut up sooner. As a child my mother washed my mouth out with soap for saying “shut up” yet that’s sound advice for women in trying to connect with men. Women are usually immediately aware of our feelings, able to express them, usually comfortable in explaining, and asking, and elaborating... in considerable detail.
Our verbal agility can inadvertently create a wall, as women, if it gets us out of sync with men. At times, in personal, social and work situations, men and women will get closer if the speed of the conversation and the amount of words slows down.
When women feel that men are not listening, we tend to “rise” to the occasion by raising our voice and verbiage. That is we tend to say more, faster, more intensely and at a higher volume. It is as if we are thinking, “What I said and how I said it did not work so I will do more of what did not work, and expect a different outcome.”
Our pace in conversation is faster and more multi-dimensional. We rush past and around most men.
We need to allow a man to respond, a point at a time, at his pace, without interrupting or finishing his sentences.
If the strongest complaint women have about men is that they do not listen, then we must work hardest on leaving the time for them to speak.*
Suggestion #2
“Sidle”
While women prefer to talk, face-to-face, men pefer to sidle, standing side by side. Research shows that both women and men like each other more and get along better when standing or sitting side-by side.
Suggestion #3
“Get Moving”
Any woman who wants better relations with a man should “walk it out”: talk while walking to the meeting, around the block, etc.
Further, when men and women are walking or eating together their body motions become more similar so they get more in sync. Even vital signs (heartbeat, skin temperature, eye pupil dilation) become more similar) so we are more likely to feel a natural, easy kinship.
In motion we tend to experience the best, rather than the worst side in the opposite sex. That's good news. Yes?
Suggestion #4 “’See’ the Situation Their Way”
Women crave longer and more continuous eye contact than men.
To help men feel more comfortable let go of that unremitting eye gaze. Glance away sometimes as a man is inclined to do while thinking.
His glance away does not necessarily mean avoidance so don’t act as if it does by a your harsh tone, words or glance.
He may be trying to gather his thoughts.
On Regis Philbin’s TV show, “Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?” a contestant could call his smartest friend or ask the audience for help with the answer. Contestants are more apt to get the right answer when they ask the audience. The insight? Calling on the collective intelligence can get you smarter support, and often sooner.
Cultural critic and cofounder of the Web zine Feed, Steve Johnson came to the same conclusion in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (Scribner, 2001).
He found that intelligence resides at the street level, whether you are observing harvester ants - capable of great coordination or quick improvisational response to attack, despite their limited cognitive skills - or workers in the primitive factories of 19th-century England. Johnson found that groups could achieve extraordinary feats through decentralized thinking or what is often called emergent behavior. More bluntly, that means that even simple agents following simple rules can create sophisticated structures. In the Digital Age, this is a powerful concept because of the Webís capacity for facilitating far-reaching group intelligence.
As massive proof of this theory consider the most popular e-commerce site, E-Bay. The E-Bay community rewards people who play by the rules, and banishes those who do not. In fact, the collective intelligence of the E-Bay users has raised the level of their collective game over time, to the benefit of all players. Some participants have build an entire business for themselves that could not have existed before the emergent intelligence of the E-Bay model.
This finding is especially important in our post-7/11 world, when we want to live a life that matters. More that self-styled solo star performers, we seek out those who want to create opportunity and community together. We want to find healthier ways to communicate to connect.
Pods are another way for people to feel more connected and capable, even in a larger group, and to reap the benefits of their collective intelligence. Transform a larger organization such as a company, college student body, synagogue or civic club into 8 to 10 person pods of diverse people with specific goals and Rules of Conduct. Like the ants, we can accomplish much together. We are more nimble in changing direction when weíve established one in the first place. People in pods tend to feel a deeper affinity with each other and for their common purpose.
Further they are more likely to demonstrate more confident, higher-performing behavior. The University of California campus at Santa Cruz, was created around pods of students who are then part of colleges within the larger campus. Compared to the other UC campuses their students have fewer reported health problems and accidents, and a higher sense of well-being.
In the early 1990s, George Colony began organizing his company into pods of 8 or 10 people from different disciplines. Colony is chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, Inc., one of the largest Internet research firms. Says Colony, ìThe pods are a way to mitigate the alienation of size as our company grows. Itís like being in a squad of people in the military. You get so that you are willing to die for the guy next to you.î
In his book The Tipping Point, author Malcom Gladwell writes that the human brain is wired to have no more than 150 relationships. The deeper the affinity and rewards people feel in those relationships, the more optimistic they feel about their participation.
The more optimistic one feels, the better one performs. Thus the group creates a reinforcing upward spiral of smarter mutal support. That ís probably why people are more likely to excel, not in solo tasks, but when they are part of a small group with a specific goal and deadline, be it a product launch or a team game.
In this time of turmoil and greater uncertainty, when people are more likely to seek affinity, we have grand opportunities to test these ideas. We desire camraderie more than competition. Want to make a difference with others? Find or form a pod around your greatest passion or talent and see emergent intelligence in action.
All Jokes Come Down to One of Four Themes
Anywhere in the world, all jokes can be reduced to just one of four themes, according to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who’s been conducting mass participation experiments about what we think is funny. * (See below)
What’s the Funniest Animal?
Wiseman also found that if you insert different animal names into the same joke, one animal evokes more laughter than any others. Guess which animal? ** * (See below)
Well, how hard is it to get others to laugh?
Mysteriously difficult, according to scientists, and many professional comedians. In fact, it is easier to get others to cry or smile than to laugh. While you need to evoke a response in only one part of the brain for the first two, you must stimulate a more complex “laughter circuit” involving many more parts of the brain for laughter to happen.
Several researchers, including John Allen Paulos, author of Mathematics and Humor discovered that when we attempt to understand puns, we process them in left side of the brain. Yet more complex, non-wordplay jokes are sent to the right side of the brain to comprehend, triggering many more parts of the brain along the way.
Researchers, Wendy Wapner, Suzanne Hamby and Howard Gardner, in a 1981 paper, entitled “Brain and Language”, described the left side of the brain as a “highly efficient, narrowly programmed linguistic computer. In contrast, the right hemisphere of the brain constitutes a suitable audience for a humorous silent film.” Perhaps that’s why comedians often use their body and props to silently act out a part of their story – to activate more parts of your mind.
4. What Makes You Laugh?
What makes us laugh? Here’s three clues from the researchers: incongruity, superiority and the pattern of three.
Incongruity
A joke: “I went to my doctor for shingles. He sold me aluminum siding.”
When we see or hear something incongruous, we are surprised into laughter, often as a sort of relief. This may be a primitive response for alerting your community in ancient times that an apparent danger, is, in fact, nothing to fear. V.S. Ramachandran, in “Phantoms in the Brain”, wrote, “The main purpose of laughter might be to allow the individual to alert others in the social group that the detected anomaly is nothing to worry about.”
Superiority
Those who tell us funny stories about their own foibles - or those of others - help listeners feel momentarily superior to the jokester or to the people who’ve been made the butt of the joke.
The Pattern of Three
Joke: “My favorite books are ‘Moby-Dick,’ ‘Great Expectations,’ and ‘Rock Hard Abs in 30 days.’”
Comedians have long believed that jokes work best in a pattern of three parts. Offer two straightforward examples, then a third one to shatter the pattern.
Wiseman, that scientist we mentioned at the top of the column, is a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the director of its Perrott-Warrick Research Unit. He is probably Britain’s most well-known psychologist – at least since last year when he took his humor research to the world via the Internet.
His mass-participation experiments cover emotions, from lying to laughter. For example, he asked participants to detect who was lying after being exposed to accounts offered on television, the radio or in print.* * *
In the Fall of 2002, Wiseman decided to learn about global differences in humor and opened a web site (LaughLab.co.us). The server for the site broke down when Wiseman got three million hits in the first five days after the site opened.
Among other studies, he asked visitors to contribute their favorite jokes and rather others’ jokes, on a 1 – 5 rating scale. He’s received over 40,000 jokes. About two-thirds of the submissions are so off-color, violent or otherwise offensive that he chooses not to post them for site visitors.
With Wiseman’s permission, here’s a description of one of the mass participation experiments. Wiseman and his colleagues asked people who took part in LaughLab to answer questions that involve making various estimates, such as: “How many words are there on one page of a typical paperback novel?
A) Under 500
B) 500 - 600
C) 600 - 700
D) 700 - 800
E) Over 800”
They found that people who are good at this type of question (the correct answer is under 500) “tend to have good frontal lobe activation. Those who had wildly inaccurate estimates have very bad flexible-thinking skills.”
People who answered this question correctly tended to prefer more complex jokes, such as, ‘A scientist and a philosopher were being chased by a hungry lion. The scientist made some quick calculations, he said ‘its no good trying to outrun it, its catching up’. The philosopher kept a little ahead and replied "’I am not trying to outrun the lion, I am trying to out run you! ‘“
“’People whose answers were way off, often liked simple jokes such as, ‘What’s pink and fluffy? Pink fluff.”” or “ ‘Which day of the week do fish hate? Fry-Day.’”
~ ~ ~ ~
* Almost all jokes, according to Wiseman’s research, seem to involve one of these four themes:
∑ 1. “Someone trying to look clever and taking a pratfall.”
∑ 2. Husbands and wives not being loving.
∑ 3. Doctors being insensitive about imminent death
∑ 4. God making a mistake”
* * A duck
* * * Of those options, people are most likely to detect lying they hear on the radio.
... Bring Others Closer by Praising What You Want to Flourish
When the priest was moved to a new parish he approached he asked his superior to ask for permission, “Would you mind if I smoked while praying?” and was, not too surprisingly, turned down.
Some wise people instinctively know they can gain approval by how they ask. Set the stage for people to hear your positive intent. For example, the priest might have said, “Would you mind if I pray while I am smoking?”
Setting the context with your initial comments is akin to dressing in the fashion that the people you are going to be around will approve or even admire, while still being true to yourself.
Why? Because people like people who are like them. Like all other animals, we are most comfortable with those who look right -- like us. In fact, the more you look familiar to me, the earlier in the conversation I will literally hear your words, absorb their meaning and be more able to accept them, and you.
The more you look and act different than me, the more my peripheral vision narrows initially. Further my skin temperature will go down and my heart beat up in anticipation of the possible need for flight. That is because the primitive triune part of our brains has not changed. We are forever hardwired to respond to new, unfamiliar situations with the “fight or flight” syndrome.
Our vital signs literally shut down when we are first around a person, setting or situation that is radically different, unfamiliar thus initially potentially dangerous, until we have decided how we feel about our situation.
You can pull people closer, and bring out their better side so they can see and appreciate yours. In fact, this is probably the most meaningful gift you can give someone else, other than the present of your warm presence. Continuously praise others’ specific actions you admire, however small they may seem to you. People eventually warm up to your warmth.
Here’s two ways to praise to inspire happier, high-performing behavior in others and yourself..
1.
One way is to praise someone directly.
Whatever you praise you will encourage to flourish.
The more specific your words, the more memorable your message.
Describe the actual act in as much rich detail so you honor the person in acknowledging how vividly it affected you.
2.
The second and perhaps even more powerful way to praise is to compliment the person to one or more people who are very important to them. My client, the CFO of a Berlin-based maker of wireless portal equipment named Punjabi, has had a rugged and quite successful third year of operation where everyone has worked long hours. Instead of handing out the ten top team awards in the traditional way, at a company event, the CEO took the time to find a significant group related to each of the winners.
For those winners the groups included a place of worship, a rugby club, a college alumnae organization and an antique car association. With the permission of these organizations, the CEO arranged to give the award and an eight-minute speech, describing both the winner’s accomplishments at Punjabi and a specific incident where the winner exemplified the heroic character of a true team player.
Thus each (surprised) winner got to bask in the spotlight in front of valued people in her or his non-world world. The CEO’s greater effort also put his company in a genuinely positive light in many new places. Although it did not appear that any of the people who saw their friends receive the award were immediate, potential customers of Punjabi, they were sufficiently inspired to stir some positive word-of-mouth buzz about the awards ceremonies….
A month after these ceremonies a feature writer for the equivalent of the “lifestyle” section of the main Berlin paper heard the story through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who was a rugby player with her husband. Not one to be interested in business stories, she was nevertheless touched by the way the ceremonies had rippled out to surround the winners’ lives. She tracked down the CEO and interviewed him, thus affording him another chance to speak glowingly about some of the specific examples of his winners’ dedication and ingenuity. As he praised each person, the glow of the values he admired reflected back on him and his company.
The reporter also interviewed the winners and several of the people at the organizations where the awards events occurred and then wrote a human interest story that appeared, with photos, in a Sunday edition. The article generated several glowing letters to the editor by people who witnessed the ceremonies, the winners and others who were also moved by the story.
Mr. John Sunui, a vice president of sales for Singapore-based construction management company happened to read some of the letters in the paper while eating his breakfast in a hotel while in Berlin on business. Sunui emailed the reporter to request a copy of the original article that the reporter emailed back the next day and he received when he returned to Singapore.
That December holiday in Singapore -- and 14 other countries where Sunui’s company has offices, both the office director and one person in each office who has done an outstanding job at their work, as voted by their co-workers, will be happily surprised when they walk in the door at some place that is special to them to be greeted by a company representative who will give them a present and tell a story about another side of the winner that their friends in that organization may not know about.
How can you give a lasting and perhaps the most widely-known gift that ten people you admire can receive? For each person think of the specific incident where that person has exemplified the quality that you most admire or cherish.
Re-play the situation in your mind so you can describe it in all its story-building, touching detail.
Practice saying the story, then notice how you now feel about the person.
Begin with the specific details before you end with the general statements that summarizes your feelings and values. That way, you make the story, and the person, more vividly memorable to all others who read or hear your story.
Next step: for each person envision what group to which they are affiliated (family, religious organization, hobby or other interest or professional group, etc.) would be most significant for that person if you were to praise them among the members.
You have several ways to pass along your praise about the person you love or admire. You may simply call, email or write to someone in their valued affinity group and share your story of praise. Or you may, like the people in the story above, ask for permission to confer a gift on the person at a gathering of their group.
In advertising this method is called a “third party endorsement.” For example, when customers praise a product in an advertisement they are providing a credible third party endorsement.
Because we are all instinctive voyeurs, naturally interested in the stories of each other’s lives we are more drawn to third party endorsements than to other kinds of advertisements.
Further, when we hear a positive story about someone, told by another person we do find it more credible and compelling than if the person was to “boast” about it in telling it himself.
Here are other ways to offer heartfelt, long-lasting third party endorsement gifts to those you hold dear during this upcoming, less certain holiday season:
• Donate money or another gift to a charity or cause in which that person is active, and ask that your story about them be included in any acknowledgement of the gift.
• Seek out places that person frequent and see if you might buy a needed piece of equipment or repair in that person’s name. In our Sausalito church you can buy a hymnal and dedicate it with a related phrase, to someone. So every Sunday, someone at my church opens up a hymnal with this caligraphied message on the inside front, dedicated to my mother who loves piano music, “To Lestelle whose piano playing washes away the dust of everyday life.”
• On an object which that person might use frequently (coffee mug, bath towel, key holder) imprint or monogram a positive nickname or one phrase characterization of the “hero’s” action. To my English rugby-playing friend, Richard, we’re giving a glass beer stein this holiday with these words etched on the bottom, “Great giver of bone-crushing hugs.”
• Make a large, colorful postcard where you use your computer to print a description of the positive incident involving your hero, then ask your colleagues who agree to join in signing it before sending it to that person’s home.
• Give a gift to the person’s partner in work or personal life, as an acknowledgement of your admiration.
• Make a banner or poster, with a celebratory sentence and an enlarged and flattering image of the hero and hang it in a prominent place (wall or door of the person’s office, home or event).
• Find a place the person frequents (dry cleaner, golf club) and offer the business manager at that site your credit card number with a set dollar limit. Ask the manager to pay the next bill of your hero, fax you a copy of the bill, and hand the manager a gift card with your inscription on it to be given to the hero at their next visit.
• You may think of a variation of this story. Two years ago I learned that Janice, a meeting planner who had hired me to speak at her association several times over the years, and who was exceptionally gracious and generous with me, had contracted leukemia and was not doing well. I learned this from her assistant who called to confirm some details of my next presentation at their annual conference.
On a long plane flight back from another speaking engagement, I looked out the window, thinking of Janice, and conjured up this idea for a third party endorsement of the Hawaiian-born meeting planner which would reflect one of her most passionate interests, gardening. I called the association’s executive director to share my idea and he immediately agreed.
Two months later, just after I was introduced to speak at that association’s convention’s opening breakfast, I moved to the center of the raised stage, signaling the 500 attendees to also rise from their seats as the board president caught the elbow of our surprised meeting planner, Jana, who at the bottom of the stage steps, still focused on making sure the room lighting would be alright for my speech.
He guided her up the steps as I stepped back to the side of the stage and the first person in the audience, roving mike in his hand told the first vignette of how Jana had guided him at the beginning of his career. As Jana reached the center of the stage, in front of the people she had served for 14 years, eight other people in various parts of the room lifted their mike and told their brief story about her.
Then a saxaphone player stepped out from the side of the stage to serenade Janice with a fragment of her favorite Kenny G song as the screen on the stage was filled with these purple words on an emerald green (her favorite colors) background, “Jana is a special flower” followed by a swift changing set of images of Janice in several situations.
As the song ended, on cue, all 500 people pulled from out of their pockets and purses the fragrant Hawaiian-grown white flowers, the gardenias, tuber roses and pikaki and held them aloft towards Jana. The board president handed Jana a bouquet of the flowers and asked Jana to speak, which she did, briefly, through her tears.
Even several of the hotel waiters standing still, crying by then. My speech had, of course, been moved to the luncheon so people could drop by Jana’s table to say hello through the ensuing breakfast.
Why do we instinctively like some people and find others irritating or worse?
What makes us agree, buy, help . . . or not? Do your gut instincts help or hinder your “LQ” – Likeability Quotient? From an expert on gut instincts, gain insights about how to say it better next time. Answer this quick nine question quiz and get some tips. Some of the answers may surprise you.
1. Do people get along better when talking to each other if they are facing
each other or if they are standing side by side?
2. Who tends to face the person with whom they are speaking (men or women) and who tends to stand side by side, facing more or less the same way (women or men)?
3. If you want to increase the chance of knowing if someone is lying to you, what is one helpful phenomenon to notice about that person’s face when he or she is talking to you?
4. If you want to keep someone’s attention, is it better to wear a patterned
shirt or blouse or a plain blouse or shirt?
5. What is the most directly emotional of all the senses, bypassing the
thinking facilities and causing a quicker, more intense reaction in the limbic
(emotions) system than any other sense?
6. Are you more likely to get someone to support you or buy something if you give them something up front, unasked, before you ask for the favor?
7. Who tends to maintain wider peripheral vision when entering a new place, men or women?
8. Who tends to be more specific in their descriptions, adults or children?
9. Of the previous eight questions, which is the one people are most likely to
ask for the answer to first, and if reading the questions in a group, are most
likely to comment on first?
~~~~~
Answers
1. People get along better when they “sidle”, stand or sit side by side rather than when they face each other.
2. Men are more likely to sidle than women.
3. Note the timing and duration of the first “reactive” expression on someone’s face when you think that person is not telling you the truth. When lying, most people can put an innocent expression on their faces, yet few (except pathological liars) will have the right timing or duration of that expression.
If you ignore the expression itself and, instead, consider whether the timing and duration of the expression seem natural, you’ll greatly increase your chances of knowing if that person is lying.
4. Wearing a plain, unpatterned shirt or blouse will increase the chances that the listener will hear you longer. A patterned top or ornate jewelry or loud tie will break up the listener’s attention span sooner, and that person is more likely to go on more “mental vacations” sooner.
5. Smell is the most directly emotional of the senses. The right natural scent can refresh or relax you and others in your home or work site. Vanilla, apple, and chocolate are the scents Americans most like.
6. Yes, up to 14 times more likely to get their support or a purchase. This gut instinct is often called “reciprocity reflex.” Learn more by reading influence by Robert Cialdini.
7. Women. That is why storeowners who serve men will increase their sales if they have prominent, eye-level signage over large displays where men will see the signage soon after entering the store.
8. Children are more vividly specific, hitting their prime around fourth grade and then beginning to speak in generalities, more like adults. A specific detail proves a general conclusion, not the other way around. Plus, specifics are more memorable and credible.
9. Question number 3.
It seems that we have an inordinate interest in lying.
~~~~~
Three related insights on instincts that may interest you:
Finding #1: “Move to Motivate”
MOTION
Motion is emotional. It increases the intensity of feeling about whatever is
happening.
Further, people remember more the things they dislike or fear that they
experience in motion, more than things they enjoy. Motion attracts attention and causes people to remember more of what’s happening and feel more strongly about it, for better or for worse.
Insight:
This is another justification for golf! Think of the memorability inherent in a golf swing. The more dimensions of motion involved (body moving up/down, left/right, backward/forward), the more memorable the motion.
Get others involved in motions with you that create good will: walking, sharing a meal, handing or receiving a gift, shaking hands, turning to face a new scene. You are more likely to literally get “in sync” (vital signs become more similar: eye pupil dilation, skin temperature, heartbeat) and to then get along.
Finding #2: “Deep Convictions”
PASSION
The more time, actions, or other effort someone has put into something,
someone, or some course of action, the more deeply that person will believe in
it, defend it, and work on it further.
Insight:
If you want more from another person, wait to ask until after she has invested more time, energy, money, or other resources. The more someone talks about it, repeats and elaborates it, writes it down, and explains it to others, the more deeply that person will believe it – and feel inclined to tell others. Imagine your customers raving about their experience with your product.
Finding #3: “True Timing”
LIKEABILITY
If a person likes the way he acts when he is around you, he often sees the
qualities in you that he most admires. The opposite is also true. Two universal truths: people like people who are like them, and people like people who like them.
Insight:
Pick the moments when someone feels most at ease and happy to move the relationship forward. Don’t make suggestions or requests when they are acting in an unbecoming way your efforts will only backfire. Praise the behavior you want to flourish. Don’t ask for more from someone until they have invested more time, money, other resources, or emotional “chits” in the relationship.
The secret is all in understanding a code.
It is a most elaborate code that is written nowhere,
known by none, and yet understood by all. That secret
is how we tell each other, without words, what
we really feel.
How do other people perceive you, especially upon first meeting you face-to-face?
How well do you anticipate another person’s discomfort before that person freezes up and becomes paralyzed, withdrawn or even destructive in a situation?
Whichever side of the table you are on, these skills are crucial to your ability to lead, mentor or be a “MVP” valuable team player with your staff, vendors and customers.
Whether you making a presentation or listening, the boss or support person, being interviewed for a job or conducting an interview, selling or trying to decide whether to buy, your ability to project a comfortable confidence and approachability -- and to detect another’s degree of comfort - will always play a huge role in your ability to sell, lead or otherwise get things done - with others.
Early Warning Signs of Increasing Emotional Intensity
Here are some ways to observe increased emotion. Learn to look out for them in yourself as well as in others.
Sweating: Might indicate an increase in some emotional feeling.
Blinking more: Might indicate an increase in some emotional feeling.
Dilated pupils: Often indicates arousal or fear.
Blushing: Might signal embarrassment, shame, anger, or guilt.
Talking louder and faster: Usually signals anger, fear, or other excitement.
Talking slower and softer: Might signal sadness or boredom.
Body gesturing: Signals a negative emotion, usually fear or anger.
Breathing fast and shallow: Indicates the presence of emotion.
Are You Out on a Limb?
Gestures are emblems of feelings. Using too many gestures usually takes away from the potency of your natural presence, just as talking high, fast, loud or at great length diminishes your power and credibility.
Most people cannot help “leaking” their feelings. Fortunately, few of us are attuned to noticing the often subtle signals that indicate strong emotion in others. Or we misread the signals.
Your body is a hologram of your being; a three-dimensional movie that is constantly running, showing others how you feel about yourself and the world. As you walk through life, is your body saying what your words are saying? Your body is a three-dimensional "full-motion" billboard to the rest of the world. Even if people are consciously reading your body language, they subconsciously react to your body signals.
Tour Your Body for Vital Signs
For example, if you are literally uptight – rigid in any part of your body, especially your face, where most people focus most of their attention in conversation – people will instinctively resist or react against you and your comments. This phenomenon is akin to bounding a hard rubber ball on a concrete surface and then on a soft carpet. The ball bounces higher and faster against the hard surface than the soft one, of course, just as others react more against your "hardened surface."
Suggestion: Whenever you are entering a potentially volatile or even new situation, loosen up physically. Walk, stretch, and work on the areas where you tend to hold most of your tension.
Probably – like many conscientious, hard-working people – you hold your shoulders higher and slightly more forward than is natural, with one of the tendons in your neck tightened up even more than the other. If someone can give you a quick 10- to 15-minute shoulder and neck massage, you will enter a situation more relaxed and others will respond more softly to you.
This is a good time to get acquainted with your body again, as you were as a child. If you don't know where you hold your tension, and most people don't, take a tour of your body so you can know what needs the most loosening – and exercise.
Are you shouldering the world's responsibilities, or perpetually drooping? In your determined drive toward success, do you plant your feet solidly on the ground in a life gesture of hostility, defiance, or taking ground?
Perhaps you have a forward-leaning posture, with your head tilted slightly forward, as if ready to spring into action, actually expressing a lifelong pattern of flight away from psychologically threatening situations when you thought it was part of your makeup to leap forward to new opportunities.
To be depressed is, in fact, to press against yourself. To be closed off is to hold your muscles rigid against the world.
Being open is being soft, with no instinctive muscle-clenching, such as the jaw-tightening that is a growing pattern in Americans, even into their sleep. Hardness is being uptight, cold, separate, giving yourself and others a hard time. Softness is synonymous with pleasure, warmth, flowing, being alive, drawing other people toward you rather than forcing them away.
Are you itching to get at someone? Is a colleague a pain in the neck? Are you sore about something? What is your aching back trying to tell you? Is there someone or something on your back? What about your ulcer, allergy, or muscle spasms? Is there someone you cannot stomach? What is it that you would like to get off your chest, or your back?
Your body speaks to you all of the time, telling you your own needs. Listen to it. It is your free and most sophisticated medical feedback testing system, continuously showing you your inner tensions, state of mind, and habitual life attitudes.
When you are misaligned and tense, you expend outrageous sums of extra energy in the everyday gestures of life. Because the body is a high-viscosity substance that is 60–80% water, your bones are floating in a relatively fluid environment. Over time, despite that apparent fluidity, you have tightened the muscles around every major experience of pain, fear, or anger.
In Western society, we usually hold the tension somewhere in our upper bodies, whereas in many Eastern cultures, the tension tends to be held in the lower body.
We all hold great muscle tension around certain bones in blind remembrance of fearful events, long after the actual events are probably long forgotten. You continue to tighten these muscles each time you think you are experiencing similar situations, thus guaranteeing that you make your pattern of uptightness increasingly habitual, until it becomes an almost permanent condition you no longer recognize as not normal.
Ah, the misleading appearance of maturity. You might never recall what initially made you afraid, but you can note where your body reacted to protect itself. Then spend more time in your exercise and massage or other bodywork to relax and loosen those muscle groups.
We go through life making decisions, closing down and limiting ourselves unconsciously. If you don't begin a regular practice of exercise and stretching, you are guaranteed to lose mobility sooner as you age, robbing yourself of the most positive and alive present you can offer the world every day – a loose and relaxed presence.
Stay open literally by getting in motion more frequently. Stand and stretch at least every twenty minutes when you are sitting and working. Try to walk, hopefully in sync with someone else, in fresh air and sunlight, at least thirty minutes a day. As Dr. Dean Ornish wrote in his most recent book, Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, our survival depends on the healing power of love.
One of the safest and most natural ways to move closer to others is to walk with them. Walk farther to the restaurant. Walk and talk on the way to the meeting. Walk with your loved one, rather than sitting at home, to come down from your day together. Motion is emotional and makes every event more vivid and memorable. Literally move toward the one you want in your life and loosen up together.
Your life could depend on it.
We are all literally and unwittingly two-faced. To learn more about how you present yourself to the world, and your underlying, more “private” feelings, you just have to look yourself in the face. What to get out a mirror now, before you read further? Do you attract or alienate your insurance prospects and longtime staff?
You constantly present two aspects of yourself, on the two sides of your face. Recent research on the different functions of the left and right sides of the brain helps to explain why this is so. The two, vertical halves of the face are each affected by the nerves of the opposite side of the brain and show the world different parts of how you feel.
In fact, the two sides of your face, like the two sides of your body -- -the left and the right -- are usually asymmetrical and unequal in proportion. Look at yourself in the mirror -- full-face and full length -- to see the differences.
In short, your face is your shorthand to your body language.
Your expressions, in repose, are icons of your attitudes toward life.
The left side is your more “private” part of your personality and your right is the more “public” side of your face. The left often looks less happy than the right. Most subjects who have been analyzed projected their wish images upon their left side of their face and their right side related more to their real or basic self-image and attitude towards the world.
Your face’s right side often appears more pleasant, sensitive, vulnerable and/or open in expression. The left side is less expressive than the right and tends to reflect the hidden, severe, stern and/or depressed aspects you usually intend to keep private from the world -- and sometimes even from yourself.
The left side is more likely to register negative emotions, while the right side tends to reflect the more positive and optimistic, but not necessarily phony part of your personality.
“When I smile I must also show the grimace behind it.”
- Live Ullman, actress, author
Since the right side of the brain has more control over the left side of the body -- including the face -- then it stands to reason that the research on how the brain is organized, left and right, can give us insights into how we literally face the world and how we can better understand others. The left brain -- reflected more in the right side of the face -- relates to logic, pragmatic thinking, practicality and language.
The right part of the brain, in turn, relates more to intuition, imagination, and other more creative leanings.
The basic gut feelings, including your attitude towards yourself and your life emanate from your right brain. You express them more in the left side of your face.
We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.
The more controlled or conscious responses -- the social mask you put on for the world -- may be processed more by the pragmatic left brain and appear more readily on the right side of the face.
Now you may be getting lost in “lefts” and “rights” of all this, but let’s continue with some experiments you can conduct to learn more about yourself and others for whom you have strong feelings (like or dislike) in your life.
How Do You See the World?
Ironically, the right brain is more actively involved in observing the world -- which it does predominantly through your left eye. And, when you face someone, your left eye is across from the other person’s right side. Therefore, you are more aware of their right side.
But you are thus most noticing the side of the other person’s face which is more connected with the left or “logical” and less revealing side. You miss facing the part of their face that is most likely to show underlying “true” feelings.
“Public / Private Face” Exercise
Here is a rather intimate exercise to do with someone -- and it doesn’t involve disrobing or even touching. Sit facing each other.
Now look at the left and the right sides of the other person’s face. Does the right side show a more open, less tense presence? Does the left look more reserved, serious?
The left side, that is their left side, is the more private face, remember, and the right side is their more public face. In fact, the left side is likely to show their more basic disposition. As you face each other, discuss your observations, one side at a time.
“The face is the most memorable part of the body and the eyes are the most memorable part of the face.”
- Werner Wolff, psychiatrist and hypnotist
“Driver’s License Photo Show” Exercise
Now try this experiment. Get out your driver’s license. Look at both sides of your face, covering one side at a time with a piece of paper. Look “inward” at yourself and see if you observe different aspects of yourself.
You may also want to look back at your family album and look at the progression of your face and your personality development overtime -- and that of others in your family. Look at the childhood albums of close friends and in-laws for other perspectives on them.
“Photo Finish” Exercise
To gain a still more revealing view of yourself, find two photographic negatives of “head and shoulders”, close-up pictures of yourself. If you don’t have any handy, ask someone to take two pictures of you; offer to do the same for them and compare notes on this exercise.
Cut both negatives of yourself vertically in half, down the center of your face. Flop over one side of each negative. Take a glossy-coated side and a dull-coated side of the left side of your face from the two negatives, and ask your camera shop to print it to create a “left-left” photo.
Take a glossy and a dull-sided half of your face and also get a “right-right” print made. Thus, instead of the normal right-left photo of your actual face, the joined half negatives become right-right and left-left faces.
You will then see exaggerated versions of both aspects of yourself -- and will probably be able to see each more clearly.
“Language is magic: it makes things appear and disappear.”
- Nicole Brossard
Tell the Story That Tells the Story
Dusk settled coolly over the misty emerald vineyards in Napa Valley one fall evening.
Through the window, I gazed wistfully at a thin stream of bittersweet chocolate sauce a waiter was ladling high over a raspberry-colored cake a the table of a hand-holding couple, seated inside the big stone restaurant operated by the Culinary Institute of America.
I knew it was bittersweet chocolate because the rich smell was drifting through the French doors out onto the patio, where we were drinking a fine Cakebread cabernet next to two giggling toddlers, just as happily chewing red licorice twists from the local 7-11 store.
“To generalize is to be an idiot.”
- William Blake
Here's the pity. As adults, we tend to lose our "picture-making" way of speaking – especially as we become older, more educated and experienced. Our expertise does us in.
Our conversations begin with sweeping generalizations.
To further numb listeners, we are more likely today to talk "at" others, using longer sentences, full of jargon, background and qualifiers before we cue the listeners in with the context that matters to them.
Our words become underbrush to obscure our message. Instead make the point in everyday language, wrapped around an example that matters to your listener.
Here’s Some Tips to Say it Even Better …. Next Time
Whoever most vividly characterizes a situation or person usually determines how others see it in their mind’’s eye, discuss it, and act on it.
Here’s ten quick tips for becoming the most frequently-quoted expert in your profession, organization, market or cause.
1. Be Mercifully Brief
In the movie, "The Player” during a scene at a Hollywood studio executive meeting Mr. Levy shows Reeve, the central character, how to pitch a potential movie story. Levy holds out a newspaper, saying, “ Here, read a headline, any headline.”
Reeve responds: “Um . . .’Immigrants Protest Budget Cuts in Literacy Program.’"
Levy: "Human spirit overcoming economic adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in the barrio. You put in Jimmy Smits, you got a sexy ‘Stand and Deliver.’ Next?”
Robert Kosberg, a Hollywood producer convinced a studio to make the 1993 pets -gone-wrong movie "Man's Best Friend." His pitch was “Jaws on Paws”.
2. Create a Captivating Turn of Phrase
Here’s three ways.
A. Use a familiar word in a new way and become associated with a new trend:
Example: Futurist, Faith Popcorn, predicted five years ago that people would want to be “cocooning” in their home.
B. Be catchy, using one or more of these memorabiity-building devices:
• Alliteration: “Peak performance” and “high tech/high touch.”
• Rhyme: “Jaws on Paws” (from earlier story)
• Repetition: “First things first”, Steve Covey’s advice.
• Puns: Tongue Fu!, title of book by Sam Horn.
C. Employ an unexpected turns of phrase: For example, I suggest that to forge a connection, “go slow to go fast.”
3. Get Specific Sooner
The specific detail proves the general conclusion, not the other way around.
“The Mini Cooper of office furniture,” is the apt tag line of the tiny firm, Turnstone. Their elaboration: “Leveraging parent Steelcase's technology and distribution channels, we offer small businesses great style for less, with big-business speed.”
Unlike most children under the age of 12 or so, we adults offer qualifiers and background, creating verbal underbrush before we finally get to the delicious details that are most involving, credible, and evocative.
Think of the speeches, advertisements, and conversations you most remember. Didn't the words evoke one or more of the senses, create an indelible picture?
“Air bag for your computer” is the description of back up software for a computer’s hard drive.
For several years, many advertising campaigns featured a group photo of "diverse" people, with some variation of this headline: "We Are the People Who Care." Banks, insurance companies, hospitals, and other large institutions thus offered a generality that perpetuated their impersonal image instead of promising some specific service, extra convenience, guarantee, or customer story that proved how they were better than the competition.
For example, a bank could offer a specific new service, followed by the general reason that matters to customers: “We’re now open Saturdays to make your life easier.”
4. Make Favorable Comparisons With Familiar, Admired Objects
Say it so they can see it in their mind's eye. When people in your work world are immersed in jargon, your remarks can stand out from others, when you make a comparison with a well-liked product, person or situation from outside your profession or industry.
Example: At the high stakes J.P. Morgan Healthcare investors’ conference, venture capitalists hear 20-minutes talks by CEOs of start-ups and public companies who seek funding or favorable stock analysts’ reporters. The tension is high and the schedule is packed. Most presenters speak fast, using a mix of highly technical scientific and finance language.
The CEO from bio-tech company, Amgen, walked past the podium to the center of the stage, pulled up one suit and shirt sleeve to bare his raised forearm. He opened his talk, saying, " You will feel the effects of this medical patch faster than it takes a Porsche to go from zero to 90. “
5. Hijack a Familiar Slogan to Use in a New Way
After a company has spent millions to make a slick slogan well-known, twist it in a new direction for your intended meaning. Redwood Hospital in Northern California used this billboard variation of the popular milk slogan to ask for blood donations: “Got blood?”
6. Anchor Your Suggestion With a Pertinent Story
To pull people into hearing and remembering your view, set it up with a brief anecdote. For example, as a way of gently suggesting that his team may be looking at a problem from the wrong perspective, my client first offered this story:
There is an old story in Soviet Russia about a guard at the factory gate who at the end of every day saw a worker walking out with a wheelbarrow full of straw. Everyday he thoroughly searched the contents of the wheelbarrow, but never found anything but straw. One day he asked the worker: "What do you gain by taking home all that straw?" "The wheelbarrows."
7. Veil the Truth in Humor
So much of life is fast-paced, serious and tense. Consider opening a meeting with mock-serious inspiration or admonition, then grinning. You’ll find true life, Dilbert-like examples everywhere that you can keep for your dry humored use. Here’s some:
“What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.”
(Lykes Lines Shipping)
“This project is so important, we can't let things that are more
important interfere with it.”
(Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)
‘We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.”
(Switching supervisor, Verizon)
8. Encapsulate a Situation
Do people stop listening before you stop talking?
Offer a vignette that captures attention before they can go on a mental vacation.
Example: Jenny Lee’s literary agent characterized Jenny’s book, I Do. I Did, Now What?: One Woman’s Musings on Married Life, as "a rant that (almost despite itself) ends up as a celebration of marriage."
Example: Financial analyst, Alan Parisse shared this perhaps apocryphal newspaper advertisement with me: “For sale. Infant shoes. Never used.”
9. Imprint by Evoking Universally-Felt Emotions
“The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.”
- Oscar Wilde
Consider these potent ways that people are more likely to remember what you say, even when they are not trying to:
1. Imagine that the brain is like a wall with clothes hooks on it. For the brain to catch and retain a detail, that detail must hang on one of the memory-inducing hooks that is already in the brain.
The biggest hooks in the brain are the three universally felt, core life experiences, familiar to us all:
1) Family
2) Hometown or town where you have lived or are living, and
3) Past or current kind of work. For family, relate what you're saying to a family situation: yours, theirs, someone else's, or even a metaphorical family of services. Or relate your topic to the listener's work situation or work with which she is familiar.
People also remember landmark places where they live, have lived, or have visited or well-known places. For example, our business is in Sausalito, which evokes pleasant by-the-bay memories for most who've visited here.
2. Motion makes memories.
Whenever people are moving or see movement, they remember more and are more emotional about what they remember. When others are in motion with you in a positive experience they are more likely to share their experience with others. That's why we literally move to offer samples, getting people to reach out, so they feel the experience more deeply.
An experience is most memorable when you and the other person are both in motion, such as when you shake hands, walk together, or reach to exchange something. Pick those ripe moments to say the most vivid, specific detail you want the listener to remember and repeat to others. Times are next most memorable for the listener who is in motion even if you are not.
The next most memorable movement is when you are in motion, even if your listener is not. A final valuable way to evoke a memory is for you both to watch motion from something or someone else.
Warning: Let Go of the Vibrating Pole
“There are two levers for moving men - interest and fear.”
- Napoleon
Movement is a two-edged sword. It is never neutral. The listener who experiences something negative where motion is involved will also remember the experience longer, and more intensely. Just like grabbing vibrating pole, we grab onto negative feelings sooner, longer, and more intensely than positive.
That is because the primitive triune part of our brain-- wired to help us survive -- causes us to respond to appearances of danger more strongly than to those of delight.
3. Speak first of the other person's most current, pressing interest. Just
as those in the market for new cars are most likely to hear car ads on the
radio, all people listen sooner when you first speak about what is most on
their mind at that moment.
Sadly, in fewer than 5% of interactions - even when we want something from someone else - do we first speak about what matters most to them. We are more likely to speak about our own interests first.
4. Speak in the vivid, specific details that have a high emotional value for
the listener.
The good news?
If you practice speaking first about the other person's interests, then about what you share in common, and only then about how that commonality relates to your interests, four amazingly powerful changes occur in how that other person relates to you. The person listens sooner, listens longer, remembers more, and assumes you have a higher IQ than if you first speak about your own interests.
10. Look to Their Positive Intent, Especially When It Appears They Have None
Do not let somebody else determine your words or behavior.
Unfortunately, we are more likely to be vivid in describing what we don’t like than what we do. Yet, as Adlai Stevenson once said, “When you throw mud, you get dirty."
Report in neutral language the negative news and hand any resultant problems back on the person who “caused” them without labeling that person’s behavior: “As we are starting our meeting at ten after, how shall we best use the time?”
Conversely, use emotion-laden language to state the positive and both you and the person you praise will shine: “Your manager was thoughtful enough to send us the plans ahead of this meeting so we are much better prepared to make decision. Please thank him for putting in the extra time to give us a head start on this project.”
Praise what you want to flourish. As you bring out another’s best side (temperament and talents) that person is more likely to see and support yours.
After all, if this is the Age of Engagement, fueled by The Power of Us, then what could be more crucial for you to learn than to create the captivating picture that inspires us to be greater together than apart?
