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Syxth Sense Body Language Blog March 28, 2015

How to win trust fast

In today’s article I am going to teach you a technique which will help you win peoples trust faster than ever before with your body language.When using this body language technique you will notice that people seem to like you more, open up more, trust you more, and as a result of all these things they want to help you.

Sound too good to be true? lets get started.

The technique which I am talking about is called mirroring, it is something which we all do naturally and the most charismatic of us do it a little more adeptly. Mirroring is matching the body language of the person who you are talking to in order to non-verbally show them that you are similar to them. For example, when you observe a couple or good friends, you will notice that they talk the same, walk the same, and even gesture, blink, and breathe at the same rates.

Mirroring is a non-verbal way of saying “I am like you. We use our bodies the same way, and feel and think the same too.” It is pretty easy to see how someone feels based on their posture as I described in my article on anxiety. When our non-verbals match those of the person we are talking to they subconciously understand that we are similar to them. and as Robert Cialdini described in his book “Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion”. one of the main things which makes other people like us is when we are similar to them, be that in how we dress, what we believe,or how we use our body language.

But the real magic of mirroring comes when you learn to consciously send signals to the other persons subconscious. By being in control of how you present yourself to the other persons subconscious mind you develop a huge advantage over people who don’t have this skill, you can win the trust of someone in 10% of the time as anyone who doesn’t know how to use mirroring.

5 tips to start using mirroring today1. Speak at the same speed

When we speak quickly we convey enthusiasm, or nervousness. When we are nervous, we speak faster so that no one can interrupt us.

When we speak slowly we convey just the opposite, boredom or confidence.

By matching the speed of speech to the person you are speaking with you will show them that you are as excited as they are.

If you are feeling adventurous, try to match these other qualities of speech as well

2. Hold your arms in the same rest positions

This technique needs to be done with the word of warning at the bottom of the page in mind.

When you are speaking to someone, start to notice how they rest their arms when they aren’t eating, smoking, gesturing, etc. Are their arms crossed over their chest? Are they folded in their laps? are they on top of their heads?

After noticing their resting arm position for a few minutes try to copy the same general positions. If you notice that they switch between hands on head and hands folded in the lap, do the same. After you have mastered this, move on to more advanced arm mirroring

3. Match their posture

This technique is the most important of all, notice how the person holds their torso, is it expanding or contracting? In Amy Cuddy’s TED talk she describes how high confidence posture is open, and taking up space.

She also describes how low confidence body language is rounding forward and taking up less space, like a beaten dog.

When you match the posture of the person you are speaking with you will notice that your mood changes to feel more engaged or more withdrawn. This is important because matching the posture of the person you are talking with not only conveys to them that you feel the same, but it actually lets you be in their shoes and understand how they feel physiologically

4. For the bold- Match their breathing rate

This technique is a fun thing to try out because it is so damn hard to do! try to notice the breathing rate of the person you are speaking to (this can be done by looking at their shoulders for a rise and fall or at their nostrils when they aren’t speaking.)

Matching breathing rate is normally something reserved for couples or lifelong friends but if you can master it you will notice a big change in how you feel. As experienced meditators know there is a profound connection of the breath and state of mind.

A word of warning *THE PROBLEM

The biggest mistake people make when they are first getting into mirroring other is that they mistake mirroring for copying. They do the exact same thing as the other person at the exact same time. They cross their arms at the same time as the other person, they nod at the same time etc… The problem with this is that it is way too obvious! The other person will be able to tell what you are doing and instead of feeling like you are likable and trustworthy they are going to think you are weird and manipulative

THE SOLUTION

The solution here is to just check in every few minutes. Every 3-5 minutes ask yourself, Am i speaking at the same speed as they are? Are my arms in a similar position as theirs? Is my body language as open as theirs? as closed off as theirs?

When you check in like this your use of mirroring will be much more natural, instead of trying to be the same as the person you are speaking to you are going to come across as similar. And similar is much more attractive than the same

I hope this technique works for you as well as it has been for me. Let me know what your experiences with mirroring in the comments below. I read every one.

Engineering Social Blog March 26, 2015

WHOIS your daddy

GoDaddy's layered verification protections defeated by a phone call and four hours in Photoshop

The Humintell Blog March 26, 2015

Parenting and Emotional Language

If you ask most mothers, they would probably tell you that they speak to their daughters and sons the same way, but research is now suggesting that that isn’t true.

A new study published in The British Journal of Developmental Psychology featured the research of Ana Aznar and Harriet Tenenbaum. Through their study, they concluded that mothers are more likely to use emotional words and emotional content when speaking with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons.

As described in a recent Time Magazine article, “In this new study, researchers videotaped 65 Spanish mothers and fathers along with their 4-year-old and 6-year-old children during a storytelling task and then during a conversation about a past experience. The subjects lived in middle-to-upper-class neighborhoods. On the first visit, the mother or the father and the child were taped in conversation. Within a week, the other parent and the child came in and talked about a similar subject. The videotaped conversations were transcribed and emotion words like “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” “love,” “concern,” and “fear,” were singled out.”

The results? Mothers used a higher proportion of emotional words than fathers did with both 4 and 6-year olds, which is consistent with studies performed in the U.S. However mothers were particularly expressive with their 4-year old daughters. In addition, although fathers didn’t use as much emotional language, they used more with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons.

Why do mothers use more emotional language than fathers? One theory is that mothers may be more comfortable talking about their emotions than fathers. Children might therefore think it is more appropriate for girls to talk about feelings. In fact, daughters were more likely than sons to speak about their emotions with their fathers when talking about past experiences.

Time Reports, “Aznar and Tenenbaum did a few things in this study that made it different from previous ones. They added fathers to the equation, when most studies looking at emotions have focused only on mothers, and they examined Spanish families, which hadn’t been looked at before, because they wanted to see how patterns played out across different cultures.

And most importantly, the authors tested the children to determine their baseline emotional comprehension. They quizzed them on what people in various situations might be feeling and found that emotional understanding was the same for 4-year-old boys and girls. Thus, emotional intelligence is not an innate quality of females. Since the pretest didn’t show that 4-year-old girls understand emotions any better than boys, the fact that parents talk in more emotional terms to daughters over sons can’t be explained away by saying parents do this because they believe girls understand emotions better. “We didn’t find any difference in the children’s understanding of emotions in the pretest,” says Tenenbaum.

Are parents perpetuating stereotypes? “Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive, but don’t know [they] are speaking differently to them,” Tenenbaum says.

Parents should try to teach boys about emotion as much as possible, says Tenenbaum, and use emotion-laden language with both sons and daughters. “We are beyond the point in society where boys are taught never to express emotions,” she says. “We need to model for them how to appropriately express emotions. These are learned stereotypes and we are reinforcing them as a society.”