An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields
KTLA Anchors dive under their news desk when a 4.4 Earthquake hit Los Angeles.
Take a look at the expression of surprise on the anchorman’s face!
Click here to view the embedded video.
Thank you to our affiliate Eric Goulard for first posting this video on his website!
Want to know why our eyebrows raise and jaws drop when we are surprised?
Find out in our MiX Professional Online Training!
Don’t break eye contact
No, I don’t mean never break eye contact… That would make you look like a lunatic. This tip only applies to when you are doing the talking. Studies show that the Visual Dominance Ratio (VDR) is a reliable indication of who is more dominant in an interaction. So what in the heck is the VDR anyway?? The VDR is the time you spend looking at someone while speaking/ time looking while you are listening. a high VDR means you are in charge. A VDR of 1.00 means that the power is balanced. A VDR of less than 1.00 means that you are the less dominant person in the conversation. So, if you want to feel and be percieved as higher status, always look at who you are talking to, and don’t be afraid to look away occasionally while they are speaking.
Speak 20% slower
Most of us are over caffeinated and in a hurry. It is natural that in a fast paced world we all tend to walk, talk and work faster than ever before.
But did you know that speaking quickly doesn’t make you appear smarter and more driven? It has the effect of making you seem hurried, disorganized, and even un-confident (people with low confidence often speak quickly to avoid being interrupted)
Barak Obama in his 2015 state of the union address speaks at between 100 and 130 words per minute.
If you want to learn to speak more slowly and powerfully here is a good exercise, find a paperback, count off 120 words, and by speaking slowly and pausing often make those 100 words last a whole minute. Do this again and again until you have found a way of speaking slowly which feels natural to you.
Keep your hands visible (and calm)
People feel at eases when they can see your hands. It seems that as humans evolved, it became a good idea to check a persons hands for weapons as we met them.
But more than just making sure we set the other persons mind at ease, using your hands well is important because hands which are making low confidence gestures are more off putting than hands which are making high confidence gestures.
Here is your action tip to make your hands convey confidence when you start a conversation, set your hands in a steeple and make sure to come back to that as your default listening position.
Until next time…
Today, we celebrate the achievements of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a moral and spiritual leader who became a giant of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.
An article on Inc. written by Hitendra Wadhwa, a professor at Columbia Business School explores how MLK wrestled with anger and what we can learn from his example.
He says “Average leaders focus on results, and that’s it. Good leaders focus also on the behaviors that will get the results. And great leaders focus, in addition, on the emotions that will drive these behaviors. One emotion that shapes our behavior is anger, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we commemorate today, knew of the power that came packed in this emotion.”
Dr. Martin Luther King was provoked time and time again, not only by being physically attacked and threatened, but by being harassed and even vilified by fellow black leaders.
Wadhwa says that “great leaders often have a strong capacity to experience anger” but that they “also know the downside of anger, and wage a firm battle to tame it within themselves.”
He concludes his article by stating “Great leaders do not ignore their anger, nor do they allow themselves to get consumed by it. Instead, they channel the emotion into energy, commitment, sacrifice, and purpose. They use it to step up their game. And they infuse people around them with this form of constructive anger so they, too, can be infused with energy commitment, sacrifice and purpose.”
To read the complete article, take a look here
