How do others perceive you?

Whether you are 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 to detect a comfortable confidence – and to detect another’s degree of comfort – will always play a huge role in your ability to get things done through others and to succeed.

Here are some early warning signs of 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.

○   Breathing fast and shallow: Indicates the presence of emotions.

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 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.

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 bouncing 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.

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 titled slightly forward, as if ready to spring into action, actually expressing a life-long 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 in 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 you would like to get off your chest, or your back?

Your body speaks to you all 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.

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.

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 20 minutes when you are sitting and working. Try to walk, hopefully in sync with someone else, in fresh air and sunlight, at least 30 minutes a day. As Dr. Dean Ornish wrote in his 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 other is to walk with them. Walk farther to the restaurant. Walk with your loved one, rather than sitting at home, to come down from your day together. Motions is emotional and makes every event more vivid and memorable. Literally move toward the one want in your life and loosen up together. Your life could depend on it. In fact, why not get up right now and take a stretch, look around, call someone, and suggest a walk?

© Kare Anderson. All Rights Reserved.