My best friend is a college English professor. She edited my book Snap, Making the Most of First Impressions Body Language and Charisma several years ago and was struck by my information on the importance of first impressions and handshakes in the assessment of a speaker. I shared that I took the importance of handshakes and first impressions to heart and always shake hands with my audience members before my speeches around the country, even if I have 500 audience members I stand at the door and greet them with a handshake.
She had been teaching for over a decade and because of this information, she began changing her body language in each semester's first class. She stood at the door and greeted each student. She was stunned to discover that creating rapport with her students improved. Telling me that the connection and back-and-forth conversations with her students use to take several classes and now she felt their comfort and connection immediately and started having amazing discussions in the very first class of the semester.
It's not surprising. A Harvard University study analyzed the
nonverbal aspects of good teaching. Harvard teaching fellows were videotaped,
and a 10-second silent piece of that video was shown to outside
observers, who were asked to rate the teachers on a 15-item checklist of
personality traits. Even when Ambady cut the video back to 5 seconds--even to 2
seconds--the ratings remained the same. All the important stuff happened,
apparently, in the first 2 seconds. The researchers Ambady and Rosenthal discovered that a
person's conclusions after watching that 2-second video clip of a teacher he
has never met are very similar to the conclusions reached by classroom
participants after an entire semester's exposure.
