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Why people should gesture when speaking.

A former audience member asked the following questions recently, "What's the protocol when someone uses their hands when they are speaking?" "Is this in poor taste!" "Do you have any literature out there on this type of body language?" I sent her a chapter from my success signals book to explain why gesturing to emphasize what you are saying can help your speak more eloquently and speak more from your heart. Here is my Success Signals book excerpt.

Gesturing can help you think and speak from your heart. When you gesture you show your personality to your others. Why? Because your arms come out from your heart they show how open and receptive you are to everyone you meet and interact with, so when you open your hands wide and hold them high you show you are open, when you hide them behind your back or glue them to your sides you show you are not willing to embrace the person or situation your in. Personality tests say that the more outgoing you are as a person, the more you tend to use your arms and the more you gesture broadly. The quieter and more introverted the less you move your arms away from your body. How do you gesture and what does it say about you?
Understanding gestures can help you increase your sales they help you think and help you read what other people are thinking. The first thing they do it show your personality to your prospect. Because your arms come out from your heart they show how open and receptive you are to everyone you meet and interact with, so when you open your hands wide and hold them high you show you are open to your prospect when hide them behind your back or glue them to your sides you show you are not willing to embrace the person or situation your in. Personality tests say that the more outgoing you are as a person, the more you tend to use your arms and the more you gesture broadly. The quieter and more introverted the less you move your arms away from your body. How do you gesture and what does it say about you?


We use more gestures when we’re excited or trying to communicate a difficult message. There are more than 100,000 possible hand signals using different combinations of postures, arm, and wrist or finger movements. No wonder we keep on doing that crazy hand jive! As a professional speaker, I use an enormous number of gestures. Research says lecturers make twice as many hand gestures as people who are talking one-on-one. Gesturing actually helps you access information in your brain and helps you form your messages. Think of gesturing as the way you pull out the file cabinet's in your brain to search for information.

To read more you can purchase my body language book at www.PattiWood.net by clicking on products.

Body Language Tools to Build Confidence in Job Interviews

I just responded to a media request for tools to "... prepare people mentally to go into the interview and do the best they can. With the job market in the shape it is in now, people who have an interview are extremely lucky and they cannot afford to become stressed or "psyched out" before talking to a potential employer. I responded.

I am a body language expert I just had a coaching session with a client where we used some of my confidence building tools for job interviews.


One powerful technique to gain confidence and keep yourself from getting stressed during and interview is to imagine the emotions you want the interviewer to have about you and deliver the body language that elicits those emotions. For my client today the emotion he wanted the interviewer to feel was excitement. So you he said the word excitement and then moved and held his body up and leaned forward and gestured as he shared his positive work experiences . He smiled and even laughed as he relayed one particular story. He didn't feel excited in the moment before he started moving his body, he felt afraid. But he said, "It was weird as soon as I brought my shoulders back and smiled and put some energy in my voice I got it sighted." "It felt like I had just had a cup of Starbucks" So go into your interview showing excitement with up, energetic nonverbal behavior. Do know, of course that there are caveats to excitement being the appropriate response. But overall your demeanor can illicit the appropriate emotion for the situation.

A second techniques to build confidence is to move and hold your body “UP!” I created the label UP. to describe all upward posture and movements and facial expressions such as, head held up, gestures with up motions. When we are happy are body naturally moves up and holds itself up. When you hold or move your body the way you would like to feel the posture actually sends a message to the brain, “Hey I am feeling great, positive and up.” As you hold your body the little pharmacy in your brain starts producing the chemicals that match that state, (in as little as a 40th of a second.) and pumps them into your body and you begin to feel up. The combination of your up posture and movement up and chemical up state is felt by the interviewer. They start to give you attentive nonverbal cues and that makes you feel more confident. I call this the fake it till you make it technique. You only have to fake it for a fraction of a second before it actually effects how you feel.

A third tool is to choose a word that expresses how you would like to feel in your interview and then get into a posture that matches it. So if your word is CONFIDENT your put your body in an open position, arms away from your body, legs uncrossed shoulder back heart forward, extending eye-contact for as long as three seconds, and make your voice going down at the end of sentences. (We tend to tighten the vocal chords when we are tense and the high, sometimes screechy sound is not powerful. When we use positive words we can alter how are brain functions by increasing cognitive reasoning and strengthening areas in our frontal lobes. Using postie words in your life more than negative ones can kick-start the motivational centers of the brain, propelling them to action.

And a forth techniques is to use that same magic word to replace any negative thoughts you have about the interview. For example, replace the though, “ I am going to mess up is and forget what to say with your magic word. “I am going to be CONFIDENT and remember what I want to say.”

So imagine confidence and use the word to motivate yourself and move up to be more confident!

E-mail Patti - Patti@PattiWood.net

Body Language of Ed Westwick will be in In Touch Weekly











Today I was asked by In Touch weekly magazine to read the body language of Ed Westwick (the guy on the right) He ended his ended his “bromance” with co-star Chace Crawford (best friend/roomate) and is hanging out with another guy at a basketball game. Tune in Wednesday for the read.

What is Barbie's middle and last name?

My friend Mark just emailed me that Mattel's Barbie was "born" Barbie Millicent Roberts on March 9, 1959. This is important information. Read posts I wrote today on her attractiveness.

Barbie's Birthday and why men are attracted to Barbie's hour glass shape.

Barbie’s Birthday –Why girls and woman buy Barbie’s dolls and Why men our drawn to her hourglass figure.

Why are men attracted to the hourglass shape? Why do men like Barbies girls?

Large-breasted, narrow-waisted women have the highest reproductive potential, according to the newest research. Therefore, it is not a surprise that men are attracted to women with an hourglass shape. The attraction has a biological justification. If men choose to a woman with an hourglass shape they increase the chance that they will bear a child with her. (OK, perhaps not on the top of men's conscious minds when they are out cruising at a bar, put their primal wiring is working at the subconscious level. Their attraction has a biological justification. Poor men they just can’t help themselves. They love Barbie.
The research on the hour glass shape attraction shows that woman with a relatively low waist-to-hip ratio and large breasts had about 30 per cent higher levels of the female reproductive hormone estradiol than do women with other combinations of body shapes. (Research by Dr. Grazyna Jasienska, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow)
Barbie curves are now justified by science.
Writing in Proceedings B, the researchers led by Dr Grazyna Jasienska of Harvard University, said the hourglass figure was popular in Western cultures, but not in others across the world. (Just tell me where a short woman with a big tummy is attractive so I know where to move.)
She said men in non-Western societies did not seem to favor women with hourglass figures, and broader figures, indicating good nutritional status, were considered most attractive. (I think I show good nutritional status, mint thin Girl Scout cookies are very nutritious.)
However, in Western societies, the cultural icon of Barbie as a symbol of female beauty seems to have some biological grounding," added Dr Jasienska.
In Europeans it may well be that the hourglass body shape for women is more highly correlated with fecundity ( ability to get pregnant.) than is the case with other groups and that this is due to average genetic differences. There may have been co-evolution of the hourglass body shape as more fecund along with genetic changes that increased the attraction to that body shape.
The higher level of estradiol translates into 3 times higher likelihood to get pregnant.
"If there are 30 per cent higher levels, it means they are roughly three times more likely to get pregnant," Jasienska, a human biologist, told New Scientist.

The experts tell us that the physical features and characteristics considered to be "beautiful" are in fact subconscious indicators of fertility and good health, while some other features and characteristics are considered”unattractive" because they render a person less fertile or more susceptible to disease and parasite assaults. For example, a woman with an oestrogenized small chin and a small waist-to-hip ratio appears to be beautiful because these are physical features that indicate good fertility, childbearing ability and general health. In addition, of course a man has reciprocal features to indicate his facility to sire healthy children, and (apparently less importantly) support them and the mother.
Judging beauty involves looking at another person and subconsciously figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's genes. We judge each other by nonverbal rules that we're often not even aware of at the conscious level. We may consciously admire Heidi Klum’s legs, but we're also viscerally attuned to small variations in the size and symmetry of facial bones and the placement of weight on the body.
Research correlates the physical attraction of human males to human females to certain basic physical features, regardless of culture. These include:
· signs of youthfulness (vigor, flexibility, bounciness, smooth skin);
· signs of health (clear skin, lack of disease, physical fitness);
· a good figure with an optimal hip-waist ratio and generous bust;
· facial and body symmetry;
· An infant like face.
The possession of beautiful characteristics by a woman acts as a 'certification of biological quality', offering her a significant mating advantage over other women in the competition for partners and reproduction - historically and today. All men are innately attracted to a beautiful woman, and she is thus more likely to be able to attract and select a high quality, high status, man as her mate - but women can often be pragmatic and he may not be the most beautiful (aka most handsome and physically attractive) partner available. It can be argued that women have an inherent ruthless streak that urges them to seek out the most beautiful mate to sire her children, and separately (and if necessary deceitfully) a high value partner who will best look after her and her children. Modern DNA testing is certainly revealing in many instances a woman's children are actually be sired by another, presumably often more "beautiful" man, than their husband - one study found that 1 in 8 of the children tested were probably calling the wrong man "Daddy"!