When You Think They Don't Like You. First Impressions

You meet someone for the first time and perhaps they don't smile, or lean forward or make significant eye contact. Is it you? If you worry about your first impression, you may start to freak out. You don't have to. I am doing research on the brain and how people can make changes in their body language. Self Awareness, discovering what people might think about you is productive, but you don’t need to go overboard.

Years ago my audiences joked that after my seminars they were so self aware, so conscious of all the cues in the perfect handshake, the most sincere smile and all the other body language they learned, they didn't know what to do first. Now and then we talked about how to implement personal behavioral changes into their lives. I was reading the book, "The Mind and The Brain." looking to see how one of the authors, Doctor Jeffery Schwartz, advised his OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) patients to make productive changes in their behavior. I was looking for a method to effectively calm any destructive or paralyzing self consciousness about your first impression. To paraphrase he instructed his patients to follow the Buddhist philosophy of wise attention (as supposed to unwise attention.) Schwartz advises his patients to "Revalue." See things for what they really are rather than as you may imagine them to be. I interpret this to mean. Instead of thinking, "Don't think of pink elephants." "Oh my God, there may be dangerous pink elephants." "Think instead of what is real and what isn’t.”Pink elephants don't exist." "The likelihood of a Pink Elephant coming into this room and stomping me is nil."

Apply this to situations when you are forming a first impression. Instead of meeting someone and thinking, "They didn't smile, they didn't lean forward." "They hate me!" "They are not making eye contact.”Oh they must think I am the biggest dork." See those disturbing thoughts for what they are and as Schwartz says, for his OCD patients he says "Wise attention means quickly recognizing the disturbing thoughts as senseless, as false, as errant brain signals not even worth the gray matter they rode in on, let alone acting on it." In analyzing someone’s behavior towards you in a first encounter instead assess it wisely. Think first the person then the topic or situation. Lastly think of yourself. Here is in more detail

First ask yourself, “What is going on with this person that may be motivating him to act this way?"

Then, what about this situation or what we are talking about may motivate him to act this way and finally, and with the least likelihood, what about I could make him act this way.

Very good advice I think.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://pattiwood.net/. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Virtual Interviewing, Body Language,

Companies are taking virtual interviewing to a new level with Avatar virtual world New Life Interviewing. IT and international companies are using virtual worlds for interviewing.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/09/first-impressions-second-life.html
Friday, September 28, 2007
First impressions, second life
I blogged last week about people working in virtual worlds. But I must admit I didn't think about how the ritual of the job interview might look in a virtual world.

In fact, global consultancy Accenture has already started using job interviews in Second Life to recruit real-life employees. That's what Darren Nicholson at Rowan University, New Jersey, US, told me. He's been studying how teams of IT workers can collaborate using virtual worlds, as an alternative to email or instant messaging.

Since May, two large job fairs attended by multi-national companies including Microsoft and Accenture have been held and, as a result, Accenture spent three days interviewing candidates inside the virtual world at the end of August.

To me, it sounds a little pointless. Unless they were using the still-buggy voice chat in Second Life, it would be much like interviewing using instant messaging. I'd consider the avatars a distraction from the content of a conversation, but Nicholson thinks they make an important contribution:
"When I prepare students for interviews with big companies I advise them how to use the behaviour recruiters are looking for. With an avatar you are even more in control. Are you wearing power red? Are you rearing dark blue? There are so many social indicators that we use in real life that are being transported into virtual universes."
But Nicholson doesn't think virtual interviewees will be able to game interviews more easily. Interviewers will be ready for it, he says. "It could work in their favour - I think you can learn a lot about people by the avatar they create and the way it acts."

Nicholson predicts the IT industry is where the practice will become common first. Teams of software developers are already work together from different parts of the world so it makes sense, he says.

The first place this will be tried on a large scale is probably Beijing. The city government did a deal in May with the producers of a virtual world called Entropia, with a view to shifting thousands of the over-crowded municipality's workers into offices in a virtual city.

Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
Labels: virtual-reality, virtual-worlds

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Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://pattiwood.net/. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

The Power Of A Smile, Research On Smiling And Risky Behavior

The Power of a Smile, Research on Smiling and Risky Behavior 

Research on Smiling and Risky Behavior
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227024.700-cheery-traders-may-encourage-risk-taking.html

Cheery traders may encourage risk taking 07 April 2009 by Peter Aldhous Magazine issue 2702. Subscribe and save for similar stories, visit The Human Brain Topic Guide

WAS it just greed that prompted the risky financial decisions that triggered global economic meltdown, or could other factors have been at work?
Before rushing to condemn the traders and bankers responsible, consider this: perhaps they were in too good a mood. That's the intriguing implication of experiments showing that even a fleeting exposure to a smiling face makes people more likely to make risky investment decisions.
At the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco last week, graduate student Julie Hall of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor described experiments in which 12 male and 12 female volunteers played a game in which they repeatedly had to choose between investing in a "safe" bond and two much riskier stocks.
For every round of the game, the bond paid out $3. One of the stocks paid out $5 half of the time, while the other lost $5 at the...

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

What Stars Posing Body Language Shows...Photos Say More Than "Cheese!"

Find out what Patti Wood, body language expert,
sees behind the poses of these stars. The camera doesn't lie Patti tells US Weekly!
You can check out her insights at the link below!


http://www.scribd.com/doc/37126568/Repeat-Pose-Offenders-US-Weekly



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://pattiwood.net/. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Loneliness and Body Language

Loneliness and Isolation. Five years ago I started a post with the words, "I am lonely today." Have you felt that way recently? As I work on the techno impressions chapter for my new first impressions book I reread what I said about the cost of loneliness. Isolation and lack of community are so much a part of our fast paced lives. Life can be rich and meaningful. It seems amazing to me that I could have ever felt lonely even when I had so many people in my life that I loved. The original post was lost on this blog when I switched host providers so here it is again.


I am lonely today. I got up and got on my computer like so many people hoping to download emails from friends. Sure enough there were emails from friends meeting me tonight for dinner and comedy improv competition and other friends that want to meet for dinner and movie tomorrow night and one from a girlfriend who was just checking in. But I am still lonely. I am sitting at my computer in my big old four bedroom two story house, all by myself. Well there is Bo, the wonder dog, curled up at my feet, but I am so lonely I am resisting the urge to belt out the old 70’s song ALL BY MYSELF. That’s lonely. I don’t think that we were meant to be so lonely and isolated.

We spend so much time working to get the big old car and house and live in suburbs where we can’t hear our neighbors and have to drive to get anywhere…we co-exist rather than live in community. Richard Schwartz, a psychiatrist who co-authored the book, "Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life," with his wife, Jacqueline Olds, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School says, "Our notion of success is being able to purchase what you need and not be obligated to anyone,'' I Want to be obligated to people. I have that with my wonderful friends. I want someone to expect things of me. I want someone to expect me to be there when they call, to love hearing their voice, to enjoy seeing their smile, to think that there company is a delight. I want someone to miss me when they have not seen me in a while. I want intimacy.

Last week I missed my Thursday night discussion group and they called me from the restaurant to find out where I was. That felt so good. It is strangely comforting to be missed. Yet I think we may fear the opposite in our romantic relationship. We may fear becoming so close to someone that we will miss them when they are not there. That is my fear. Or if we allow them to get close to us they will expect things from us that we don’t want to give. Something that is not a problem for me but I know is from experiences with others. And both those fears keep us lonely.

Now you may have read my article about my falling down the stairs weight loss adventure and think, hey you say you are getting hit on all the time, what is with the loneliness? You don’t think I actually follow through with any of those grocery store and parking lot flirting do you? No I just avert my gaze, look down and smile tensely. Romantic Relationships are scary. And even when we are in one, fear can make people in them get very close and then fear that intimacy. Now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with nonverbal communication. Everything. Because when we are scared we respond with our primal Freeze Flight Fight instinctual brain. Our neocortex with all its beautiful language is not accessed. So we stop talking and use nonverbal actions to communicate. We may communicate with silence, distancing and time. I have experienced the rubber band stretch that Mars and Venus relationship Guru John Grey talks about. Romances where the man gets very close then gets scared and stretches out and away like a rubber band then snaps back again and in again and out again. I have wanted to say “It will be OK, we can help each other through our fears.” But fear stops us and we stay silent.

Here is research on the topic.

One of the most fascinating revelations of the last decade is that emotions change the cells in our body. Just as exercise can change your molecular pathways so can emotion. Anger, stress and loneliness are signals for “starvation” and chronic danger. Research shows that lying on the coach watching TV melts our muscles not just because we aren’t jogging but because it isolates us. And positive emotions that come from loving other, building friendships and community actually trigger process in our body that help us build our bodies. Loneliness “melts” our bodies as surely as sedentary living. Optimism, love and community trigger the process of growth, building our bodies, hearts and minds. I am ready to do some growing.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://pattiwood.net/. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.