People often wonder how representative Non-Verbals are when
it comes to understanding people. Some are people are concerned with the
consistency and universality of some of the concepts of NVC. Also, some people
also want to know the degree of conscious control that can be exerted on your
own non-verbals, which would lead those who can interpret it to be thrown off.
I want to share an experience from one of the workshops I
conducted a few weeks back that is an amazing example of the power of nonverbal
communication, and its usefulness in conveying the truth in any social
situation.
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We were talking about status and dominance, and a
participant wanted to know how he may tackle a few bullies who dominate him in
certain social situations; he wanted to know how he could come off as equal
status by using his non-verbals, because he was annoyed with constantly being
in a subversive position with regard to certain individuals. So we decided to
do a little role play, where he was to be domineering. It just so happened that
taking up those large and self-assured body positions were hard for him, so
much so that we had to get back to the exercise at the end of the program! When
we did try it again, there was a large change, and he did manage maintaining
strong eye contact with me, a huge sign of him not backing down.
What followed from that was what was what assured me that no
matter what, your nonverbals can give away a lot of information that the other
person may try to hide, by default in an attempt to portray something else. We
spoke of this concept called mirroring (where an individual who is in agreement
or looks up to you will mimic your body posture without consciously realizing
it). So anyway, our participant was doing a great job taking the dominant
position from me in our role play, when I decided to shoot my hands behind
myself. And almost like hypnosis, so did our participant. Going to show that
although he did come off as challenging my dominance, he jumped at the
opportunity to follow my lead. This was a natural reaction, since I had spent
the past two days with them and we had set up a good rapport.
There is another take away from this experience. If your
feelings are not congruent with your nonverbals, i.e., you are trying to give
radiate a certain state of mind (confidence, dominance, sadness, happiness) and
you are not feeling it internally, your true feelings are soon going to betray
your attempts to fake a disposition.
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