According to a recent article published on Psychology Today, researchers have found out that it takes a couple of seconds to make a judgment about a person. I know, it sounds harsh and it says a lot about human nature, but the only best thing we could do is to accept the fact that judgment will determine the success of your presentation, sales, pitch or a chance getting a date. This article will focus on what does nonverbal communications means, the role of emotions and the role of your audience in your nonverbal communication.
You can imagine nonverbal communication as a tool that helps you to express emotions, reveal opinions and personality traits and enhances or changes your own verbal communication. Nonverbal communication consists of tone, speed and volume of your voice, facial expressions, gesticulations, proxemics (use of space), looks and touch. Using nonverbal communication helps your audience to focus easily on the content that you are sending. Even if you think that you are not doing much on your nonverbal communication, such as sloppy posture, mumbling words or not looking people in the eyes, you actually are sending many signals to people about yourself.
The key instrument in understanding nonverbal communications are emotions. Emotions have different meanings across cultures, but there are some universal emotions, which applies to all humans such as fear, anger, joy, sadness and disgrace, fall into this group. These universal emotions help us to relate more to other people and understand them better.
To be a good communicator means to act on your words, but it also means being fully aware of your body language and what kind of messages you are sending to your audience. The individuals should be aware of its own traits, their audience, as well as cultural and social differences among themselves and other people. If you are doing any kind of public speaking, before you prep yourself for the speech, you need to be aware what kind of people does your audience consist of. When you once figured that out, then you can prep yourself better, which it also means how you are going to look, how you are going speak and what kind of reactions or questions you may expect. Additionally, when defining your audience, you should take in notice their social and cultural norms, because not all signals or signs that you are using have the same meaning and by knowing the other people’s cultural and social norms, you can avoid unpleasant or stressful situations.
In my next article, I will focus more on the impact of social and cultural norms on nonverbal communication. If you are interesting more on this topic, I advise you to check out this TEDx Talk by Leyla Tacconi http://bit.ly/2oOTIWg.
Sources:
https://pixabay.com/en/men-women-apparel-woman-man-2425121/
https://pixabay.com/en/chilling-hanging-out-2716425/
Author: Valentina Zajec
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