What you say without even talking

My Master’s degree includes a variety of career events at the university. Company representatives visit and talk about interesting topics that are relevant in their companies and professional lives or the career perspectives students have in their companies. 

Sometimes, however, it is not what representatives say, but how they behave that is actually most interesting.

Just last week, we had three female representatives visiting. At the end of their presentations, a Q&A-session took place. I realized that I perceived one of these women as more competent than the others, even though I had only heard a short presentation by each of them and could by no means judge their professional performance. So what caused my perception?

Having a closer look at each of the women gave me a clue: the one woman that I assumed to be more competent was sitting on her chair in an upright position and looking attentively into people’s faces. Another woman was somehow crouching on her chair and often stared to the floor in a forward-bent position. The third woman was constantly playing with a strand of hair. In no way do I want to deny these women’s individual professional competence, but it was startling how much influence their posture had on me.

Paying attention to your body language 

This incident reminded me to pay more attention to my own posture when being in a professional environment! I also googled this topic and would like to share an interesting finding:

by now, we probably all know that we should have a firm, but not too strong hand shake, make eye contact and stop fidgeting (which could be playing with your hair, picking at your nails or displaying some other nervous action). But I had not heard about the following concept before:

The social gaze vs. the look of business

Women often tend to use the social gaze when they should actually use the look of business. The difference lies in where your eyes are focusing when you are talking to somebody. 

source

Focusing on the eyes-to-forehead triangle signals a no-nonsense approach, while shifting your eyes to the mouth of a person can be misinterpreted as flirty.  This does not mean that we should never use a social gaze in business environments, but rather that we should pay attention to the individual effect of where our eyes go.

Next time you go to an important event or meeting, just take a minute to think about your posture and adjust appropriately!

Carolin