carrer success tips

When you stand with your feet close together, you can seem hesitant or unsure of what you are saying. But when you widen your stance, relax your knees and center your weight in your lower body, you look more solid and confident.

In the workplace, the quality of your voice can be a deciding factor in how you are perceived. Speakers with higher pitched voices are judged to be less empathic, less powerful and more nervous than speakers with lower pitched voices. One easy technique I learned from a speech therapist was to put your lips together and say Um hum, um hum, um hum. Doing so relaxes your voice into its optimal pitch. This is especially helpful before you get on an important phone call where the sound of your voice is so critical.

To display confidence and be perceived as upbeat and positive, think of a past success that fills you with pride and confidence. (This doesnt have to be taken from your professional life although I do encourage clients to keep a success log so that they can easily find an event.) Then recall the feeling of power and certainty and remember or imagine how you looked and sounded. Recalling that genuine emotion will help you embody it as you enter the meeting room or walk up to the podium.

Research into the effects of body posture on confidence, conducted at Harvard and Columbia Business Schools, has shown that simply holding your body in expansive, high power poses (leaning back with hands behind the head and feet up on a desk, or standing with legs and arms stretched wide open) for as little as two minutes stimulates higher levels of testosterone the hormone linked to power and dominance and lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.Try this before your next important business meeting, and I guarantee you will look and feel more confident and certain. In addition to causing hormonal shifts in both males and females, these poses lead to increased feelings of power and a higher tolerance for risk. The study also corroborated my observation that people are more often influenced by how they feel about you than by what youre saying.

You may be an introvert, you may be shy, or your cultural background may have taught you that extended eye contact with a superior is not appropriate, but businesspeople from the U.S., Europe, Australia (and many other parts of the world), will expect you to maintain eye contact 50 60% of the time. Heres a simple technique to improve eye contact Whenever you greet a business colleague, look into his or her eyes long enough to notice what color they are.

Brain imaging has shown that a region called Brocas area, which is important for speech production, is active not only when were talking, but also when we wave our hands. Since gesture is integrally linked to speech, gesturing as you talk can actually power up your thinking. Whenever I encourage clients to incorporate gestures into their deliveries, I find that their verbal content improves, their speech is less hesitant, and their use of fillers (ums and uhs) decreases. Experiment with this and youll find that the physical act of gesturing helps you form clearer thoughts and speak in tighter sentences with more declarative language.

Keeping your movements relaxed, using open arm gestures, and showing the palms of your hands the ultimate see, I have nothing to hide gesture are silent signals of credibility and candor. Individuals with open gestures are perceived more positively and are more persuasive than those with closed gestures (arms crossed, hands hidden or held close to the body, etc.) Also, if you hold your arms at waist level, and gesture within that plane, most audiences will perceive you as assured and credible.

You see lecturers, politicians and executives use this hand gesture when they are quite certain about a point they are making. This power signal is where your hands make a steeple where the tips of your fingers touch, but the palms are separated. When you want to project conviction and sincerity about a point youre making, try steepling.

Smiles have a powerful effect on us. The human brain prefers happy faces, and we can spot a smile at 300 feet the length of a football field. Smiling not only stimulates your own sense of well being it also tells those around you that you are approachable and trustworthy.Research from Duke University proves that we like and remember those who smile at us and shows why we find them more memorable. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the Duke researchers found that the orbitofrontal cortices (a reward center in the brain) were more active when subjects were learning and recalling the names of smiling individuals. Most importantly, smiling directly influences how other people respond to you. When you smile at someone, they almost always smile in return. And, because facial expressions trigger corresponding feelings, the smile you get back actually changes that persons emotional state in a positive way.

Since touch is the most powerful and primitive nonverbal cue, its worth devoting time to cultivating a great handshake. The right handshake can give you instant credibility and the wrong one can cost you the job or the contract. So, no dead fish or bone crusher grips, please. The first makes you appear to be a wimp and the second signals that you are a bully.