To improve specific facets of your nonverbal communication
Eye contact
People are considered more confident, interested, and trustworthy when they maintain good eye contact with the person they’re speaking with. That doesn’t mean fixing your partner in a death stare. Instead, look them in the eyes for three seconds or so, then glance away for a moment before meeting their gaze again.
In general, you should make more eye contact when you’re listening, which is easier to do. When you’re speaking, it’s okay to look away more, which often happens naturally as you get distracted by trying to put together what you want to say. When talking to a group, spread your eye contact among everyone.
Poor eye contact can be nothing more than a bad habit, but people often avoid looking others in the eye because they find it too intense and intimidating. Having a tendency to get lost in your head during conversations can also hinder good eye contact. Here’s what can help:
- If eye contact makes you nervous, start with social situations you can handle and build up to the harder ones. Maybe you can’t look an attractive authority figure in the eye, but you can manage when you’re interacting with a restaurant server or sales clerk. As mentioned, you’ll likely find it easier to maintain eye contact when you’re listening rather than talking.
- Two safe ways to practice are to watch TV and make eye contact with the characters on the screen, and to stand in front of a mirror and meet your own gaze.
- You don’t have to look right into the center of people’s eyes. Looking between or close by them will still register as eye contact from the other person’s perspective.
- Give your eye muscles time to get into better shape. If you’re used to always looking down and away in conversations, it can be tiring to continually look up at someone’s face and hold your focus on it.
Resting facial expression
Ideally you want your neutral face to look relaxed, happy, and approachable. You don’t need to walk around grinning like a clown at all times, but it’s good if you can seem reasonably content. Some people create the wrong impression because their face unintentionally looks nervous, bored, angry, zoned out, or unfriendly. There are a few reasons this can happen:
- They actually are feeling that way and may not be aware of it (for example, they’re more checked out than they realize at the office Christmas party).
- Their facial features naturally make them look that way (for example, someone with large eyes may seem more stunned and nervous; someone with a prominent brow may look angrier).
- Their overall look matches a stereotype (for example, if someone dresses in a stereotypical hippie or stoner style, people may read their neutral expression as zoned out and dopey).
- They don’t always give off a misleading expression, but some of their moods can be mistaken for others ones (for example, they look annoyed when they’re tired, or bored when they’re deep in thought).
As with other facets of your nonverbal communication, your resting expression may shift as you change your mentality and social skills. If you tend to look nervous, that may go away as you become more comfortable around people.
You may start to look more relaxed and happy at parties, rather than bored, when you know how to mingle and unlock their fun. It’s too draining to do all the time, but when it’s important to do so, you can consciously try to wear a happy, approachable facial expression; simply smile slightly, open your eyes more, and relax your features.
If you’re tall, lower your chin so you don’t accidentally look down your nose at people. You may also be able to adjust the impression you create with some tweaks to your grooming, style, and posture.
For example, if your eyebrows are naturally downturned and grouchy looking, a little plucking may change the vibe they give off. If you’re a big, imposing guy, some changes to your fashion may make you seem less intimidating. If you have a wide-eyed, fretful expression, better posture may help cancel out its effect and create a more confident overall look.
Voice
There are two aspects to having a decent speaking voice. The first is to be able to speak smoothly, pleasantly, and at a good volume. The second is being able to get your message out in a way that shows you’re reasonably confident in yourself and what you’re saying.
Voice volume
If you’re shy and unsure of your opinions, you may speak with an overly quiet voice. The easiest way to talk with more volume and projection is to speak from down low in your abdomen, which is more resonant than when you use your throat to make higher-pitched sounds. Singing, acting, and public speaking lessons can teach you to use your voice more effectively. You may have to face a fear of making yourself heard and being the center of attention. If your voice is always quiet, not just in certain situations, there may be a physical cause, like weak vocal chords. See a speech therapist to rule that out.
Voice quality
Most people’s voice quality is fine, but some have issues like stuttering or speaking with an unusual tone or cadence. Speech therapy can help in these cases too.
Voice conviction
The book has already mentioned the usefulness of bringing up your issues and insecurities in a “no-big-deal” tone a couple of times, so you already have a sense of how the way you say something can change the way it’s received.
A somewhat cynical observation is that if you watch popular people socialize, they often aren’t saying anything that interesting or clever, but because they’re speaking with conviction, everyone around them finds them compelling.
It’s too much to conclude, “As long as you seem sure of yourself, you can say whatever dumb things you want,” but you do need to nonverbally package your statements. When you’re surer of yourself and your opinions, you’ll naturally start to express yourself more confidently.
Your statements will also seem more selfassured if other aspects of your nonverbals, like your eye contact and posture, are strong. Here are some more direct ways to speak with conviction:
- Purposely try to speak in a relaxed but assured tone that communicates, “This is a perfectly natural, acceptable, interesting thing to say right now.”
- Speak with enough volume to be heard.
- Speak clearly. Don’t mumble or talk into your chest.
- Don’t speak too quickly in a rush to get your point out or not take up too much time.
- Be reasonably concise. Know what you want to get across, rather than rambling on.
- Try to cut down on filler words and sounds such as “Like” or “Uh…” (if you need a moment to think, being silent for a split second is better). Everyone uses filler words sometimes, but overdoing it can make you seem ditzy.
Overall expressiveness
In addition to your facial expressions, expressiveness comes from varying your voice and the gestures you make. If your face is always a blank mask, you speak in a monotone, and you don’t move your hands or body much, you’ll seem flat and bored, and be hard to read.
On the other hand, being overly expressive and animated can make you seem fake, flighty, or agitated. Aim to hit whatever the typical level of expressiveness is for your culture. If you’re under-expressive, you’ll have to consciously force yourself to gesture more often and put on a smile when you want to seem cheerful.
More than with many of these points, this feels very clunky and unnatural at first, but showing a wider range of emotion will feel more normal in time. Again, as you get more comfortable in your own skin, you’ll likely naturally start to be more expressive.
If you’re over-expressive you’ll need to do the opposite and tone down your gestures and facial expressions. This can also feel artificial and restrictive at first, but will become easier with time.
Body language
In day-to-day social situations, you want body language that makes you seem relatively confident, relaxed, friendly, approachable, and happy. This involves
- having open body language;
- holding yourself in a loose, non-tense, and non-rigid way;
- absence of nervous or fidgety gestures like rubbing your hands on your pants or tapping your foot;
- absence of unintentionally bored or disrespectful-seeming actions, like looking around the room or fiddling with nearby objects.
You want your body language to seem self-assured, but casual and relaxed. If you come off as overly confident, you will seem like you belong at a sales convention, not a ho-hum social gathering.
You also don’t want to veer into confrontational or overly dominant territory (that is, standing with your chest puffed out, body too rigid and rooted in place, hands planted defiantly on your hips, invading other people’s space, or resting your hands on people’s shoulders).
Sure, maybe you’ll need to act like that if you’re living in a rough neighborhood where only the strong survive. But in most social situations, that kind of body language will either make you look angry and unstable, or like you’re a jerk who’s trying too hard to be the top dog at the expense of connecting with people in a friendlier way.
Posture
The most attractive, confident posture is when you’re standing upright with your head and shoulders back, though not in a standing-at-attention way. There are two main types of poor posture.
The first is slouching—when your shoulders are hunched and rounded, and your head juts too far forward. The second is anterior pelvic tilt, which makes you look like you have a potbelly, even if you’re thin.
This poor posture occurs when your hips tilt too far downward and your lower back arches too far inward, causing your butt and stomach to stick out. Posture problems are caused by muscle imbalances that pull your body out of alignment.
In slouching, the chest muscles are tight, while the ones in the back are relatively weak. With the anterior pelvic tilt, the lower back and hip flexors (the muscles near your hips that raise your knee up) are too tight, while the abs and butt are weaker. These issues can develop due to factors like slumping in front of a computer too much, compensating for old injuries, or simply from entrenched habits. Some less-confident people slump their shoulders because they chronically feel defeated or don’t believe in themselves enough to walk tall. Genetic differences in spine curvature can lead to posture issues as well. To improve your posture, you need to strengthen your weaker muscles and increase flexibility in the tighter ones. If you slouch, you need to stretch your chest and work out your upper back. If your pelvic tilt is out of whack, you need to regularly stretch your hip flexors and lower back, and work your abs and gluteal muscles. If you log a lot of hours sitting at a computer, change the ergonomics of your work station so it encourages you to sit up straight.
Use of personal space
Confident people are comfortable taking up their reasonable share of personal space. To do this, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and don’t be afraid to use the occasional bigger arm gesture. Don’t swing your hands around wildly and try to claim six feet in every direction, but don’t be shrunken and huddled up either. Avoid unintentionally getting too close to anyone.
Some people default to speaking at a distance that’s too close to the person they’re talking to. Observe what distances people in your area talk at and try to do the same. You may also have a larger need for personal space and tend to pull back when people try to talk to you at a distance that seems natural to them.
If your space bubble is impractically large, it can make you seem like you’re scared of or uninterested in people. Try to get used to standing closer to people. Don’t force yourself to put up with someone who’s standing too close and being too familiar, but if you’re having a casual conversation with someone who’s at a reasonable distance and you find yourself wanting to retreat, try to override the urge.
Your use and acceptance of touch
You don’t need to touch others very often to do well in social situations. However, if you’re uneasy touching people in even the most casual, friendly way —say, by giving a light hug good-bye or touching someone’s shoulder to get their attention—you can get used to it through purposeful practice. Start with the types of touch that make you the least uncomfortable and then build up to the ones that you’re more hesitant to do.
If you notice people often retreat from your touch, it’s a sign you may be doing it too much, too soon, and in too familiar a way. Some people are uneasy with being casually touched and may flinch or show discomfort when someone else touches them.
If that describes you, you can get more used to being touched by consciously being aware when it might be coming and forcing yourself not to react in a tense or jumpy way. With time, it won’t faze you as much. Again, this does not mean you should put up with touching that’s blatantly over the “casual and friendly” line.
Grooming and sense of style
How you dress or groom yourself affects how other people see you. If fashion isn’t on your radar and you don’t dress in the most flattering way, you may cause some people to unnecessarily write you off or assume negative things about you, like you’re boring or don’t take good care of yourself.
Don’t worry, though. You don’t need to become obsessed with clothes or completely overhaul your appearance to have a happy social life. The majority of people dress fine.
They won’t win any style awards, but the impression they make through their looks isn’t holding them back either. People can err two ways in their style and grooming:
- The first, rarer one is when they make cut-and-dried errors like having bad breath, body odor, or unkempt facial hair; wearing clothes with holes or stains in them; or sporting classically unfashionable combinations like shorts, sandals, and pulled-up white socks. If you’re making any mistakes at this level, then saying you should fix them is going to be this book’s closest thing to mandatory advice. Fortunately, these are easy problems to fix once you’re aware of them.
- The second is when someone isn’t making any flagrant mistakes, but their overall sense of style is below average for the town or city they live in. They dress and groom themselves in a bland, frumpy, or unflattering way. If you fall into this category, you don’t have to change. Lots of people who are indifferent to fashion have good social lives. However, polishing your appearance wouldn’t hurt.
Maybe you’re worried your fashion sense isn’t good enough. However, just because you’re reading a section on style and grooming mistakes doesn’t mean you’re necessarily making any.
It’s possible your appearance is okay as it is. If you want to know if there are any areas where you could improve, try asking some friends or acquaintances for their opinion. You can also upload some photos of yourself in typical outfits to fashion-related message boards online and get feedback.
Say you learn you could stand to polish your style. People often have stronger reactions to the idea of having to dress better than they do to things like improving their posture or speaking volume:
- Many people have been picked on in their youth for wearing the “wrong” clothes by peers who seemed overly concerned with the superficial parts of life. When these people are older, they carry baggage about dressing well. They see it as shallow and may even feel like they’re letting the enemy “win” if they begin to focus on it themselves.
- More generally, someone may not personally care much about fashion and resent the fact that they’re forced to devote energy to it because the rest of the world thinks it’s important.
- Some shy, self-conscious people have a fear of standing out and making waves. One way they unconsciously manage it is by wearing very conservative, nondescript outfits. When they’re told they should dress with a little more panache, it triggers their anxiety, and they react with a self-protective hostility.
- They have poor self-esteem and think they don’t deserve to look nicer.
- They have an overly rigid self-image and equate dressing even slightly differently with giving up everything about who they are.
Developing your style
This subsection won’t list a bunch of rudimentary fashion and grooming tips like “brush your teeth every day”, “wear clothes that fit you well”, or “regardless of your body type, you’ll look better if you’re fit.” If you previously didn’t give much thought to your hygiene or style, once you’re tuned in to it it’s easy enough to look up guides on those topics and figure out what to adjust.
This post is also not going to give you any specific clothing suggestions, because what’s considered good style varies immensely depending on your age, subculture, and the region of the world you’re living in. Instead, here are some general guidelines on improving your style on your own:
- Don’t feel you have to become a fashion connoisseur to improve your look. There are advantages to having above-average dress sense, but it takes time and effort to get to that point, and the typical person isn’t going to think less of you if you don’t look like you stepped off a fashion runway. You just need to dress on par with the other people in your city. That doesn’t mean you have to mindlessly adopt the same uniform as them. You just need an average level of fashion knowledge.
- You can’t develop a better sense of style in a week. You’ll improve your instincts little by little as you read up on the topic, observe how other people dress, experiment with your own look, and get feedback from the people in your life about what suits you best. Practically, this means don’t go out tomorrow and spend a bunch of money in an attempt to overhaul your wardrobe. Learn and buy a little at a time.
- Changing your look, even for the better, may make you uncomfortable. As you’re trying on new clothes, you may think things like, “That’s not me. I’m not the type of person who wears this stuff.” When you first wear a new type of outfit, you may feel like everyone on the street notices how weird and different you look. Try to push your comfort zone. You may be surprised at how, within a few days, you’ll feel comfortable in outfits that initially made you feel like you were playing dress-up.
- Fashion-savvy friends can help you tweak your look, but any one person can be hit-or-miss, because their sense of what looks good may not match yours. You can get better feedback by consulting a range of people. If everyone at your job or in your social circle says they like your new haircut, you know you’re on the right track.
- Try to get a sense of how people in your area and demographic are styling themselves. You can do this by people watching. A less conventional but efficient way to check out a lot of people’s styles at once is to join a free dating site, make a fake empty profile, and then look at who’s in your city. Ask yourself: What are some of the broad style categories people fit into? What distinguishes the sharper-looking people from the more generic or poorly dressed ones?
- Find a good-looking haircut for your face. That might involve growing it out or cutting it much shorter. If you have hard-to-manage hair, take the time to learn how to properly handle it (for example, by changing your shampooing routine or using products to control frizz).
- Glasses can look great if they’re the right frames on the right person as the right accessory of a larger style package. Glasses can just as easily send the signal of “stereotypical dork.” If you wear glasses, consider whether you’d look better in contacts. They’re not as expensive or high maintenance as you may think. If not, make sure to choose frames that look stylish on you and jell well with your overall look.
- If you have a more bland style, you’re at risk for two mistakes when buying clothes:
- Going too far and buying clothes that are overly flashy and gaudy;
- Not going far enough and seeing run-of-the-mill clothes as too colorful for you. With experience you’ll get better at finding that middle ground, but when you’re just beginning to add pieces to your wardrobe, get a second opinion from a sales clerk or friend.