Page 40 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Facial Expressions and Eye Behaviour
Your face is the primary site for expressing your emotions; it reveals both the
type and the intensity of your feelings. Your eyes are especially effective in
indicating attention and interest, influencing others, regulating interaction,
and establishing dominance. In fact, eye contact is so important that even
when your words send a positive message, averting your gaze can lead your
audience to perceive a negative one. Although the eyes and the face are usu-
ally reliable sources of meaning, people sometimes manipulate their expres-
sions to simulate an emotion they do not feel or to mask their true feelings.
Maintaining eye contact is not important in some cultures. In fact, it can be
considered impolite.

Gestures and Postures
By moving your body, you can express both specific and general messages,
some voluntary and some involuntary. Many gestures—a wave of the hand,
for example—have a specific and intentional meaning, such as ‘hello’ or
‘good-bye’. Other types of body movements are unintentional and express
a more general message. Slouching, leaning forward, fidgeting, and walking
briskly are all unconscious signals that reveal whether you feel confident or
nervous, friendly or hostile, assertive or passive, powerful or powerless.

Vocal Characteristics

Like body language, your voice carries both intentional and unintentional
messages. On a conscious level, we can use our voices to create various impres-
sions. Consider the sentence ‘What have you been up to?’. If you repeat that
question four or five times, changing your tone of voice and stressing upon
various words, you can convey quite different messages. However, your vocal
characteristics also reveal many things that you are unaware of. The tone and
volume of your voice, your accent and the pace of your speaking, and all the
little um’s and ah’s that creep into your speech say a lot about who you are, your
relationship with the audience, and the emotions underlying your words.

Personal Appearance

Your appearance helps establishing your social identity. People respond to
others on the basis of their physical appearance. Because you see yourself as
others see you, these expectations are often a self-fulfilling prophecy. When
people think you are capable and attractive, you feel good about yourself,
and such a feeling affects your behaviour, which in turn affects other people’s
perceptions of you. Although an individual’s body type and facial features
impose limitations, most people are able to control their attractiveness to
some degree. Grooming, clothing, accessories, ‘style’—all modify a person’s

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