How Personal Coaching Can Help You
Ranbir Kapoor as appeared on Koffee With Karan, Season 5
Some of us are media shy, others just don’t want to reveal our personal side to every stranger we meet on the street. Then there are times when we want to be in control of how much information we give away about how we are thinking, what we are liking when we are getting happy, when excited. The last two are especially true during sales and negotiations. But little do we know that our limbic brain seldom gives us a chance to control how much we reveal about ourselves. Our body is constantly emitting signals about our thoughts, intentions and emotions as felt by this primitive brain of ours. So how exactly does our body do this, and what can we do about it? See how Personal Coaching works
How our body emits signals
If you think only facial expressions mattered, did you know our face is capable of making around ten thousand different expressions? A mind-boggling number if you sit and think about it. And we are still at the face. The rest of the body is just as transparent in leaking information. Neck, shoulders, torso, feet, thumbs, these are those places where you might least expect body language displays and yet these emit very specific signals. When the entire body’s displays are put together, we derive an overall message. Then comes how you are oriented towards someone, how much space you are comfortable at in someone’s presence, how many things are lying between you and them, how involved you are in greeting someone you meet, the feel and duration of the touch, whether you act like you always do, or differently, and the list goes on.
Where Personal Coaching fits in
When we sit together with you, we first give you an initial assessment of what is your normal “baseline behaviour“. This simply means how you usually react to situations in terms of body displays, like the ones discussed above. There are times when being totally transparent really does not help build a good impression. We are not talking about display rules here. Display rules are when you are taught by your father to give a polite smile to your visiting uncle even when you are not happy to see him. Or when your reaction to your friend’s question about how good is the new dish she just baked is again a nice flattering nod. So then, what are we talking about? Why should we not be transparent? Isn’t that a good thing? Like I explained in the very beginning, there are lots of scenarios in our daily life when being composed and poised can be to our advantage.
Alia Bhatt as observed on Koffee With Karan Season 5
Let me share a very simple example. There was once a seminar I attended not long ago on sexual harassment of women in the workplace. There were three eminent lawyers who individually presented a very nice breakup of the recent laws in the Indian judicial system for this. Once their separate talks ended, they were all put together on the stage for an open forum where anyone from the audience could ask any question. There was one senior lawyer among the speakers who were very transparent in her reactions to her peers on the stage. When she did not like a particular answer of her colleague, she would crunch up to occupy less space, or orient her body away from them, or shake her head very vehemently, close her eyes to display eye blocking, and so on. Now if one was to choose any of the three lawyers to fight a case for them in the future, no points for guessing which one would be definitely out. We form impressions about people not just from how they act but also from how they DON’T act.
So when we coach, the first thing we do, is try and improve those aspects of your baseline behaviour which can help with a bit of tweaking. Next, we work on teaching you to put on body language appearances as fits the occasion. Simply put, if you are a company’s boss and are irritated because of some lost deal yesterday, we teach you to be aware of how you might be leaking that irritation to your employees and thereby teach you to keep your charisma alive for those who respect you and look up to you. If you are home and turn into a loving mother, we teach you to leave the burden of office out of your home premises and interact more effectively with your child. You thus learn how to put on different body language behaviours as per the situation and audience.
Does Personal Coaching change the person you are
Therein lies the trick of your coach. The changes we will be working on will be small ones, taken up step by step to just add composure to your personality, to prevent you from being totally readable when it comes to interactions. The small tweaks will be life changing since they will drastically change the meaning of the message, but since the tweaks will be small, it will take very little conscious effort from your end to put them into action. I have put out a lot of posts which prove how small changes in one’s body language can drastically change the message being emitted. Thus our aim is not to change you as a person, rather to help you be more in command of your body signals, and to teach you how to use the power of nonverbal communication to your advantage.
How can we begin
The only step you need to take is to ping us on our chat window, drop us a message on contact@simplybodytalk.com/demo or call us on our landline 022 67208017. We will schedule a meeting with you to explain how Personal Coaching works, and see if you would like us to work with you so that you can become a better communicator. And don’t worry, we don’t charge for the first meeting!
Picture credit: Hotstar
