Body Language Tips for Career Success

Body language can be a booster to career success. It can help you build positive professional relationships, as well as influence and motivate the people around you in the workplace. Even better, body language can help you improve productivity, bond with team members, present your ideas better, and do a lot of other things that are instrumental to career success.

Sit up straight

Good posture not just makes you feel good about yourself, it also has the potential to impress those around you. Good posture affects your health and will play into how people perceive you at the workplace. Body language specialists emphasize that how you sit affects your breathing patterns, and even how you speak. So, make sure that you sit upright before you host that new client in your office, or make that outbound call. Good posture radiates confidence.

Stand tall

Status, power, and confidence are displayed nonverbally through the use of space and height. By holding your shoulders back, keeping your posture upright, and your head high makes you look self-assured. When you stand, you look assured and powerful to those who are seated. If you’re seated, you can appear more confident by positioning both your feet flat on the floor, then widening the arms away from the rest of your body.

Lower your pitch

Your voice quality can determine how you’ll be perceived in the workplace. Speakers who have high-pitched pitch are deemed to be less powerful, less empathic, and quite nervous compared to those with a low-pitched voice. If your voice pitch often goes high, you might want to spend a few minutes every day trying some easy voice therapy techniques.  There are hundreds of articles on how to do this online!

Power Trimming

To succeed in your career, you’re better off if you’re perceived as positive and upbeat. Well, think about your past successes that fill you with confidence and pride. Recall the feelings of power that you derived from these successes. Visualize how you sounded, and looked, the certainty you had within you. Recalling such genuine emotions can help you embody them while you walk to the podium, or an important meeting room.

Keep eye contact

Most business leaders expect you to maintain eye contact for about 50-60% of the conversation. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an introvert, whether you are shy, whether your cultural background teaches you otherwise. You can start practicing this simple tip that can help boost career success anytime. Whenever you’re greeting a work colleague, maintain eye contact just long enough to notice the color of their eyes.

Master the power pose

A study done by the Columbia and Harvard business school shows that holding your body in the ‘high-power’ pose increases levels of testosterone, and diminishes levels of cortisol (stress hormone). Testosterone is the hormone associated with power and dominance. Before an important meeting, try to hold your body in the ‘high-power’ pose, it’ll make you look certain and confident.

Use open gestures

By keeping movements relaxed, and taking advantage of the open-arm gesture, as well as showing the palms, you’re communicating a message of ‘see- I have nothing to hide’. This will be perceived to be a silent signal of candor and credibility by your audience. Individuals who exhibit open gestures are often perceived positively and happen to be more persuasive than those with closed gestures.

Of course, there are many other body language tricks that you should learn if you want to give your career a body-language success boost. But the list above is a good place to start.

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