Are you saying one thing in an interview, only to have your body language convey something different? Do you sound confident, but avoid eye contact and undercut your voice? Read this article for resources on how to make your body language sync with your vocal language.
Whether you've gone on dozens of interviews yourself, or conducted dozens more, it's always worth a little time brushing up on your interview skills - especially the ones that most people aren't even trying to control, despite how helpful (or damaging) those skills might be.
We're talking about body language, and if you've made it to the short list of candidates being interviewed for that executive position, there's no sense in getting sabotaged by some errant twitch you never knew you had.
Get a leg up on your competition by mastering some of these simple tricks:
* Maintain the right eye contact with your interviewer - not too little, AND not too much, according to Nick Morgan's "The Truth Behind the Smile and Other Myths - When Body Language Lies," a 9/30/2002 article for Working Knowledge, the Harvard Business School publication for faculty research. If you avoid eye contact when answering a question, the interviewer gets suspicious. Worse, staring down the interviewer makes them uncomfortable, and could be interpreted as a form of flirtation. Yes, flirtation.
* Keep your extraneous body motions to a minimum. In other words, don't fidget - it makes you look nervous and unprepared. You'll find more red flags for your body behaviors in Carmine Gallo's "7 Body Language Killers" article on AskMen.com.
* Like your mother told you, sit up straight, and don't cross your arms - present yourself as confident and poised, not defeated and defensive. You'll get more in this vein out of the "Body Language in Business" 5-page article at BizHelp24.com.
Use those resources to start making notes about your body language in your current interviews. Identify which ones went well, what your body language was like, and how you felt emotionally in those interviews. It could be the key to improvement - and landing the executive position you want.
And here's one last tip: You've probably heard of doing role-playing for interviews, but why not take it one step further? If you're going to do it, how about recording it?
Set up the camera, record your role-play, then watch it back with your interviewer. Put on your best sports commentator hat, and pretend that's not you on screen. (It can be very hard to watch yourself dispassionately like that.)
Instead, parse every little bit of body language as though it's someone else - someone you can learn from, who does some things right and others wrong, and who, with a little bit of practice, can become truly proficient in making sure the gestures match the words coming out of his or her mouth.
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