marmar592 said:
Thanks to all of you guys? I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
Would post my thoughts soon... anyone else has another opinion?
The advice in this thread seems OK, but I don't think anybody really answered your question the way you wanted it answered, so let me venture out there with my opinion.
I think the big thing here is that you are trying to fix inward problems with ******d solutions. You want a hard, fast solution overnight to something that, honestly, takes YEARS to acquire.
So, let me tell you what you need to do. YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR FOCUS. Instead of looking OUT and trying to find a quick fix, you need to shift your focus INSIDE and decide what it is that is holding you back.
How do you do that?
START SMALL.
What I mean by that is you've got to start at the beginning and analyze the LITTLE things that you do that you do so often and the habits that define you in such a way that you don't even notice them anymore.
I'm challenging you right now! From this moment forward, I've got a small exercise for you to do. And it's easy. It's so easy, but so powerful that you'll wonder why you didn't think of it sooner. I assert that you blend into a crowd because of the way you present yourself...Rather, do you present yourself as outgoing and CONFIDENT? Or do you present yourself as a "blender"?
Start now...
1. Lift your head up. Pay attention to the postion of your head. Do you find yourself looking down at the ground or looking away when confronted? If so, then you need to consciously take control of this and make a conscious effort to hold your head up straight forward. A simple way to internalize this is that for every doorway you walk through, imagine there is a paper clip hanging from a string at the same level as the bottom of your nose. Whenever you walk through a door lift your head in such a way as if you are going to take said paper clip and put it in your mouth. Every doorway you walk through do this. This will get you to shift your head up straight and look straight forward. And the reason I mention every time you walk through a doorway is because you walk through A LOT of doorways in any given day. So keep your head up straight and look straight ahead.
2. Next, EYE CONTACT. This is a KEY element of CONFIDENT people. You want to make eye contact with everyone you meet. Everyone you see you want to SEARCH for their eyes and MAKE EYE CONTACT. Be brazen enough to actually SEARCH THEIR EYES OUT. Confident people make eye contact and they DON'T BREAK EYE CONTACT UNTIL THE OTHER PERSON BREAKS EYE CONTACT FIRST.
3. Thirdly, confident people don't slouch. Keep your shoulders up and walk straight. I don't mean to be all stiff and uppity, I just mean to consciously elevate your body to walk with an air of confidence. It's amazing the power that changing your body language can acheive. If you keep your head up, make eye contact with everybody you meet, and you stand up straight, you WILL notice a difference in your level of confidence over time (sometimes almost immediately).
4. Finally, when you make eye contact and then the person makes eye contact with you, GREET THEM! This is powerful. Don't wait for them to greet you, YOU GREET THEM. Search people out just to make eye contact with them and greet them. You don't have to engage in conversation, you just want to get yourself into the habit of carrying yourself as if you are the life of the party and these people do these things. They stand up straight, they make eye contact, they are social and they greet people and they are confident enough to hold eye contact and to focus on the things they want without being "creepy".
That is the very beginning. That is the first step. That is, in the most simple manner, the thing you want to do FIRST. If you want to be the life of the party, then you need to present yourself as such.
Next, after you've mastered the idea of presenting yourself confidently with your body language, you want to present yourself confidently with your speech. Pay attention to the way you talk. Learn a new word everyday and USE IT IMMEDIATELY in your conversation. It's amazing how a person with a colorful vocabulary can command people's attention. For example:
Let's say that you walk through a door, you hold your head up straight, you look straight ahead, you make eye contact with them, and then you say:
"How are you doing?"
And they answer "Fine, how are you?"
Most people will answer with the usual stuff like "fine", "ok", "not too bad", etc. What if, instead, when someone asked you how you were doing you said something like "Fabulous" or "Fantastic!" and you say it with ENThUSIASM! You say it with passion and power. You pull your words from your diaphragm instead of your nose and you speak comfortably with a deeper tone as opposed to a nasal tone.
See what I'm saying? See how the tiny, simple habits from day to day can effect the bigger changes you need to make? See how when you let the little things go, the bigger things get affected? SO CHANGE THE LITTLE THINGS. Bring it with passion. Get inside of your head and coach yourself to be CONFIDENT. To be ASSERTIVE. Then immediately make the change and break the mold that you are bound to.
That is the most basic things you can do as for presentation. Showing confidence by the way you use your body, and the realization that you want to use fresh words and that it's not important WHAT you say, but rather HOW you say it.
Once you master that, THEN you can focus on gaining respect. Respect is something you earn by being confident and asserting your opinion in a passionate manner, but then being able to stay lighthearted and fun all in the same breath. People will LOVE you if you try this: Take the focus off yourself and put it onto them. When you are in a group of people, ASK THEM QUESTIONS that you know they'll LOVE to answer. Change your focus, and remove the words "I", "me", and "myself" from your vocabulary and replace it with "you", "yourself", etc. Don't criticize people, learn their name IMMEDIATELY. People love the sound of their own name, so when you show them that their name is important to you, suddenly you become important to them.
Keep in mind that all of this stuff isn't going to change in you overnight. It's going to take time and you are going to want to take these steps a step at a time, and a day at a time. But I promise you that these simple changes will greatly affect the way people look at you and the level of respect that you command.
This also means that when you disagree, DO SO! Don't be afraid to be yourself or to assert your opinion. The KEY to that is to do it in such a way that they can't disagree with why you are disagreeing. Keep a positive attitude towards people, and choose your words in such a manner as to assert your opinion but to also uplift the person you are with.
Try it, it works.
