What Your Body Says (and how to master the message): Inspire, Influence, Build Trust, and Create Lasting Business Relationships

Chapter 4. Gestures of Location

You've probably already noticed how intentional gestures can relate, overlap, and build on each other. The previous chapter left your audience feeling self-confident, capable, and good. You learned to create a visual placeholder to draw the audience's attention to a new location. Locations allow us to maintain and build on the positive feelings we create with our gestures of relationship. Here we take the concept further to understand how to maintain those positive feelings, even when we have not-so-positive information to share, by understanding phantom locations. There are four directions for gestures of location:

1. Toward yourself [positive].

2. Toward the listener [positive].

3. Within the immediate vicinity—next to you, on the floor, or on a visual such as a flip chart [negative].

4. Outside the immediate vicinity—out a window, the far corner, way over there [negative].

Each of these four locations comes in handy when given a context and an intention.

How to Use Locations

In terms of speaking to others, locations are as follows: you are one, the listener is another, and there are two neutral locations—within and outside the immediate vicinity. As often as possible, you'll want to assign good news to the locations of yourself and the listener. This enhances the positive feelings of relationship and connection. Connect negatives to yourself or the listener only when you have a specific context/reason.

Consider possible outcomes carefully before assigning a negative ...