Vu Thi To Uyen Speak and Write Day

Student number: 1700226

16th March , 2017
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science

1. Amy Cuddys book:

When facing a stressful situation, people get too worry and fell
into the condition of anxiety. Therefore, instead of being
confidence and wise to answer your interview, you become worry
about being at the interview and not focus on the fact that the
interview must be engaged in its progress, not while thinking. In
that situation, you should engage and present fully who are you,
what is your true person and what is your strength.

That is called the anxiety-laced anticipation. That affect how

you act throughout the important things. You keep worrying about
how it turns out and miss the real part. Just show your confidence
and excitement instead of being doubtful all the time. Feeling
ease and comfortable might help you release your doubt, think
about you have done your best and live in the moment. Presence
means knowing who are you and what you deserve to have.

Elements of presence include: comfort level, confidence,

passionate enthusiasm. Successful people dont sit around and
worry too much about how others think of them or how they did
something in the past. In another way, they are fully present. It
shows mostly through nonverbal gesture, facial expression, vocal
qualities and so on.

Definition of Presence:
Presence means the state of being attuned to and able to
comfortably express our true thoughts, feelings, values and
potential.

Presence usually goes with powerful. It the power you can feel in
situation that makes you powerless but you can stand up and use
your presence to connect to yourself and other people. It happens
through mental changing process. Presence means everyday. By
doing ordinary things and small changes in body language and
mind set, we can achieve presence. This allows you to overcome
your fear in stressful situation, help you focus on presenting
yourself.

Presence has nothing to do with extrovert. You can practice to be

present, to show your confidence without arrogant step by step.
Not by forcing yourself to be someone else, be yourself and be a
better one is the key. The improvement can be made day by day,
so your nonverbal gesture can naturally be built up. You have to
believe in yourself, focus on the impression you made on
yourself, not on others.

Learning how to believe in yourself means be confident and know

what you have and what you dont. The situation that you
Vu Thi To Uyen Speak and Write Day
Student number: 1700226
16th March , 2017
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science

stressed out will not allow you to act or pretend to be the best.
Your brain will function naturally as who you are, so you have to
practice it every day to make your presence.

From the very first start of history, human and animals has been
created by nature to feel the power of their own. It can be
considered as the power that affects mind and body languages
and play a vital part in expressing the status and belief of oneself.

Powerfulness is exposed via nonverbal display. When one feels

confident and has self-awareness, he/she tends to naturally
express it by body language, charisma and style. When we,
human beings, feel powerful, we do confident and enlargement
gestures (lift chin, open arms wide, stretch body). There is a
common psychological reason behind. Naturally, these gestures
indicate the status of victory and powerful triumph that we want to
show to other people and creatures.

To make it more clear about how power influent the way we

express gesture, remove all of outside factors that are dominant
in human society (rules, cultures and religions, etc.), a more
simple version of human, primate, is the target of observing how
power leads to expression. They search and show what they want
without considering others as human do, therefore, it is easier to
observe and conclude their behaviours. While animals like
peacocks and primate are freely express their power without
social pressure, and without concerning what others might think
of as humans.

Nonverbal communication worked its own way via small detail of

a person, his/ her body gesture, facial expression, walking style,
volume and tone of voice. Through these things, we can detect
the confidence level of one person, more or less, and decide the
human image of each other.
But the question is, all of the above is natural since a person was
born, or is it developing through the time and practice?

According to Charles Darwin, some of facial expressions are

worldwide recognized, despite different cultures. Moreover, other
complicated expression of human also can be mutual in cultures.

For example, a lot of people from different cultures background

shared the same gesture for their pride expression. That is to say
about gestures by their own. Furthermore, mentioning about more
complicated action, body motion, scientists try to find the
connection between the way people walk and their emotions. You
can tell who is a strong walker, with more movement of arms,
while vice versa, weal walker shows less arm movement as well
as vertical head motion.
Vu Thi To Uyen Speak and Write Day
Student number: 1700226
16th March , 2017
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science

Not only power is shown via gestures and body motion but also
through the voice one speaks. As a result of the expansion of

your body, your voice becomes more powerful and controllable. It

indicates that if you feel powerful, you will take your time, make
more eye contact and know what you are doing. When you have
power, your voice will be louder and your pitch is lower as your
muscle expands.

Contrast to powerful thoughts and feelings, weakness and

powerless not only make you feel down from the inside, but also
shrink you down outside, which affect your body gestures and the
way you present yourself. Naturally, when you feel weakness, all
you want to do is to be smaller, protect yourself as your instinct,
restrict your body.

Another factor restricting body gesture is gender. According to

some research, men do more nonverbal gestures, expand their
bodies, interrupt more often, show more dominance, while
women interrupt less and be interrupted more often.
Considering about a man way of walking and a womans, it is
more restricted to a woman walk than a man, means she shows
less powerful movement than a men walk. At the early stage,
boys and girls are freely exposing gesture as similar as it is. But
from middle school, girls start to change how they walk and
behave, according to stereotype of how a girl should behave to
attract guys and so on. To make changes in the way girls change
to suit the environment, we should intervene and show how girls
can be powerful and have their own pride. No stereotype or
images that girls must follow to blend in. We should not define
being powerful means that we must be muscular and vice versa,
if you want to be feminine, you should show your powerless. That
is not true, totally. You deserve to have a more open and free way
to show your gestures no matter what is your gender.

Another issue in researching about how body language can affect

the way people and other animals react is the question: should
we try to show ourselves dominating other by our body
languages? In the example of a study, it was the reaction of
human towards a cougar. What should you do when a cougar
appears in front of you? An ecologist gave the advice that you
should show your body language, pretend to be bigger, stronger
and you should not run away.

But is it working as in our world? Showing dominant language

nonverbally effective for us? Or it just drawback? Showing
intimidation is not a wise choice when the purpose of showing it is
to make other aware of you in not a good way. Not every time you
try to create impression by nonverbal gesture works. In some
studies about behaviours in interviews, not people who try to
Vu Thi To Uyen Speak and Write Day
Student number: 1700226
16th March , 2017
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science

impress the interviewers for the first several seconds but they did
not show the best performance.

Another example is the study that people were given the video
that shows dominant gestures people standing and normal
people. The result shows that, according to people glazes, they
tend to watch out when saw photos of dominant gesture people.
This can be seen as they sense uncomfortable and they dont
want to engage with those people.

There are reasons also explain why people are not comfortable
with excessive eye contact. It shows the desire of controlling us
from people who we talk to. Therefore, we hate it and we should
avoid making eye contact too long at business meetings.
As social environment affects the way human behave, more
details, people mimic others behaviours to make the
conversation more fluent. If the person is in higher status, they
become bigger in existence and tend to makes other feel
stressed out or intimidate. Therefore, instead of trying to be
bigger, people should learn how to get along well, how to get
intimate with each other, not scare them by your existence.

People disgust gestures of showing off and exaggerated,

aggressive posture, pretend to be Gorilla. It is how jerks behave
and no one wants to be a jerk. Or in the subway, the act of
spreading your legs as showing your manly takes two to three
seats, people have to stand and that is definitely a bad behaviour.

Getting into business with people from around the world means
that you have to pay attention to what consider suitable in
cultures of your business partners as one normal expression of
you in your country can be seen as an insult. In the research,
Canadian businessmen act more comfortable and relax and open
while Chinese have more negative facial expression. The
Chinese businessmen take up more space in the table than
Canadians. These kinds of body language do influence how the
result of negotiation might be.
Vu Thi To Uyen Speak and Write Day
Student number: 1700226
16th March , 2017
HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Science

Through the chapter, an enormous amount of studies and

scientific knowledge have been shown and i am now more aware
about how body languages and gestures, as well as style of
walking, standing affect your image and presence in the society.

As mentioned from the book, a Vietnamese girl was being stunted

by the fact that Vietnamese women and American women body
language are different. While it can be considered that women are
not important, women have to obey some unreasonable rules that
had been decided for a long time ago, American women are more
freely to make eye contact, open arms and be opened. It can be
clearly seen that Asian students are more shy and lack of self-
confidence. Therefore, usually in presentations, they speak with
high tones, sometimes the speed of speaking is really fast, and
their voices are small. The way mostly Asian people express in
body language can also indicates their worry and anxious. We
usually wrap hands around bodies, hide hands inside pockets. I
would say this is very common in Asian and Vietnamese people.

Therefore, these knowledge helps me to avoid weaknesses and

improve presentation and life skills at the same time.
Considering the differences in cultures and how people react
towards other cultures also a concept that I would like to pay
attention to. Sometimes, when you see people from other
countries act their own way, but you should be careful because
follow their acts to blend in is sometimes not the way people can
accept it. Also, how you make eye contact is very important. You
should not maintain it too long or avoid making it at all in
meetings.

The way you react and develop yourself and your performance is
not built in just one time or in a short period of time. It is the result
of a process that you have to be strict and train yourself towards
it. For example, to be more confident and realize your weakness,
you should know how you stand, walk and fix it as criteria above.