Name: Deborah Gruenfeld: Power & Influence
Uploaded: 2014-06-14T11:11:27.000Z
Duration: 20 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

People are going to decide if you are competent or not in less

So, I can trace my interest in this topic

back to something that happened to me in the 1980s.

Before I was an academic, I worked for a short time in public relations.

And, found myself one day in a meeting at 9 o'

clock in the morning with a very powerful entertainment industry executive.

And he had a little refrigerator at the edge of his desk.

While we were meeting, he would open it up.

Drank vodka straight out of the bottle, and had a bag of raw onions.

He was munching on those while this was going on.

And nobody said anything to him about it.

He didn't even offer to share anything with us.

It seemed perfectly appropriate to him to behave that way in a meeting with us.

Would never have occurred to us to do that in a meeting with him.

I want to talk with you about power, and I want to try to provide

approach situations where you want to have impact.

One of the things that I've observed in my work in this area

is that, most people, when they are trying to prepare for a situation

where they want to have influence, going to a meeting or change somebody's

mind, is they tend to think a lot about what they're going to say.

So, I'm going to suggest that rather than thinking about what you're going to say

in situations like this, you need to think about what your body is telling people.

When people are forming an impression of you, what you

say accounts for only 7% of what they come away with.

What I'd like to do today is to start first by telling you

a little bit about the actual mechanics of the body language of power.

What are the cues that we send, and what do they mean?

And then I'd like to talk with you about how you can

to address specific challenges in specific situations.

There is actually a body language of power.

And we know it, but we know it so well that we don't know that we know it.

It, it's something that we've been learning through

our socialization since a very, very young age.

bodies to specific situations and specific relationships.

When we need to show someone respect, or be deferential, we know how to

use our body in a way that allows us to be effective in that role.

And we learn how to take charge with our bodies, and

how to make sure other people aren't taking advantage of us.

Most of us are socialized, you know, over the course of our lives, based

on other people's expectations of where they

think we should be within, in a hierarchy.

And so we learn how to do certain aspects of this, sort of performance, very well.

And sometimes we find ourselves in situations where the things we do

with our bodies that come most naturally don't fit the situation at all.

So, I wanna raise awareness of the ways in which we use our bodies,

and the impact that it has on our ability to have power and influence.

If you wanna be strategic about acting with power there

are two objectives that you have to keep in mind.

The first one is that you wanna be able to show up authoritative.

In charge, able to make the decisions, and able to privilege

your knowledge and experience over the knowledge and experience of other people.

The same time you need to be able to show approachable.

Which is, open, empathetic, willing to take others knowledge and experiences into

account and be able to relate to people on a human level.

giving you a framework for thinking about two main

objectives for addressing the set of questions about how

your body language can be used to change your impact.

There are really two things I think you need

to be able to do if you wanna have influence.

The first is, you need to be able to show up authoritative.

Being authoritative means showing up and letting people know that you're in charge.

And what it involves psychologically and from a

body language perspective, is that you're going to

other people, you're privileging your knowledge and experience.

Over and above the knowledge and experience

of other people, you're becoming more directive

and more concerned with controlling other people's

behavior than from taking direction from others.

The second objective, and it's equally important, is that

you need to be able to show up approachable.

Being approachable means that people feel that they can come to you with

whatever is on their mind, and relate to you on a human level.

Being approachable is just as important as knowing how to show authoritative.

It's really the basis of your likability.

It's the basis of the extent to which other people want to

be close to you, and it requires really, a totally opposite orientation

from showing up authoritative, it really involves being more open to other

people, being prepared psychologically to relate to them on a human level.

showing up authoritative as increasing the psychological distance

between yourself and other people, either by raising

yourself a little or by lowering others a little.

Being approachable is really about shrinking the

psychological distance between you and other people.

It's about lowering yourself a little or raising other people up.

So, in the framework that I'm introducing to you today,

which I call acting with power, the body language associated