Building better ‘First Impressions’

Controlling our “blink” responses

Experts believe that our awareness of the fact that we make snap (often unconscious) judgments about people and situations can provide the opportunity for controlling our “blink” response. The key is constant awareness of your ability to thin-slice and think without thinking. Then there is the necessity for each of us to be aware of and control our thin-slicing. Experts are now more convinced than ever that we make snap decisions about situations and people, unconsciously, that bring into play all of our biases. For example all candidates interviewed for a position deserve the same treatment and the same attention to factors other than race, religion, appearance and size.

Any decisions that we make based on our thin-slicing must be accompanied by the recognition that we do make important decisions using this process - unconsciously. Take the time to gather a larger pool of data before going with your initial gut reaction. While you may be right, you can be wrong. And, there is the constant opportunity to unconsciously discriminate, make poor hiring and networking choices and to trust or distrust employee stories for all of the wrong reasons. We are challenged to work with people who are not just like us. After we notice the differences (blink), we need to constantly demonstrate that we honour and appreciate the differences.

Knowing Your Body Communications

It's time to get to know your body. If you don't know where you hold your tension, and most people don't, take a tour of your body, so you can know what needs the most loosening - -and exercise. Are you shouldering the world's responsibilities, or perpetually drooping? Or, in your determined drive toward success, do you plant your feet solidly on the ground in a life gesture of hostility, defiance or taking ground? Perhaps you have a forward leaning posture, with the head tilted slightly forward, as if you are ready to spring into action, expressing a lifelong pattern of flight away from psychologically threatening situations, when you thought it was part of your make-up to leap forward to new opportunities. To be depressed is, in fact, to press against yourself. To be closed off is to hold your muscles rigid against the world. Being open is being soft. No instinctive muscle clenching, such as in the jaws. Hardness is being uptight, cold, separate, giving yourself and others a hard time. Softness is synonymous with pleasure, warmth, flowing, being alive, drawing other people toward you rather than forcing them away.

Expressions & Muscles

When you are misaligned and tense, you expend outrageous sums of energy doing the everyday gestures of life. Since the body is a high viscosity substance, that is 60 percent to 80 percent water, the bonds are floating in a relatively fluid environment. Yet, over time, despite that apparent fluidity, you have tightened the muscles around every major experience of pain, fear or anger, and continue to tighten them each time you think you are experiencing similar situations, thus guaranteeing that you make your own pattern of uptightness familiar and increasingly habitual, until it becomes a permanent condition you no longer recognize as not normal. We all hold great muscle tension around certain bones in blind remembrance of fearful events, long after the actual events are often long forgotten. You may never recall what initially made you afraid, but you can note where you body reacted to protect itself and spend more time in your exercise and massage or other body work to relax and loosen those muscle groups. In Western society, people usually hold the tension somewhere in our upper body whereas in many Eastern cultures the tension tends to be held in the lower body. If you don't begin a regular practice of exercise and stretching, you are guaranteed to lose mobility sooner as you age and rob yourself of the most positive and alive personal presence you could offer the world every day.

We go through life making decisions, closing down and limiting ourselves unconsciously. Stay open literally by getting in motion more frequently. Stand and stretch at least every twenty minutes when you are sitting and working. Try to walk, hopefully in sync with someone else, in fresh air and sunlight, at least thirty minutes a day. One of the safest and most natural ways to move closer to others is to walk with them. Walk and talk on the way to the meeting. Walk with your friends/colleagues, rather than sitting with them. Motion is emotional and makes every event more vivid and memorable. Literally move towards the one that matters in your life and loosen up together. Your life may depend on it. In fact, why not get up right now and take a stretch, look around, call someone and suggest a walk.

-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net