It’s been said that 70 percent of all communication is nonverbal. At Loveawake blog, we consistently preach that your body language is one of the most important things in your social game. When you’re chatting up a lady, your body language speaks a lot louder than your words. If you feel like you’re never getting the results you want when you head out to the bar or club, examining body language is a great first step toward improving your results.
It doesn’t matter what you actually think of yourself. When you trudge through life staring only at your shoes, people assume you have low self-confidence.
Here are five body-language traits that might be killing your chances to make a good first impression. Scrub these moves from your game, and you’ll be taking a big step toward demonstrating that oh-so-sexy charisma women crave.
Head Down
A lot of guys walk around with their eyes fixed squarely on the ground. The fact is, this sends the message to the world that you don’t think much of yourself. It doesn’t matter what you actually think of yourself—if you have a high self-opinion or a low one. When you trudge through life staring only at your shoes, people assume things about you. Since no one wants to be around someone with a low self-opinion, especially women, this is a true game-killer.
Quick Fix: Start walking around with your head up and your eyes fixed on an arbitrary point in the distance.
Grimace
I’ve got this one friend who basically seems incapable of smiling. He’s a super-nice guy, really friendly and outgoing, but people are invariably intimidated by him because he never smiles. More to the point, he’s got a perpetual scowl on his face that makes him look unapproachable. The irony is, he’s one of the easiest people to talk to in the world, but you’d never know it if you saw him on the street. Lucky for him he’s married. He’d never meet women with that angry mug of his.
Quick Fix: Before you head out, exaggerate a grin in front of a mirror for a few minutes, then settle into a more natural-looking smile that you keep on all night.
Hunching
Another thing guys with low self-esteem do? Walk around with their shoulders down and hunched forward. This is a reflexive biological behavior in which you’re trying to make yourself as small as possible to avoid a perceived threat. But we’re not in trees anymore, and the chances of a tiger coming along and eating you are slim. All you’re communicating when you hunch over is that you don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself.
Quick Fix: Do a lot of stretching before you head out and pay attention to your own stance, correcting yourself every time that you hunch forward. A more long-term solution? Core exercises, which make your trunk stronger and improve your posture.
Bad Eye Contact
When you go out in public, even if you’re not staring at the ground, you need to look at people. We encourage students at The Art of Charm boot camps to look away from whomever they’re looking at every two seconds or so. But you don’t need to worry about any of that. The majority of men are making insufficient eye contact with others, not too much.
Quick Fix: Play the eye-color game. Make a note of the eye color of everyone you talk to. This will get you started making the right amount of eye contact with a girl right off the bat.
Self-Touch
Get your minds out of the gutters, guys. When I say “self-touch,” I mean all the different ways that guys touch themselves in public to relieve anxiety. Called “pacifying gestures,” these can be anything from drumming on your chest to putting your hands in your pockets to folding your arms. It’s another way that you communicate boredom and a lack of confidence, two things that are going to kill your game.
Quick Fix: Stand in front of a mirror with your hands at your sides. Stand there for a few minutes until it feels natural. Make a note of how you look and feel. Then, each time you go through a doorway, try to reset your body language into this upright, neutral, confident position. Remember, the mind follows the body, and the body follows the mind. So if you can get your body language in order, confident, attractive mindsets will soon follow. And what follows that? High-quality women, of course.
