Page 30 - How To Sell Yourself

Selling Your Competence 29
Become aware
It’s not enough to know about the “audible pause.” You need to become aware of it as you do it. My suggestion is that you ask someone you trust, like, and are comfortable with to send you a small signal each time you do it in conversation—something such as a small, inconspicuous head nod.
After you’ve seen the signal a couple of times, you’ll start to hear yourself as you do it. And until you become aware of it, you won’t be able to control it. Now, as you hear it...uh...(there, I heard that), you’ll be able to control it the next time, and pretty soon, it’s gone 50 percent of the time. No one minds an occasional intrusive sound. It’s only when it happens during almost every pause that it becomes a competence defeater.
Step one in protecting competence is to pause silently.
Step two is to maintain steady, warm, nonintimidating eye con- tact. It’s as important a demonstrator of competence as the silent pause. And it’s just as unnatural.
Eye contact
This is a terribly misunderstood concept because we all inter- pret it to mean eye to eye, and that’s often a mistake.
All our lives we remember being told, “look ’em in the eye.” But many people find that very uncomfortable and stressful, es- pecially at close range. Eye-to-eye contact is often a challenge, an invitation to compete, a contest to see who blinks first. In fact, it’s such an uncomfortable encounter for some people that they think better when looking “away” from the person they’re talking to.
Certainly, if looking into someone else’s eyes for an extended time doesn’t bother you, then eye to eye is fine.
Where to look
In a television interview a few years before he died, James Stewart credited Marlene Dietrich with teaching him where to look. She told him that when two people looked into each other’s eyes, they kept shifting from one eye to the other eye. The result: They looked “shifty-eyed.” And, of course, in a close camera shot, the movement was magnified.