Do you want investors, advisors, consultants and colleagues to remember you, trust you and buy into your ideas? Then try these ideas from Mark Bowden, author of the world’s best-selling book on body language.

“Like many English actors, I got into it at a young age,” says Northampton-raised Mark Bowden. “I trained all over the world as a performer specializing in visual or non-verbal theatre, which is really telling stories with pictures. The early work I did was about figuring out how to build resonance with an audience. In the world of marketing, this is what you do all the time with words and images.”

Once the dot-com bubble burst, demand for Bowden’s body language training really took off.

“A lot of companies at the time had bad news,” he recalls. “People tend to shut off when it’s bad news and not listen. These days, the financial sector is the same — the audience has lost trust and isn’t listening. I train leaders to exhibit the non-verbal behavior that restores that trust.”

In addition to working with financial services firms, Bowden spends time in industries where getting a message across successfully can be a matter of life or death, such as the military, security services, medicine, even news anchors and reporters in conflict zones.

Bowden’s study of body language has revealed a three-part neurological structure that provides tremendous insight into what we can do to command greater trust from investors, advisors, consultants and colleagues.

Reassure the primal mind

According to Bowden, every human has a primal or “reptilian” aspect of the brain that makes rapid, black-and-white assessments of whether a particular sight or sound is friend or foe. This “fight or flight” center is a powerful survival force that almost always errs on the side of caution.

“When the market is down and a client feels in crisis, we think they have become irrational, so we try to give them better rational data. Then they only become more irrational. The reptilian brain doesn’t understand language — only sound and pictures. And once it decides the market is a danger, the rest of the mind is totally disconnected.”

The only way to re-open a client’s primal mind is to give it new signals. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to assume a posture that Bowden has coined the “TruthPlane”— gesturing with open, empty hands held at around navel height.

“The belly area is very vulnerable in humans, and empty hands tell the brain that there is no weapon to harm it. This type of gesture plays right to the reptilian brain, triggering an instinct that says, ‘this person is good for me — they’re here to give to me, not to take away,’” says Bowden. “When you adopt this posture, you will appear calm, with an even tone of voice and slower speech so people can hear every word. We instinctively gravitate towards leaders who are calm and assertive, not aggressive or unpredictable.”

Connect with the limbic brain

The limbic brain is present in mammals, and is most developed in social animals that form packs, such as dogs, dolphins, whales — and humans. This part of the brain is home to values, beliefs, rituals and customs.

“If I believe a brand is good for me, that belief tends to stay intact unless there’s a crisis that changes that value,” says Bowden. “The recent financial crisis was dramatic enough to reprogram these values. Before, most people probably felt that their investment manager was very good, and perhaps even part of the same social group, tribe or family. But in crisis, the family can be broken up and it’s traumatic. It’s divorce. It’s Cain and Abel stuff.”

The limbic brain doesn’t value complexity and data, it values connections and people. So just like the primal mind, charts and graphs will not succeed in repairing the client relationship.

“The limbic brain is mainly non-verbal. To decide if you are a member of my family and to be trusted, I’m really seeing it with my eyes and hearing it in the tone of voice. If someone is speaking to me, I need to see their whole body, unhidden by a desk or podium, with open posture, and I need to hear that calm, assertive voice.”

Satisfy the neocortex

The neocortex is the highest part of the brain that does math and language, reviews the past and plans the future. It’s much more powerful than the reptilian and limbic brains, but you can only satisfy the neocortex with rational facts and arguments after the reptilian and limbic brains have been persuaded to let you in.

And by the time you get to that stage, Bowden says your audience has probably already made up their mind about you.

“We hope our audience is making a choice based on rational decisions, but the majority of choice is made on instinct and emotion. We usually post-rationalize our choices. After a meeting, people will say, ‘I really like that guy, because…’ and then they rationalize. Rarely do they go verbatim through the data to arrive at a decision.”

Our view

Whether you are involved in selling financial services or simply wish to have more influence within your firm, you will find Mark to be a fascinating speaker with loads of practical advice that you can use every day. Please contact us for details on how you can attend a free workshop with Mark in Toronto on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011.

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