Body language is something not often discussed openly in volunteer groups, but it can be a prime factor in the empowered volunteers success.

For many people who take on the challenge of volunteer group membership building it will be the their first encounter with sales or any form of direct solicitation with the possible exception of helping a child move some Girl Scout cookies.

This means that most empowered volunteers will have only informal or nonexistent knowledge of body language mechanics that are not dramatic, such as poses like that of a boxer or acting poses for the most part. This post can’t substitute for books or videos on the subject but a few reminders and a bit of structure can go a long way towards success in prospecting.

The hand shake is often the initial response to meeting someone for the first time or renewing an old relationship, even if it is only one of customer sales relationship. Usually hand shaking is a normal way of renewing relationships too.

There are variations of the regular handshake, but most of them should be avoided. The normal firm, grip to grip is expected, no matter what the combination of the two involved, mixed sex or both male or both female.

The sometimes encountered “fingers only” grip some lades give sends a message that is in my experience followed up by either indifferent or negative body language, telling the other hand shaker that the message is not being received well. In my limited experience when I was on the receiving end of this partial handshake, the interaction was always difficult and for her part indifferent.

I suggest any female empowered volunteers always avoid the fingers only hand shake.

For the rest of the body language supported hand shakes such as the two handed politicians grip, or the over the top businessman who shakes but also includes the other hand on the elbow or worse, on the shoulder, these have no good use for the empowered volunteer. They convey way too much intimacy for nearly all encounters you will find with even well known prospects.

From The Definitive Book of Body Language, by Allan and Barbara Pease I have gleaned some very helpful hints for the new empowered volunteer to employ. Select which, if not all of these helpful hints Allan and Barbara Pease provide in their international bestseller, revised and expanded edition of Signals you find worthy of employing.

Laughing is unique to humans and worthy of cultivation by the new empowered volunteer, even if it needs practice and refinement before being used in public. Allan and Barbara point out research that in the 1980′s several American hospitals introduced the “Laughter Room” for medicinal purposes. All it took was 30 to 60 minutes a day to show dramatic results in many forms for patients, including painkiller drug reductions. Laughter and smiling are powerful features for any human to use in bonding.

They concluded, “He who laughs, lasts”. 

Humor research has determined that, “Only 15 percent of our laughter has to do with the jokes. Laughter has more to do with bonding.” Relationship building is what is more important and jokes are a fundamental tool for that bridging. Further research concludes, “The results demonstrate that the more social a situation is, the more often people will laugh and the longer each laugh will last.”

Advertisers know that humor sells too. A marketing professor, Karen Machleit from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Business Administration found that consumers will accept advertisers claim if humor in included, such as a funny ad with a famous person will become even more readily accepted.

Empowered volunteers will be more effective if they find ways to include humor in their presentation.

Smiling has been studied and the results are predictable, women smile more than men. The portion for the empowered volunteer to take from this is that for women, smile less when dealing with dominant men in business or to mirror the amount of smiling that men do. Unfortunately this is a fine line, research shows that for women photos of unsmiling women were judged to be unhappy while the same thing for men were judged as a sign of dominance. Male empowered volunteers in dealing with women need to smile more in all contexts, according to the authors.

From a health perspective many posts have shown that when properly applied, many of the suggestions for the empowered volunteer help parts of the body cope better or help extend the life expectancy of one’s life. In short, body language that is positive will have health benefits and body language that is negative doesn’t help.

In this case, another fact the authors bring up is that, “Evidence shows conclusively that smiles and laughter build the immune system, defend the body against illness and disease, medicate the body, sell ideas, teach better, attract more friends, and extend life. Humor heals.” 

The authors include a section on touching to gain maximum effectiveness for your message and it is very detailed, with the percentage of success between different European nationalities and how exactly, “skillful elbow-touching can give you up to three times the chance of getting what your want”. At this point the fine points are too detailed for this forum, I would encourage the empowered volunteer to either view their website or to purchase or borrow their book. Information from their website can be found here.

http://www.peaseinternational.com/

Also, through the power of the internet a pdf is available for downloading. It is large so allow time of a minute or so for downloading please. It contains a bunch of the information I have related already. I would recommend it if you can support this for a reference tool.

http://e-edu.nbu.bg/pluginfile.php/331752/mod_resource/content/0/Allan_and_Barbara_Pease_-_Body_Language_The_Definitive_Book.pdf

Something interesting to note, cultural differences between world regions. Europeans and Westerners blow their nose into a handkerchief while Asians and Japanese spit or snort! This stems from the days of tuberculous in past times, the authors say. Spitting, which is the Asian way of dealing with the same issue was seen as a method of spreading diseases, thus making it disgusting in the eyes of Westerners. For the empowered volunteer, avoid either in public if at all possible.

The authors also review lie detection, which is valuable for the empowered volunteer to know when the prospect is not being honest and thus they can disengage the presentation without the prospect ever knowing that they have been found out.

One detail I will mention, “Research shows that people smile less” when lying. Most people think its the opposite. In this case less positive or more negative means just that, the message is not good and the empowered volunteer should read the body language accordingly.

I am going to revisit a topic I have mentioned before, if you find these tips overwhelming or even daunting to learn you might consider broadening your mind and making your awareness to body language easier through another researcher, Barbara L. Fredrickson’s website on Positivity. The site provides for free a few guided meditation exercises that takes only a few minutes to learn and are very powerful at expanding your awareness of body language when done properly over a few weeks.

Couple these techniques from Barbara with the lessons in the book on pdf  for body language listed above and you are on your way towards a better life no matter how well your prospecting goes! Here’s the website for the meditations as well as the positivity ratio needed for moving your life toward flourishing. Who doesn’t want to flourish?

http://www.positivityresonance.com/meditations.html

Body language can’t be learned overnight, nor would you want to believe that meditation techniques will transform your life experience overnight.

Extensive research show both tool sets reviewed in this post work and will help you live a healthier life if you use them and retrain your mind to work better. When you’re more positive and perhaps even funnier when appropriate you will be more effect in your encounters with others, whither you are trying to persuade them to your point of view or just trying to be friendly.

Enjoy the empowerment expanding your mind and improving your communication skills which the proper reading of body language can help you achieve.

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Empowered volunteers are by nature caring and empathetic.

For this reason they will find themselves as they hand out business cards and encountering people who are not happy, they need to fall back on the empowered volunteer wisdom. They may have many of life’s hard issues on their plate and they may be emotionally dragging. They won’t feel that they have any good reason to even consider your offer of joining your group. When they tell you why they won’t or can’t join, the negativity of their emotional state radiates and drowns your positive nature.

This is where many would simply take “no” for an answer and move on. That is a choice. I am now going to suggest that another potential path is available, one that must fit the individual empowered volunteer well enough to even try to employ the empowered volunteer wisdom approach.

After reading this short post if an empowered volunteer feels that this idea has potential they should check out the website where the author of this book and many of the supporting studies can show a more well rounded presentation of methods to become more emotionally positive.

http://www.positivityratio.com/index.php

For people in emotional distress there are things that they can do to help themselves that are at no cost and are backed by decades of studies that show their positive impact and effectiveness. Barbara L. Fredrickson, in her book Positivity writes about the positivity ratio, the balance between negative things in your life and positive ones.

This ratio is totally in the control of each of us and it can mean the difference between languishing and flourishing! It is that powerful, according to the author.

Studies show that positive emotions don’t directly improve or impact the human heart, but they can undo the influence of the negativity! In other words, they can minimize the negative influence or damage. Positive emotions also helps the body to rebound from the negative effects faster than if they were not involved.

There are two types of positivity identified by the author, serenity and amusement. She sees both as equally good at improving recovery time from negative emotional stress. In the book and to some extent on the website she explains how each works. Serenity is something that is a great tool for those in the funeral business to use to keep their empathy from being drained away. Amusement is open and accessible to everyone.

A high percentage of empowered volunteers will be of the “resilient personality” that the author identified.

People who are of this type worry less and are able to rebound from negative life influences quicker than those who hold a more pessimistic life view. Studies on the behavior type resilient personalities have decades of research as well, and the results show that positivity and openness work together with resilience to dissolve negativity and enable people to make stronger comebacks in their lives.

If you find yourself as an empowered volunteer and you are not one of the resilient personalities, good news you can build this characteristic into your nature! It is a resource you can develop.

Empowered volunteers that encounter emotionally distraught people who seem to be generally positive but are at that point when they are encountered by an empowered volunteer in a negative rut can use this pattern to engage and perhaps set that person onto a better path. Down the road they just may take that business card and give you a call.

Negative emotions narrow the persons emotional state and their point of view.

They don’t see the forest for the trees in many cases. Many people in such states emotionally cut themselves off from the positive aspects of the community too, such as charities and volunteer groups. Do you see where this is going? They need the groups but they won’t see it.

The empowered volunteer wisdom secrete involves resilience to go beyond ones individual amount of positivity and embrace it from others in the community! In other words, the people who will without even contemplating your offer of volunteering reject it are the ones most in need of the a community embracing. Their negative emotions won’t let them even see the potential due to their narrowed focus, with the forest being the community full of positive types who can support those in need.

The author further explains that their are two responses to hardship, despair or hope. Despair multiplies the effects of negativity until it drowns out all forms of positivity! Beware of this great sucking sound of emotional drainage. Hope is the opposite of despair and it is like a shield that holds off negative emotions from the outside world in most instances. Resilience is another result from positive emotions using hope as one of the supports.

Summing things up, positivity broadens your mind, helps you build your best future, and fuels your resilience. Using the three to one ratio of positive emotional experiences to negative ones people can then see how positivity and negativity work together to “tip” their lives toward flourishing.

The nuts and bolts of how to find positive life emotions and view points from a broadened mind are available on the website. So is a test to determine the current state of the persons emotions. Tools to change that states if it needs changing are also listed in the book and on the site.

The empowered volunteer simply needs to be familiar with the wisdom and then when the presentation is rejected this is potentially the very best message that an empathetic person could offer to another who is emotionally down. Positivity and the surrounding message has decades of studies on it’s validity for the prospect who is data driven, it has strong empathy for the prospect who is more into touch and contact type informational learning and it just plain has absolutely no drawbacks that involve either monetary cost or resource costs. What could be better than FREE?

When you encounter an emotionally distraught person who rejects your message despite your passion and your knowledge that they need it, this is the one thing that you can offer them. Have the web address on you, take your card and write it on the back of your card for them. They still have to take action on their own, but they may just call you down the road and tell you they want to join your group that has so much to offer, just like the passionate presentation you offered him or her when they needed it most.

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