Dr Rob Yeung is a UK-based organisational psychologist and runs leadership development programmes for executives. He is also a prodigious author of business books, having penned an impressive 20 to date.
This one features a luminous orange cover, which probably seemed like a good idea at concept stage in the publisher’s office but it makes the title difficult to read. Thankfully, the use of orange is restrained to headings throughout the text in this generally engaging title.
The book is designed to be a practical guide for anyone who wants to make an impact and get noticed for either personal or professional reasons. It contains a dose of popular psychology weaved around case studies and the author’s observations and confidence-building techniques.
Confidence – or at least the appearance of confidence – can be learnt, he believes. Many people fear public speaking, for example. A classic approach is to advise people in these situations to stay calm. In reality, however, studies have shown that getting people to feel excitement, rather than fear – lead to a much better performance.
Why doesn’t trying to calm down work? Psychologists, we learn, categorise emotions along two dimensions. One of these is the valence of an emotion. Feelings such as contentment, exhilaration and optimism are positive emotions whereas guilt and shame are negatives. The other dimension is the physiological arousal associated with that emotion. So both excitement and anxiety are characterised by high arousal.
Calmness
On the other hand, emotions such as sadness and contentment are associated with slow arousal and slow us down. Plot these on a two-by-two matrix and you can see that attempting to turn anxiety into calmness involves trying to move across two categories.
Turning anxiety into elation involves moving across just one boundary, however, something that is apparently easier for our mental operating system to cope with.
Yeung reassures readers that feelings of anxiety are quite commonplace. The fears of other are not readily visible to us and conversely, we tend to worry that the crowd around us can see into our own heads when clearly this is not the case.
The author addresses another common situation in which confidence is lacking – job interviews. Many job hunters do genuinely feel powerless, with the odds stacked against them.
Research shows that prior to an interview – spending time thinking about a situation in which you felt powerful can have significantly beneficial effects. In one study, positive outcomes climbed by a factor of almost three.
A whole raft of studies show that feeling more powerful boosts performance. A team led by social scientist Pamela Smith at Radboud University in the Netherlands demonstrated that powerless participants made more mistakes when given computerised tasks to complete than those who felt more powerful. The same group also found that powerless participants were less able to make effective plans.
Feeling powerless doesn’t just crush motivation – it may actually reduce the ability of our mental machinery to function properly, Yeung says.
Attractive
One of the more interesting chapters of the book looks at the power of nonverbal expression. Again research is quoted lavishly to demonstrate that expressiveness helps people to get noticed and liked – irrespective of how physically attractive or unattractive they are. This can be useful in the sexual stakes. Those who use more spontaneously uncensored nonverbal behaviour tend to be rated as more attractive than those who are buttoned up.
Those with deeper voices tend to do better in life too. Political research found that both males and females were more likely to vote for men with lower-pitched voices. The same held true for female candidates, with both sexes preferring deep-voiced women.
Other insights from research include the fact that speaking faster works. Far from losing listeners or bewildering them, faster speakers are judged to be more intelligent, persuasive, having greater knowledge and being more objective.
