When you're listening to someone, your body language is crucial, the most important part of your body, your eyes. Now, you don't want to be staring someone down like you've seen a ghost or here trying to haunt them or something. But most the time you do want to be looking at the person who's speaking. Of course, you can look away for a moment. But what you don't want to do, as we've talked about staring at phones, daydreaming, talking to the person next to you, it really sends a signal to the person in the workplace speaking to you that you don't care. You're not paying attention.
Now you want to look relaxed, comfortable, pleasant. So again, it's not this intense, furrowed brow. And I do realize there are some differences in different cultures in Japan, for example, the ultimate sign of respect if you're a speaker and you have people in the audience, his eyes can be closed. Because they're concentrating so intently on what you're saying. So there are some cultural differences around the world. My advice, I think, is going to help most people most of the time in most places, certainly in Western cultures.
But we have people from 183 countries in my courses, and 190 countries in Udemy. So you're gonna have to filter this through what works in your own culture. But that's the first really big body language tip is he just kind of looked at the person. Now if it's a one on one conversation, we've all experienced this. It whether in business meetings more often in social situations where the person's looking nodding, and looking behind you to see Is there something more interesting, someone more interesting? there?
That's a huge turnoff for people. They feel like it think they're important. They're not worthy of you looking at them, it's going to make them annoyed and distract them from what they're trying to convey. So I'm going to give you more tips in the next lecture on other aspects of body language. But I wanted to put a special spotlight on the eyes, your eyes are powerful, it is just so much easier to understand someone and really hear them and remember what they're saying, if you're actually looking at them. Because if you're looking at them, by definition, you're not reading Facebook messages, you're not reading tweets, you're not looking at the birds outside and the airplanes.
Your mind is more focused on what they're saying. So you can make a lot of other mistakes and you can maybe sit with your arms crossed that someone else would say is a body language full pa pure, really lovely Looking at the person speaking to you, the vast majority of the time they're speaking you'll be in good shape.