Adjustment (we emphasize: any, not only in the body, but also in speech, and in breathing) should be performed with less intensity than the original actions of the client. He laughed - you smiled, he crossed his legs, you crossed your ankles, he folded his arms over his chest, you put one palm on the other. Etc.
• And if at first it may distract you a little from the conversation, then soon it will, on the contrary, entertain. And give self-confidence.
"Mood". The adjustment should reproduce not so much the external pattern of posture and gestures as the partner's internal state, physical or mental.
It is important to feel how the partner's body weight is distributed (and repeat this with your body), what state these so tense or relaxed muscles express.
In your body, attentive to your partner, there should be not just an external alternation of his quick or smooth gestures, but the living of his interest, enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, determination ...
• But, we repeat, a little weaker: as if by an echo, a reflection ...
"Comfort". Any reproducible pose and any repeated gesture should be comfortable and organic for you.
• With minimal training, it's not that hard. In the practice of acting there is a special task: one makes the most awkward, unimaginable pose, and the other is looking for an opportunity to justify it - to repeat it so that both meaning and naturalness are in it.
"Logics". Your postures and gestures should be logical and meaningful, correspond to the essence of the situation and the content of the conversation.
• Naturally.
Adjustments work especially well not for theorists who have learned all their varieties and the rules for their application, but for practitioners who have worked these techniques to automatism. Accordingly, it makes sense for you to spend some time on quality training, practice this skill and consolidate it in practice so that the necessary adjustments occur at the level of unconscious competence.
• That is, yourself. And you were no longer distracted.
The simplest posture and gesture adjustment exercise is done as follows.
It is better to perform it in threes. Two sit opposite each other, and the third is perpendicular to them. The task of the first is to “just be” and talk (when you want), the second (this is you) is to actively talk with the first and, most importantly, to adapt to him. The task of the third: first of all - to observe, secondly - to help the second, reminding about the rules of adjustment.
• Echo. Mood. Comfort. Logics.
If you know how to both conduct a conversation and adjust accurately, then even in the exercise, when your tasks are obvious, after a while your interlocutor gets carried away by the conversation itself and forgets about your adjustments. But you should not forget about them, because this is exactly what your main work in the exercise is.
• The first, second and third can change their positions and, accordingly, roles several times in order to gain experience from all three sides.
Body adjustments in posture and gesture are considered the simplest, most obvious and, if you like, the most rude. More subtle, outwardly almost imperceptible, but at the same time more effective are adjustments in breathing and rhythm.
Many subtle rhythmic movements are peculiar to people: the rhythm of head nodding, the rhythm of light body swaying, swinging the toe of a shoe or tapping a finger on the table ... All these movements, as a rule, are not noticed by the ordinary gaze, but are easily seen with an attentive gaze. And most importantly, if desired, they are just as easy to reproduce, especially if you use cross-adjustments.
Cross-adjustments are called when we reflect one rhythm or pattern in a similar way, but in a different way. A man crosses his arms, and we are legs. He taps his finger, we swing our leg to the same rhythm. He nods, we shake our hand. He breathes, we nod. He muffles his voice as we lean forward. Etc.
In any adjustment, it is most important to catch its general pattern, its internal mood, and most of all this is reflected in the person's breathing. Any change in the state of a person is primarily reflected in his breathing, and if we were able to feel and repeat the breathing of a person, we adjusted to the very essence of the inner state of a person.
The only difficulty is that the breathing rhythm is outwardly noticeable less than other rhythms, it is not always easy to catch it from the outside, and here your habit of looking closely, listening and feeling into the interlocutor is most important.
With its help, it is quite possible to catch the rhythm of breathing: one day you will be able to notice the play of light and shadow on a blouse or jacket lapels, another time the breath will reveal itself as a uniform puffing. In men, abdominal breathing is more often observed: the stomach is fed back and forth. In women, the chest rushes forward and upward and then falls off.
It is often seen how the shoulders sway (up and down), the wings of the nose swell and fall off. Sometimes a person, imperceptibly to himself, shakes his head slightly in time with his own breath ...
Having caught the rhythm of the interlocutor's breathing, you tune in to him, and it is only important to be in time, and not to accurately reproduce the breathing pattern.
A similar rhythm is quite enough, with hitting at least once on the third, or even in antiphase - he inhales, you exhale, - in any case, you find yourself in the strongest adjustment.
If you managed to adapt well to the breathing of the interlocutor, you automatically, without any special adjustment, start the basic bodily adjustments for his posture and gestures, the voice and rhythm of speech themselves adjust.
