PSYchology
Movie «What Women Want»

Adjustments. See how synchronously Nick and Darcy adjust to each other both in breathing, and in gestures, and simply in body position. Nick does it consciously, Darcy — out of natural habit.

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​​​​​​​Bodily adjustments in posture and gestures are considered the simplest, most obvious and, if you like, goo.e.mi. More subtle, outwardly almost imperceptible, but at the same time more effective — these are adjustments in breathing and rhythm.

Rhythm Tuning

People are characterized by many subtle rhythmic movements: the rhythm of head nodding, the rhythm of lightly shaking the body, shaking the toe of a shoe or tapping a finger on the table … All these movements are usually not noticed by the ordinary eye, but are easily seen by the attentive eye. And most importantly, they are also easy to reproduce, especially if you use cross-tuning.

Cross tunings are called when we reflect one rhythm or pattern in a similar way, but in a different way. The man crosses his arms, and we cross our legs. He taps his finger, we shake our foot in the same rhythm. He nods, we shake our hands. He breathes, we nod. He muffles his voice as we lean forward. Etc.

Breath adjustments

In any adjustment, the most important thing is to catch its general pattern, its inner mood, and most of all this is reflected in a person’s breathing. Any change in a person’s state is reflected primarily in his breathing, and if we were able to feel and repeat the person’s breathing, we adjusted to the very essence of the person’s internal state.

The only difficulty is that the rhythm of breathing is outwardly noticeable less than other rhythms, and it is not always easy to catch it from the outside. However, what is most important here is your habit of looking closely, listening and feeling into the interlocutor, and then it turns out to be quite real to catch the rhythm of breathing: once 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 sniffle. In men, abdominal breathing is more often observed: the stomach moves back and forth. In women, the chest rushes forward and up and then falls. Often you can see how the shoulders oscillate (up and down), the wings of the nose swell and fall. Sometimes a person, unnoticed by himself, slightly shakes his head to the beat of his own breathing …

Having caught the rhythm of the interlocutor’s breathing, you adapt to him, and only getting in time is important, and not the exact reproduction of the breathing pattern. A similar rhythm is quite enough, with hitting at least a third time, or even in antiphase — he inhales, you exhale — in any case, you find yourself in the strongest adjustment. If you managed to adjust well to the breathing of the interlocutor, you automatically, on your own, already without special adjustment, start the basic bodily adjustments to his posture and gestures, the voice and rhythm of speech itself adjusts.

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