7 Body Language Tricks For Nailing Your Job Interview

7 Body Language Tricks For Nailing Your Job Interview In a phone interview, you could be wearing your favorite pajamas while kicking back in your easy chair- no one would be the wiser. However, in an in-person interview, your demeanor is part of the package. Your interviewer is evaluating you just as much as your resume and your answers, so being aware of what you’re putting across is an essential part of interview prep. Here are 7 body language strategies to help you keep calm under the hot lights of interview scrutiny and project your best self.  1. Stretch it out.When you’re getting dressed and ready to go, take a few minutes to stretch your muscles and do some deep breathing. If you’re like me and have jitters before every interview, no matter how prepared you feel, this can help your mind focus and de-stress. The stretching keeps your muscles from being too tense when you get to the interview, which might make you  come off as stiff and awkward.  2. Smile! You’re on stage.When you arrive, be sure t o smile at whoever greets you first and at your interviewer(s). If you feel like your toothiest grin is pasted to your face, maybe dial it back a bit. It’s okay to show a little bit of teeth (it makes the smile seem more genuine), but no one feels reassured by a mouth full of bared teeth- that one goes back all the way to our prehistoric ancestors. Also make sure you’re involving your eyes: studies have shown that crinkling your eyes up just a little has a warm and welcoming effect to the recipient. Try to have a polite, easy smile for everyone you meet; it shows you’re happy to be there and enthusiastic about the opportunity.  3. Your handshake brings all the boys to the yard.via [zimbio.com]According to 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), â€Å"handshakefulness† is one of the pillars of business achievement. And while you may not want to base your career strategies around Liz Lemon and company, Jack is right. Your handshake matters! It shoul d be medium-firm (no death grip to show how strong you are, sorry), with eye contact between you and the shake-ee. Too strong, and you come off as aggressive. Too weak, and you seem nervous and unconfident.  4. Listen to your mom’s advice: don’t slouch.We’ve become pretty casual as a society, which  often extends to the workplace. Relaxed dress codes and flexible work arrangements are common these days. But in an interview, while you don’t want to be stiff and awkward, you should definitely err on the side of formality. Always sit up as straight as you can, with shoulders lowered and squared. You might have heard that pushing your shoulders back is the best way to approach posture in an important setting- but that can often have the effect of thrusting out your chest, which can seem provocative or confrontational.  5. Keep those limbs loose.As for your arms, those can be awkward. Should you hold them straight and rigid at your side at all times? (No pe.) Gesture wildly to illustrate every point? (Try again.) Keep them bent slightly at the elbow and resting gently at your sides? (Bingo.) If it feels awkward keeping your arms down or you’re prone to fidgeting, clasp your hands loosely in front of you, either in your lap or on the table. It’s important to stay loose, because seeming too tightly coiled can make you look small and retreating. Too loose, and it seems like you’re not taking the interview seriously. The best bet is to adjust your arms as the conversation ebbs and flows, but have the default position be resting casually at your sides.For legs, crossed confidently at the knee is the way to go. If you cross your legs at the ankles, that can give your lower half a downward slope and ruin the good work you’ve done with your overall posture.  6. Keep your head up.If you have relaxed, confident body language below the neck, you’ll want to make sure your head is in the game as well. As with the arms and sitting posture, don’t tighten up too much and stare straight ahead. The most professional-seeming head posture is keeping your chin tilted slightly sideways and up. This makes it look like you’re listening (which, ideally, you are), and that you’re confident but not aggressive. Tilting your chin straight up and out can look like you’re challenging the interviewer or reacting stubbornly.Also, know ahead of time whether you’re prone to unconscious facial tics like blinking too much when you’re nervous or licking your lips. Practice interview questions in the mirror, and try to keep those habits under control as you’re speaking. These can undermine your confident image.  7. Sound as good as you look.When you’re preparing for your interview, practice your â€Å"interview voice.† This probably isn’t the time to demonstrate the new British accent you’ve been working on, but rather an extra-steady version of your regular voice. Try smiling slightly when you talk- it gives your voice an open, confident quality. Even if you’re nervous, try not to let your voice waver or decrease in volume- that undermines the self-assured vibe you’re trying to convey.Taking the time to practice these beforehand will make them so much easier to achieve when it comes time for the interview. You know you’re ready to rock this opportunity†¦ don’t let your body slow you down!

The Scientific Possibilities of Time Travel

The Scientific Possibilities of Time Travel Stories regarding travel into the past and the future have long captured our imagination, but the question of whether time travel is possible is a thorny one that gets right to the heart of understanding what physicists mean when they use the word time.   Modern physics teaches us that time is one of the most mysterious aspects of our universe, though it may at first seem straightforward. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the concept, but even with this revised understanding, some scientists still ponder the question of whether or not ​time actually exists or whether it is a mere stubbornly persistent illusion (as Einstein once called it). Whatever time is, though, physicists (and fiction writers) have found some interesting ways to manipulate it to consider traversing it in unorthodox ways. Time and Relativity Though referenced in H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895), the actual science of time travel didnt come into being until well into the twentieth century, as a side-effect of Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity (developed in 1915). Relativity describes the physical fabric of the universe in terms of a 4-dimensional spacetime, which includes three spatial dimensions (up/down, left/right, and front/back) along with one time dimension. Under this theory, which has been proven by numerous experiments over the last century, gravity is a result of the bending of this spacetime in response to the presence of matter. In other words, given a certain configuration of matter, the actual spacetime fabric of the universe can be altered in significant ways. One of the amazing consequences of relativity is that movement can result in a difference in the way time passes, a process known as time dilation. This is most dramatically manifested in the classic Twin Paradox. In this method of time travel, you can move into the future faster than normal, but theres not really any way back. (Theres a slight exception, but more on that later in the article.) Early Time Travel In 1937, Scottish physicist W. J. van Stockum first applied general relativity in a way that opened the door for time travel. By applying the equation of general relativity to a situation with an infinitely long, extremely dense rotating cylinder (kind of like an endless barbershop pole). The rotation of such a massive object actually creates a phenomenon known as frame dragging, which is that it actually drags spacetime along with it. Van Stockum found that in this situation, you could create a path in 4-dimensional spacetime which began and ended at the same point - something called a closed timelike curve - which is the physical result that allows time travel. You can set off in a space ship and travel a path which brings you back to the exact same moment you started out at. Though an intriguing result, this was a fairly contrived situation, so there wasnt really much concern about it taking place. A new interpretation was about to come along, however, which was much more controversial. In 1949, the mathematician Kurt Godel - a friend of Einsteins and a colleague at Princeton Universitys Institute for Advanced Study - decided to tackle a situation where the whole universe is rotating. In Godels solutions, time travel was actually allowed by the equations if the universe were rotating. A rotating universe could itself function as a time machine. Now, if the universe were rotating, there would be ways to detect it (light beams would bend, for example, if the whole universe were rotating), and so far the evidence is overwhelmingly strong that there is no sort of universal rotation. So again, time travel is ruled out by this particular set of results. But the fact is that things in the universe do rotate, and that again opens up the possibility. Time Travel and Black Holes In 1963, New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr used the field equations to analyze a rotating black hole, called a Kerr black hole, and found that the results allowed a path through a wormhole in the black hole, missing the singularity at the center, and make it out the other end. This scenario also allows for closed timelike curves, as theoretical physicist Kip Thorne realized years later. In the early 1980s, while Carl Sagan worked on his 1985 novel Contact, he approached Kip Thorne with a question about the physics of time travel, which inspired Thorne to examine the concept of using a black hole as a means of time travel. Together with the physicist Sung-Won Kim, Thorne realized that you could (in theory) have a black hole with a wormhole connecting it to another point in space held open by some form of negative energy. But just because you have a wormhole doesnt mean that you have a time machine. Now, lets assume that you could move one end of the wormhole (the movable end). You place the movable end on a spaceship, shooting it off into space at nearly the speed of light. Time dilation kicks in, and the time experienced by the movable end is much less than the time experienced by the fixed end. Lets assume that you move the movable end 5,000 years into the future of the Earth, but the movable end only ages 5 years. So you leave in 2010 AD, say, and arrive in 7010 AD. However, if you travel through the movable end, you will actually pop out of the fixed end in 2015 AD (since 5 years have passed back on Earth). What? How does this work? Well, the fact is that the two ends of the wormhole are connected. No matter how far apart they are, in spacetime, theyre still basically near each other. Since the movable end is only five years older than when it left, going through it will send you back to the related point on the fixed wormhole. And if someone from 2015 AD Earth steps through the fixed wormhole, theyd come out in 7010 AD from the movable wormhole. (If someone stepped through the wormhole in 2012 AD, theyd end up on the spaceship somewhere in the middle of the trip and so on.) Though this is the most physically reasonable description of a time machine, there are still problems. No one knows if wormholes or negative energy exist, nor how to put them together in this way if they do exist. But it is (in theory) possible.