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"The Art of Self-presentation"

Last week I went to an Arctrain self-presenting workshop. Before going I felt a little bit weird about the fact that it was just for women. Why should we get extra support in presenting ourselves? The workshop very quickly made clear to me that women think different about themselves than men. This expresses in signals we send to others by our body language. It was really nice to get an insight on what body language can do and on how your own body language is perceived by others.

Moreover, the workshop got us an insight into the concept of positive and negative language. Negative language includes for example the use of irony, double negotiations or negative prefixes and suffixes. Did you know that we tend to use much more negative than positive language in our daily life? We are so much more used to say “oh, this was not bad” instead of using positive words and – as we learned during the workshop - this has not only a strong influence on how we are perceived but also on how we make us feel ourselves.

Anouk Vlug and Hannah Nowitzki

The ‘The Art of Self-Presenting’ is a workshop within ArcTrain that was led by Dr. phil. Saskia Schottelius who is a mental trainer and teacher of meditation, martial arts and philosophy. The workshop was only for female Scientists. From our ArcTrain group Anouk, Myriel, Lina, Natalia, and Deniz attended.

The overall goal of this workshop was to improve our self-expression and present ourselves in a way that we leave a long lasting and positive impression on both individual persons and audiences. We acquired theoretical knowledge about the Impostor-Syndrome, positive language, how to empower our self, body language and classical Rhetoric. To all of these topics we had many very helpful exercises, role plays and group work. We did Qigong exercises, meditation and power poses to increase awareness in motion, relax our mind, feel more confident and get less stressed. We gave and received a lot of feedback and got the chance to practice presenting our PhD project authentically, confident and positive. We all enjoyed the nice and comfortable atmosphere in our group, learned a lot about ourselves and the impression we leave to others. We got aware about our strengths and where we still can improve.

Thanks a lot to our trainer Saskia Schottelius and to ArcTrain for making this workshop possible.

Myriel Horn