There’s a pretty low threshold for how conspicuous you can make these cues without confusing most people or getting them to make their eyes wide while they try to give you strong eye contact and scrunch their foreheads as if in distress.
That said, as long as they work when you use them, why should you be worried about the asymmetry? Are you worried that they will notice that you use the cues but don’t pick up on them and start to think you’re not really paying attention to them or something? If so, I doubt this is the case; in my experience people seem to care much more about whether you are picking up on their non-verbal cues than whether you’re using the right ones yourself. Whether or not you use working cues, they will tend to be equally annoyed that you aren’t picking up on their cues.
Anyway, unless you’re interacting with very good friends it isn’t as though you could get the people you are interacting with to use a significantly different set of cues; most of this is going to be largely subconscious/habitual to them.
If you use signals that you wouldn’t notice then you’ll still be able to send the message, even if you have trouble receiving it yourself, and annoyance about you not picking up on their cues will be similar whether or not you do this; so doing this should afford you greater utility than just not using recognizable signals at all.
There’s a pretty low threshold for how conspicuous you can make these cues without confusing most people or getting them to make their eyes wide while they try to give you strong eye contact and scrunch their foreheads as if in distress.
That said, as long as they work when you use them, why should you be worried about the asymmetry? Are you worried that they will notice that you use the cues but don’t pick up on them and start to think you’re not really paying attention to them or something? If so, I doubt this is the case; in my experience people seem to care much more about whether you are picking up on their non-verbal cues than whether you’re using the right ones yourself. Whether or not you use working cues, they will tend to be equally annoyed that you aren’t picking up on their cues.
Anyway, unless you’re interacting with very good friends it isn’t as though you could get the people you are interacting with to use a significantly different set of cues; most of this is going to be largely subconscious/habitual to them.
If you use signals that you wouldn’t notice then you’ll still be able to send the message, even if you have trouble receiving it yourself, and annoyance about you not picking up on their cues will be similar whether or not you do this; so doing this should afford you greater utility than just not using recognizable signals at all.