When I say the term “body language”, what comes to your mind first? Most people when describing body language will talk about eye contact, people looking down towards the ground when they’re unconfident or telling lies, someone crossing their legs away from you when they don’t have a connection with you, and touching their face for self comfort.
Whilst these all can be feasible methods of interpreting a person’s body language, it could also be a wild inaccuracy. When you “read” body language consciously you’re not using your unconscious/subconscious mind, you’re using your rational logical mind and trying to apply a deeper sense of social mechanics to a situation. Often your own perception of another person can govern and distort how we interpret their body language. The best indicator of body language is your gut feeling. How many times have you heard people say things like “it just doesn’t feel right”, or “he looks shifty”.
Let me explain a little situation I encountered recently. I was working with a man in his late twenties (we’ll call him Mike for the sake of the story) who came to me with the following issue:
Everybody tells me that my body language is negative, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
So, what was he doing wrong? Not much to be honest! Mike was generally a very attentive and intelligent person. He had time for other people and generally knew what he was talking about. Mike had just slipped into a few habitual ‘ticks’ and patterns that other people often described as being negative. Mike had all the classic signs of ‘bad body language’. He touched his face when he spoke, he shuffled his feet a lot, he often crossed his legs away from people. If you’re like most people you will agree that this does indicate poor body language and you’d probably be cautious around Mike.
I worked with Mike to improve his body language over a series of one-to-one sessions, addressing his own perception of body language, educating him to new ways of presenting himself to others and using effective non-verbal communication.
As it happens, the crossing legs away from people was totally by chance – it depended on which side people sat as to whether Mike’s legs were crossing to or away from them. Mike had suffered a leg injury in his early twenties and abandoned his natural body language mechanism in favour of sitting the way he felt most physically comfortable. He was consciously aware of this and of the ways people seemed to recoil and avoid a connection, and as a result he used a lot of ‘self comforting’ techniques, such as crossing his arms or touching his face.
Mike had a great transformation and got the ‘lightbulb moment’ within the hour. We worked on various techniques to improve Mike’s ‘public performance’ and social awareness, deconstructed his original preconceptions of how others would interpret his body language, and built a new confidence and inner strength for Mike to use every day of his life. The best part – he can do this subconsciously. That’s right… Mike’s old habitual behaviour has been erased and replaced with a more constructive and positive attitude, and his work and social life have been transformed.
So what can we learn from Mike?
- Don’t be too quick to judge others’ ‘body language’. The chances are you’ll be applying dated, inaccurate, and ‘movie-like’ rules of reading people, and more often than not you’ll be way off the mark.
- You should take time to be aware of your own actions and ‘ticks’. Is there anything in particular that you do that makes people ‘switch off’? Why do you do it? What can you do to change it?
- Don’t over-engineer your own body language. Whatever you do, do not cross your legs towards people because you feel that’s ‘socially appropriate’, don’t avoid touching your face or looking around for fear you’ll be interpreted as shifty. Do these things because they’re natural and feel right. The non-verbal communication goes much deeper beyond those simple rules, and people WILL see right through you.
- If there is something you don’t like about your own body language, you can change it, and it’s actually remarkably easy (we teach this sort of thing).
