[Music] hello listeners welcome back to social skills coaching where you learn to be more likable more charismatic and more productive today is Tuesday January 17 2023.
if you've been biding your time since the beginning of the year today is The Unofficial ditch New Year's resolution day congratulations in today's book how to extract info secrets and truth from Patrick King and in many other episodes we've talked about the specifics of body language which way the feet are pointing are the arms open or closed what about eye contact and so on but it's important to remember that these
individual signals in body language can't be taken individually at face value as it were let's listen further on how to get the whole picture foreign It’s worth remembering right off the bat that detecting deception is not as straightforward as some would have you believe and, as we’ve seen, not as simple as spotting a tell-tale sign that proves a lie once and for all.
Laypeople and professionals alike are notoriously bad at reading body language, despite the wealth of information we now have on the topic. But the knack really comes in deciding what to do with certain observations once you’ve made them. Does a person’s folded arms mean they’re lying, unhappy about something, fearful ... or just feeling cold? The trick comes in using not just one or two but a whole host of clues and tells to form a more comprehensive picture of behavior.
The reason why it’s so difficult to “spot a lie” with perfect accuracy is that the gestures and expressions associated with deception are often not different from those signifying stress or discomfort. So given all this, is it worth learning to read body language? Absolutely. Adding this extra dimension to your interactions with others will only enrich your relationships and give you extra insight into your interpersonal conflicts and tensions.
Knowing what’s going on with another person allows you to be a better communicator and speak to what people are actually feeling rather than what they’re merely saying. Body language signals are always there. Every person is communicating nonverbally, at every moment of the day. And it is possible to not only observe this information in real-time but learn to properly synthesize and interpret it. You don’t need to be an expert, and you don’t need to be perfect.
You just need to pay attention and be curious about your fellow human beings in a way you might not have before. As you’re developing your body language reading skills, it may help to keep a few key principles in mind: Establish normal behavior. One or two gestures in a conversation don’t mean much. They could be accidental or purely physiological.
But the more you know how someone “normally” behaves, the more you can assume that any behavior outside of this is worth looking more closely at. If someone always squints their eyes, pouts, jiggles their feet, or clears their throat, you can more or less discount these gestures. Look for unusual or incongruent behavior. Reading people is about reading patterns of behavior. Pay special attention to clues that are unusual for that person.
Suddenly fiddling with the hair and avoiding eye contact could tell you something is going on, especially if this person never does either of these things normally. You may with time come to recognize “tells” in people closest to you—they may always wrinkle their nose when being dishonest or clear their throat excessively when they’re afraid and pretending not to be. Importantly, pay close attention to those gestures and movements that seem incongruous.
Discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal communication can tell you more than merely observing nonverbal communication alone. It’s about context. An obvious example is someone wringing their hands, rubbing their temples, and sighing loudly but who claims, “I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong." It’s not the gestures that tell you this person is concealing distress, but the fact that they’re incongruent with the words spoken. Gather plenty of data.
As we’ve seen, certain constricting behaviors could merely be because one is cold, tired, or even ill, and expansive gestures may not be about confidence so much as feeling physically warm and wanting to cool off. This is why it’s important to never interpret a gesture alone. Always consider clusters of clues. If you see something, note it but don’t come to any conclusions immediately. Look to see if they do it again.
Look for other gestures that may reinforce what you’ve seen or else give evidence for the opposite interpretation. Check to see if the behavior repeats itself with other people or in other contexts. Take your time to really analyze the whole of what’s in front of you. Look for mirroring. An important thing to remember is that certain gestures may mean one thing in one context or when shown to one person but have a different meaning in another context or with someone else.
In other words, certain gestures could literally only apply to you as you speak to this person. If you’re not very familiar with someone, a quick body language–reading shortcut is to merely notice whether they are or are not mirroring your gestures, whatever they are. Mirroring is a fundamental human instinct; we tend to match and mimic the behavior and expressions of those we like or agree with, while we don’t if we dislike a person or perceive them negatively.
If you’re in a meeting with a new client, you may notice that no matter how friendly your voice or how often you smile and make open-handed, warm gestures, they respond with coldness and closed gestures, failing to mirror back to you your optimism. Here, the gestures themselves are irrelevant; it’s the fact that they are not shared which shows you that the person you’re dealing with is unreceptive, hostile, or threatened. Pay attention to energy.
This is not some fluffy, esoteric idea: in a group, simply take note of where intention, effort, and focus are being concentrated. Watch where energy flows. Sometimes, the “leader” of a group is only so in name; the real power may lie elsewhere. One only needs to look at how much focus and attention flows toward a baby in the room to see this in action—the baby says and does very little yet nevertheless commands the attention of everyone there.
Similarly, a family may have the father as the official “leader,” and he may gesture and talk loudly to cement this perception. But pay attention and you may see that it’s his wife who is constantly deferred to, and every member of the family may show with their body language that it is in fact their mother’s needs that take precedence, despite what’s claimed verbally. The most powerful voice in a room is not necessarily the loudest.
A lot can be understood about the power dynamics in a group by watching to see where energy flows. Who speaks the most? Who are people always speaking to, and how? Who always seems to take “center stage”? Remember that body language is dynamic. When we speak, the content of our language isn’t just about the words and the grammar we use to string them together. It’s about how we talk. Do we say a lot or a little? What tone of voice? Are sentences long and complicated or short and terse?
Is everything phrased tentatively, like a question, or is it stated confidently, as though it’s a known fact? What’s the speed of delivery? How loud? Is it clear or mumbling? In the same way that verbal information can vary in the way it’s communicated, nonverbal information can vary too. Gestures are not static, fixed things but living expressions that move in time and space. Watch the flow of information in real-time.
Watch how expressions change and move in response to the environment and those in it. Don’t be curious about “catching” a discreet gesture, but rather watch the flow of gestures as they change. For example, look at how a person walks. Walking is like a body posture but set in motion. Shuffling, slow gaits suggest lack of confidence, while springy, quick ones suggest optimism and excitement.
Become interested in how a person responds to others in conversation or their style of talking to those in positions of power. Once you start looking, you’ll be amazed at the wealth of information that’s just waiting there to be noticed. Context is everything. Finally, it bears repeating: no gesture occurs in a vacuum. Nonverbal communication needs to be considered in relation to everything else—just like verbal communication.
Establish patterns and learn about a person’s behavior over time, in different contexts, and toward different people. Consider the situation and environment—sweating and stuttering during your wedding vows or a big interview is understandable; doing so when asked to explain what you’re doing snooping through someone’s drawers is a little more suspicious. Remember that everyone has their own unique, idiosyncratic personality.
Factor into your analysis the fact that people are either introverted or extroverted, may favor emotions or intellect, may have high or low tolerance for risk and adversity, may thrive in stressful situations or wither in them, and may be spontaneous and casual or goal-directed and rather serious. Our instinctual, evolutionarily programmed impulses can’t be hidden or resisted, but they can take on slightly different forms depending on our unique personalities.
Admittedly, reading facial expressions and body language is a skill that takes time and patience to master. There are no quick and easy tricks to understanding people’s deeper motivations. However, remember the above principles and focus on honing your powers of observation, and you’ll soon develop a knack for seeing and understanding even tiny ripples and flutters of behavior you might have previously missed. We live in a world dominated by words and language.
But when you become a student of nonverbal communication, it’s no exaggeration to say that you open yourself up to an entirely different, sometimes quite strange world. The Human Body is a Whole—Read It that Way Everyone has heard an offhand statistic which sounds a little something like, “Ninety percent of your communication is really nonverbal."
We imagine that communication is primarily a question of language, symbols, noises and sounds, and images on a page, whereas the person creating the language is a separate physical entity occupying space. But in reality, the boundary between verbal and non-verbal, medium and message, is always a little blurred. In the previous sections, we’ve explicitly considered how a person can be “read” even beyond the content they are choosing to deliberately convey to you.
In other words, you’re not just listening to the message they’re sending, but listening to them, as though their body itself were something to read and interpret. In the discussion on detecting deceit or hidden true feelings, we made an assumption: that what is inside a person will invariably manifest itself somehow on the outside of a person.
This is because we instinctively understand that human beings are wholes, i.e., the verbal and nonverbal are really just different aspects of the same thing. What really is the distinction between the words and the lips that say them? The body and the gesture that the body makes? This may seem a little abstract, but it turns out there’s now interesting research to back up the idea that communication as a whole can be understood as a complete expression of a human being.
First of all, have you ever had a phone call with someone where you could instantly tell whether they were smiling or not? Call center managers will tell their staff that people can “hear smiles” over the phone, but how do you suppose this is actually possible? It makes sense when we consider that a voice is not an abstract symbol, but a real, physiological part of the human body.
Researcher at the Donders Institute of Radboud University Wim Pouw published some interesting findings in the PNAS journal in 2020. He was interested in the topic we all seem to instinctively understand: that hand gestures and facial expressions can help us better understand what is being communicated—in fact at times a gesture can be fundamental to us understanding the message.
In an experiment, Pouw asked six people to make a simple noise (like “aaaaa”) but to pair it with different arm and hand gestures as they spoke. He then asked thirty other participants to listen to recordings of the sounds only. Surprisingly, the participants were able to guess what the accompanying movements were and even mimic them for themselves. They could say what the movement was, where it was performed and even how quickly the gesture was made! How?
Pouw’s theory is that people are able to unconsciously detect subtle but important shifts in voice pitch and volume, as well as speed changes, that accompany different gestures. When you make a gesture, your whole body gets involved, including your voice. In other words, when you hear a voice, you are hearing multiple aspects about that person’s body.
When speaking, sound vibrates all through the connective tissues of your body, but differences in muscle tension can arise if we are making gestures with other parts of our body, and we can hear these tiny adjustments in the voice. The great thing about this particular skill is that you don’t necessarily need to train it, just become aware of it.
You probably never thought you could practice reading body language over the phone, but you can—if you understand that the voice is simply a part of a person’s body! Voice alone is an incredibly rich aspect of behavior to study. When you hear someone from another room, on a recording or over the phone, close your eyes and imagine what their body is doing, and what that posture or gesture might indicate.
You can undoubtedly hear age and sex through voice, too, but you can also infer something about a person’s ethnicity or nationality by listening to their accent or vocabulary. Listen to the speed, timbre, volume, pitch and degree of control used. How is the person breathing? How are their words and the way they’re saying those words reinforcing one another, or perhaps undermining one another?
For example someone on the phone might be telling you how excited they are about something, but their slow and sluggish voice may suggest to you that they’re slouching and folded in on themselves—and greatly overstating their excitement. Thinking in Terms of Message Clusters Let’s shift our attention away from individual physical actions that may or not mean or suggest something else, and instead consider human behavior in terms of the overall message it communicates to others.
If we are feeling hostile and aggressive, for example, this attitude and intention will show up in every area, from our language to our actions to our facial expressions to our voice. Rather than trying to imagine what every possible manifestation of aggression looks like, we can focus on the aggression itself, and watch for resulting clusters of behavior. Aggression is understandably shown by confronting gestures, or those that move actively and energetically towards a target.
Invasive, approaching gestures that move in on another person can signify an attempt to dominate, control or attack. Verbally, this could look like an insult or a jeer, physically it looks like standing too close, or even displaying or exposing oneself as if to demonstrate superior strength. Aggression is all about sudden, impactful and targeted gestures. It’s as though the entire body is clenched around a single pointed intention.
Assertive body language, on the other hand, is as forceful but not so directed. This is a person standing their ground, i.e., being firm, balanced, smooth and open in expression of a confidently held desire. The aggressive person may yell, whereas an assertive one may simply state their business with a kind of muscular certainty that can be heard in the voice.
Submissive body language is the complement—look for “lowering,” self-protective gestures that make the person seems smaller, with small, appeasing gestures like smiling excessively, being motionless, speaking quietly, turning the eyes downward or assuming a vulnerable or non-threatening stance. This is different from being genuinely open and receptive.
Relaxed, friendly people will signal looseness—open and uncrossed arms and legs, unguarded facial expressions, easy speech, or even loosening or removing outer layers of clothing to show informality. This is a little like romantic body language, except someone who is sexually interested will also behave in ways that emphasize intimacy.
The focus will be on sensuality (touching the other person or the self, preening, stroking, slowing down, warm smiles) and connection (prolonged eye contact, questions, agreement, mirroring). The overwhelming perception is that of an invitation to close distance. Deceptive body language is anything that is characterized by a sense of tension. Deceit is the existence of two conflicting things—for example someone believes one thing but says another.
Look for the tension that such a disparity creates. You want to look for anxiety, closed body language, and a sense of distractedness (after all, they are processing extra data they don’t want to reveal to you!). Look for someone who appears to be trying hard to control themselves, with an anxious effect. By looking at intentions behind overall communication, we can start to read the body as a whole.
This makes it easier to gather multiple data points more quickly, and find patterns of behavior rather than inferring too much from just a single gesture or expression. Consider the entire human body—the limbs, the face, the voice, the posture, the torso, the clothing, the hair, the hands and fingers, everything. Can you see a cluster of closed off, defensive gestures? Is someone trying to display power, strength and dominance? Or are they just confident?
Is the person in front of you trying to show that they are trustworthy, or that they have a truly valuable thing to sell you (salesman’s body language) or that they are greeting you with openness and respect?
In very general terms, look for the following whole body patterns: •Crossing, closing in, or shutting off – could signal guardedness, suspicion, shyness •Expanding, opening, loosening – signals friendliness, comfort, trust, relaxation •Forward, pointed, directed – may speak to dominance, control, persuasiveness •Preening, touching, stroking – shows romantic intentions •Striking, abruptness, force, loudness – signal energy or violence, sometimes fear
•Repeating, agreement, mirroring – shows respect, friendliness, admiration, submission In an even broader sense, look at overall behavior and communication as an expression of holding—holding on to, holding in, holding up, holding back, failing to hold, holding tightly, etc. If you meet someone whose entire being seems to be an expression of force and control (holding onto), you can take your interpretation of them from here, and better understand all the smaller
data points—the hand wringing, the tightened and pursed lips, the furrowed brow, the shallow breathing that seems to strangle the voice, the high pitched tone, the rapid blinking ... Their body is sending you one clear, uniform message: one of tension. There’s something big going on that they’re trying hard to keep under wraps. Further context clues could tell you whether this is an uncomfortable admission, a lie, or simply something they’re embarrassed about sharing with you.
Wrapping up, how can we read and analyze people just through sight and observation? We have covered two primary aspects: facial expressions and body language. It’s important to note that though many aspects have been scientifically proven (with physiological origins), we can’t say that simple observations are foolproof. It can never be definitive because there are too many external factors to take into account.
But we can better understand what typical things to look for and what we can glean from them. We use two types of facial expressions: micro- and macroexpressions. Macroexpressions are larger, slower, and more obvious. They are also routinely faked and consciously created. Microexpressions are the opposite of all of those things: incredibly quick, almost unperceivable, and unconscious.
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified a host of microexpressions for each of the six basic emotions and in particular has also identified microexpressions to indicate nervousness, lying, or deception. Body language has a much broader range of possible interpretations. Generally, a relaxed body takes up space, while an anxious body contracts and wants to conceal and comfort itself.
There are too many specifics to list individually, but just keep in mind that the only true way to analyze body language is to first know exactly what someone is like when they are normal – and then compare back to that baseline. To put everything together, we need to read the body as a whole, and look for general clusters of behavior that work together to communicate a unified message. The voice can be read like other body language.
Look for signs or cues that are incongruent and don’t mesh well with the other cues they’re giving, this might reveal that the other person is trying to hide something if you can notice other cues that reaffirm this conclusion. However, as always, the signs you’ve picked up on could well be meaningless, so make sure you have enough data to support them.
People who have mastered the art of observation are like detectives, simultaneously gathering as much data as possible that they then constantly sift through, looking for broad, overall patterns that explain the whole picture in front of them. People are complex and constantly shifting and responding to their environment. But if you take the time to pay attention to how they engage with that environment – in all ways – you may surprise yourself with what you can learn.
In the next chapter, we’ll be looking at ways to not just observe behavior, but to actively influence it using the power of targeted questions. Takeaways •Body language signals cannot be interpreted in isolation. Rather, first seek a baseline of behavior to help interpret a particular new observation – a baseline helps you identify incongruent behavior and spot a deception.
•Look for mirroring, pay attention to overall energy, and remember that body language is dynamic, so you need to gather as much data as possible. Then consider this data in context of history and the current environment. •The voice is a part of the human body and speed, timbre, volume, pitch, and degree of control can signify emotional state. The body is a whole, with verbal and nonverbal mingling together.
•Reading “message clusters” helps us organize isolated observations, and note whether they are aggressive, romantic, assertive, deceptive ad so on, in aggregate.
[Music] this has been social skills coaching I'm Russell founder of Newton Media Group and producer of social skills coaching you can find us at newtonmg.com if you have any feedback on today's episode or the podcast in general please email podcast newtonmg I'd love to hear from you join us again next week for more tips and tricks on how to be more likable more charismatic and more productive