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of body language. If you do, one of the
greatest benefits is that it helps you to
monitor your own performance, assess
your own effectiveness, and improve
on it.
I find it difficult to understand that
simple skills such as body language
aren't routinely taught at schools and
colleges.
Body language outside the workplace is
relatively easy to read; body language
in a work environment tends to be much
less obvious. Indeed, it is often disguised they are fearful or anxious. It is far
and deliberately played down, for the
simple reason that at work, people of-
ten have to hide their true thoughts. If
you can understand the difficult body
language of the workplace, you will
have an excellent foundation for read-
ing 'social' body language. Most of the
principles are the same.
A starting point
It is useful to take a closer look at the
differences between workplace and
social behaviour, because it will give
you an idea of the challenges involved
in reading body language.
You might think that understanding
body language is just a matter of com-
mon sense, but you'd be wrong: if spo-
ken language is susceptible to misinter-
pretation, it's even truer of unspoken
language. There are plenty of pitfalls
when it comes to interpreting body
language, and some of them can lead
you to astray.
Pitfall no. 1
The commonest mistake is trying to
read body language in isolation, and
"Make the customer the hero of your story."
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making too
hasty an assess-
ment.
For example,
there's a wide-
spread belief
that if someone
scratches their
nose, they must
be lying; or that
if someone's
arms or legs are
folded, it means
from being that simple, and this kind
of amateur psychology can lead to a
great deal of confusion. Above all, don't or feeling that his delivery was not
try to learn individual signals. Instead, going across. He would become aware
look at body language in terms of sce-
narios, just as we do in the book, where
each piece of body language is de-
scribed as it develops in specific situa- 'perceptive' would blunder on regard-
tions, rarely in isolation.
Pitfall no. 2
Another common mistake is failing to
monitor body language over a period
of time. Recognizing the body lan-
guage signal for, say, anger is one
thing, but there is little point in doing
so unless you can also determine the
extent of that anger, and the course it
is taking.
Most researchers generally agree that
the verbal channel is used primarily for
conveying information, while the non-
verbal channel is used for negotiating
interpersonal attitudes, and in some
cases is used as a substitute for verbal
messages.
Perceptiveness, intuition and hunches
from a technical point of view, when-
ever we call someone 'perceptive' or
'intuitive', we are referring to his or
her ability to read another person's
non-verbal cues and to compare these
cues with verbal signals. In other
words, when we say that we have a
'hunch' or 'gut feeling' that someone
has told us a lie, we really mean that
their body language and their spoken
words do not match. This is also what
speakers call audience awareness, or
relating to a group.
For example, if the audience were sit-
ting back in their seats with chins down
and arms crossed on their chest, a
'perceptive' speaker would get a hunch
that he needed to take a different
approach to gain audience involve-
ment. Likewise, a speaker who was not
less.
Women are generally more perceptive
than men, and this fact has given rise
to what is commonly referred to as
'women's intuition'. Women have an
innate ability to pick up and decipher
non-verbal signals, as well as having an