Reading Body Language in Life and Death Situations
Kevin Hogan
It's really worth mastering the only Language more important than
English and Chinese...some day your life might depend upon it...
Every day the press contacts me to analyze the body language of
political figures, criminals, celebrities, etc.
I talk to about 5% of the people who call or email. There just isn't time.
Are We All Experts at Reading Body Language?
The question you want to know is, "Why are they contacting you when
we all use body language every day and at an intuitive level,
we are all 'experts'?"
Great question.
Answers:
1) The fact is that even when people INTENTIONALLY encode
their body language (they try to send a "message" on purpose),
they fail at an unbelievable rate.
2) When people DECODE, they misread people almost twice as
often as they read people correctly.
In other words, our "intuition" and our "best intentions", whether
separate or combined, at best are "right" about 1/3 of the time and
wrong, at worst about 95% of the time.
KEYPOINT: We don't read people well and we don't send messages
well, even when doing so with full intention and great care being taken.
This means you will misunderstand the people closest to you....often.
You will try hard to communicate clearly with people, and they won't
understand you.
People will accuse you of saying and feeling and thinking things you
never have said, felt, or thought.
You will be sure people said certain things and have a "gut instinct"
about people and you will often be 100% wrong...but you don't stick around
to find out.
And the vast majority of all these things happen because as humans,
we stink at ENCODING and DECODING body language.
There's nothing intuitive about it at all...at least nothing that
helps us
understand body langugae.
Turn the page for clues on deciphering body language.
