Looking at people and understanding what you see is essential for every healthy relationship and not just in romantic ones. People are insanely skilled at hiding their true feelings and hoping others will notice and react upon them. It’s ridiculous and it doesn’t make very much sense but unfortunately, it’s true for a lot of people.
Studying body language helps you to decode these unspoken expressions of their true feeling, for example when the person is looking down often, has a still face without many movements, shoulders protruded, it looks like he is in slow-motion, doesn’t communicate properly. But on the question: “Are you ok?” You get a response: “Oh yeah, thanks.” or maybe “I am just thinking, no worries.”
You might settle down with answer like this but you still don’t 100% believe in it and that is because you don’t know how important these body language signs are. That words are super easy to fake but body language is impossible to fake for most of the time. When you understand that, you will trust more in your instincts and you will be able to give this helping hand without asking. Once you ask…asking is not a good idea at all, you have to know to offer the help.
You see something is wrong and you can act upon it and not simply ignore that.
There is one essential thing why to lay at least some foundation of understanding this way (nonverbal) of communication. You might “sense” the weird feeling that something is wrong with the person but when you don’t have specific cues you can rely on, you are easily blown away by the response written above.
Once you understand what angry, sad or fearful expressions are, you can ask laser target questions that will get through the shield of the emotion of the person. And when the person tries to escape your help or question in this almost habitual dance, you don’t let them slip away that easily. You will simply understand what is going on in the mind of the person standing in front of you.
Story:
I have benefited from this skill quite a lot of time. Let me give you some specific examples in the nutshell. When I was passing my final exam at school from literature, I picked the book “Alice in Wonderland”. I have read the book but at the moment I knew absolutely nothing about Lewis Carroll. We all had 15 minutes to prepare for our test once we picked the book. So I sat there and I have been preparing a way of how to “manipulate” the exam to talk only about the book and not the author.
Once the moment came, I sat down in front of this committee and I started to speak about the book, and my thought on it and all the interesting stuff I came up with, alongside this speech I have been observing all the people relevant for me at the moment to find out who is the most interested in my speech so I focus on this person who I believed would help me to survive this exam.
After a couple of sentences, I found the person!
The chairman of the committee himself, so I decided to start talking directly to him and not to the teachers examining me. This story is more complex on how to achieve it but finding the right person was the essence of the plan. So I did find the person and the result.
Out of 15 minutes long exam, I spoke for 13 minutes on my terms even when I was supposed to speak about it for only 7 minutes. And the last two minutes I was kinda screwed but the time was so short I didn’t do any serious damage to it, hahaha.
This was a story from a positive spectre.
The negative spectre I will leave open as I don’t want to bring much attention to the negative scenarios but they will come anyway, mostly in the moments we need them the least.
Our close ones can get sad, angry, disgusted and more and it’s up to us to decode what is going on and how to find out where in the process he or she is. How severe the emotion or state is. And how to help them, is it only an early stage so you can reverse the feeling with some kind of redirecting their attention or is it more pronounced so you have to help them to walk through the storm?
Answers to these questions you can get only after you become aware of the fact there can be something indicating these mental states.
Use of body language under the line of morality is also very interesting but I can’t speak about it officially, so if you continue reading, this is a secret use of body language but very attractive.
Poker and other guessing games where there is an element of lying, hiding etc. People relatively new to poker are flashing strong disgust facial expressions when getting a bad hand or on the other side they raise one lip corner to suggest they have a strong hand, and it’s a way deeper topic, poker-wise. Guessing games generally are amazing to practise reading what others are hiding and it’s almost guaranteed for you to win but you have to be stealthy if you want to cheat regularly. I know, I have warned you, this is an underground paragraph.
I am giving you the power now and it’s your turn to turn it into a golden tool for your life.
The other use is in dating, you are having a skill of reading peoples feelings, intentions, moods, confidence levels, micro-expressions, stress levels. Can you imagine how great this is in dating? How much trouble it can save you? After the first date, you will know whether it makes sense to wait for the call or if it didn’t click. You will know when the person likes you, so it’s easier for you to talk to them and you will know when the person doesn’t like you so you don’t need to spend time hanging out with them. Easy, isn’t it?
Body language is an essential people skill, that makes your life easier in the area where it lives. Which is relationships, communications, conversations and everything is run by that. So body language will help you everywhere. No matter whether you are a mechanical engineer, IT specialist, manager, mathematician, psychologist, medical doctor or an actor. In every single branch of industry or job you will have to deal with people and this makes you better with people because you are really understanding them, you are listening to them even with your eyes and that is a most valued people skill. Seeing what is the person up to, is priceless.
I’m done now.
See you next time. 🙂
Enrol in the FREE course on observing body language called Hidden Signs of Attention NOW.
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