Having knowledge about body language is not exactly the same as using body language in casual life to make it the nicest possible. Life is quite often very strict game master and very often it pushes us to the edges of our abilities so we need to learn what to make different to face life better than we did last time.
We study body language, we study persuasion and a lot of these sciences or arts or whatever you want to call it but studying is not enough. We need to be able to transport the knowledge into useable wisdom and then apply that and just rest in the shadow of the tree we planted.
Let me give you an example, we are, for instance, reading about the impact of confident body language and smile on our mood and self-confidence and persuading others. Now, you have the knowledge but how much effort do you put into transforming this into your own behaviour. Why don’t you give a shot to that?
Maybe because you are too busy, maybe because you already do that and you don’t need to do these type of silly exercises. And if you would try that, you would actually start feeling much better mentally and physically as well. You will be more productive, more talkative, you will trust yourself more, be able to take higher risk and be more persuasive and all these aspects are often the beginning stage of being successful in anything you do.
There is one reasonable obstacle which I found when I started practising body language. Since you have no collective training on that, you need to put your own time into the practice and to practise just the way you stand…let’s face it, who would do that? The advice I got from my martial art si-fu was not about body language by the way but can be applied here very well.
If you are on the train at the moment it appears on your mind, train it on the train. When you pass a shopping window and it reminds you to stands properly or to smile more, do it at the moment. Are you just talking to your partner/parent/customer or a boss do it in that very moment? And it will be popping up more and more often and after the time you will find out that you don’t need to do it anymore because you are standing at the position naturally.