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The Awesome Power of

BODY LANGUAGE

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

We think in pictures, not in words.

Try not to think of a pink elephant with large purple spots. Try not to think of a cat chasing a dog around in a circle. For just a nano-second, a picture will have flashed through your mind.

We have a reticular system at the base of our brain, which filters billions of bits of information, streaming through your senses, your eyes, nose, ears, mouth and skin. It filters the information and allows you to process whatever you consider is important enough at the time.

Here’s an example. If you’re wearing shoes right now, try not to think of how your left shoe is fitting around the toes of your left foot!

Suddenly, you’re senses are opened and you start to think about it.

Pictures stimulate our senses. Familiar pictures become the norm. As we’ve developed our increasing number of words, we’ve shut off from the normal gestures, movements and expressions, and ‘ignored’ them, in favour of the words. Sadly we are ignoring the way we learned to communicate

“ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS.”

…. A familiar age-old expression we use to justify that a visual experience is generally much more expressive, and has more impact than just hearing the words alone.

Take the sales person who is selling shatter-proof glass. No number of well phrased words and psychologically exciting words. will entice the most discerning buyer of glass, that the sales person’s product, will do what the sales person says.

Watch the sales person pick up a 500-gram hammer, and hit the glass hard, still leaving the glass intact, and ‘actions speak louder than words.’

“A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND WORDS.”

Another old expression we use to convey our interpretation of a visual message being stronger than a verbal one.

Take the sales person again with the shatter-proof glass, training other sales people his technique, of how to get the most effect from the visual display of hitting the glass with a 500-gram hammer. He demonstrates the visual effect of creating interest and desire. The sales person instructs the sales people: - give the hammer to the prospective customer, and ask them to hit the glass with the hammer.

There’s an old Chinese proverb: -

I hear it, I forget it.

I see it, I remember it.

I do it, I understand it.

This indicates the power of the visual signals we give.

Our actions can be divided into 3 main categories: -

Inborn actions; actions we don’t have to learn.
Discovered actions; actions we discover by ourselves.
Absorbed actions; actions we acquire through being amongst other people; many of these actions we acquire unknowingly.

INBORN ACTIONS

Body language is predictable and obvious to the trained eye. To the untrained eye, our pre-occupation with words, has drawn our attention away from these predictable and obvious gestures.

When you greet someone, maybe for the first time, what’s the first thing you tend to do?

If you were walking down a street and a stranger walked towards you, you have eye contact at the point the stranger starts to pass by you; what do you do?

When I ask this question in sales training sessions or seminars; without fail, more than 99 out of a hundred delegates will give answer like: - smile, look away, look down, nod your head.

People all around the world, when greeting, perform an eyebrow raise and lower gesture. The eyebrows are momentarily raised and lowered.

According to studies by Eibl-Eibesfeldt, this facial movement done around the world, suggests that this action is inborn. He also found that smiling and frowning by blind people, suggests that these expressions can’t be copied or learnt, and so must be inborn.

We are programmed, throughout our lives in many ways by the societies we live in. We are also programmed genetically before birth.

We are programmed to instinctively search and suckle our mother’s nipple. To cry in a manner that’s difficult for parents to ignore, so we get their attention. We don’t have time to learn these actions, so they have to be inborn.

A baby can’t focus and see properly for a number of weeks from birth ‘and yet you’ll still see the baby raise its eyebrow at surprise’ and frown at something the baby doesn’t like’ or if the baby doesn’t get what it wants.

Whilst writing this book, my lovely wife Jill and partner in business, gave birth to our son Max. I’ve had the opportunity to watch Max develop as the weeks and months have gone by. I’ve looked for the inborn gestures, the discovered actions and the absorbed actions. I’ll comment on my personal findings as the book progresses.

When Max was born, I was at Jill’s bedside, helping her through a 23-hour labour period.

When Max was delivered, he was handed directly to me, by the attending nurses. He was blue, and his head was mis-shaped due to the length of time he was trapped in the birth canal. His umbilical cord had been coiled around his neck, partly throttling him.

The nurses were under instruction not to wake Max and that he was to be left to wake of his own volition. Studies have shown that babies who are allowed to wake naturally, adopt a balanced left and right brain, balanced logic and emotion. Studies before that showed that bringing a child into an unnatural bright light, with clanging, noisy instruments, forcing the child to wake by pinching it or slapping it, generally cause one side of the brain to be dominant.

Picture this …… Max is handed to me, still covered in blood and vernix (the white lubricant seen on new-born children). I hold him in my arms. He’s blue, so we wrap him in a blanket. He’s still asleep, his lungs, throat and nose not yet cleared of the fluid he’s been eating and breathing from.

He stirs a little, moving his head around. The nurses are hopping from one foot to another, getting very anxious after 2 minutes have already passed, and Max hasn’t made a sound. They’re very nervous. They’ve not experienced this type of procedure before.

I’m talking to Max and Jill. Jill has flaked out, from overdosing on ‘gas and air’, and sheer total exhaustion due to the 23 hours of labour. As I’m talking, Max turns his head towards me, ‘looks’ at me with his eyelids closed and …..

raises his eyebrows at me.

New-born babies are comforted with the recognition of the mother’s and father’s voice that they have been used to listening to, and recognising, even in the womb.

Tears streamed down my face in an emotional rush of the excitement from his birth, and the feelings of the start of a wonderful father and son experience, into the most enjoyable of studies … body language. Here was his first inborn gesture … and then he started, slowly, to cry.

Other inborn gestures, that we are programmed with before birth are: -

Crying.
Curling up in a ball.
Kicking.
Arm flapping.
“Rooting” with pouted lips for mother’s nipple.
Smiling?

According to Desmond Morris, and a number of other eminent behavioural psychologists, Smiling is inborn. Their explanation for this is that children born blind still develop smiling. I challenge this deduction from my own observations. And my reasoning is this: - Babies don’t smile when they are first born. It takes a number of weeks before they smile.

We, as parents, spend hours smiling at them, nurturing them to smile, laughing at them when they do smile, and getting exited in front of their eyes. The baby learns to smile and gradually then learns to laugh. I’ve watched this intensely with my son Max. So what about children born blind at birth?

My theory is that as adults smile and talk to the blind child, the child begins to notice the difference in the tone of voice from the adult, and the child explores the face of the adult with its hands.

The blind child will notice by feel, the different facial expressions and as the child evaluates the different expressions of happiness, laughter, sadness, crying and anger; will try and emulate these differences.

Laughter is a learned, absorbed experience. We’ve watched Max learn to laugh over a number of months, even to the extent that once he knew that laughter was contagious. At the age of 6 months he would fake a laugh, to get other people to laugh, just to receive the recognition.

If you look at some photographs of children who were born blind, you’ll see a number of what seem to be unnatural smiles. More like a ‘stage smile’. The type you may see an actor put on, and looks fake.

The reason for this fake look, is that a smile has two basic stages. The curling up of the mouth at both sides bares the teeth, and the creasing up of the eyes.

Both muscle groups have to work for a full smile, the muscles in the cheeks around the mouth and the muscles around the eyes. Without both groups working, the smile isn’t complete. Without the eyes moving you have an unnatural ‘fake’ smile, and without the mouth moving, one would say you are ‘smiling with your eyes’.

I believe that it takes longer for a person born blind, to develop a full ‘natural’ smile, so a smile isn’t inborn, it’s learned by absorption.

DISCOVERED ACTIONS

Some of our actions are so familiar, we have done them so many times from birth, that we have taken them for granted.

Let me ask you a question. If you were to interlock your fingers, would you know, before you did it, whether your right thumb would be on top, or your left thumb? Most people can’t confidently state which thumb will be on top, before actually performing the gesture.

Your dominant thumb will be on top, irrespective of whether you are right or left handed.

Try this with your friends. Ask them to place their hands flat on a surface, like a table, and tell you, before the action, whether they can confidently tell you which thumb will be on top.

This is a discovered action. An action unconsciously acquired as we get to know our bodies, during the process of growing and understanding our bodies. We aren't aware of how we acquire them. At some stage in our lives, through a process of trial and error, and what feels most comfortable to ourselves, we discover various actions.

Now let’s go back to the hand clasp. Try completely reversing the gesture.

Does it feel comfortable to you? To the majority of you it won't. So why is that? You've interlocked your fingers the same way so many thousands of times, that to do it any other way will seem strange, awkward, and uncomfortable.

Any time you try and change the habits of a lifetime, it will be uncomfortable for you, until you develop a new habit.

The only difference between an act and a habit is repetition.

Repetition ….. is the mother of all learning.

Let’s take another example … arm folding. There are seven basic arm folding actions throughout the world. Each of the seven has a mirror image counterpart.

Do you know, without moving your arms, whether you fold them right over left, or left over right? When I do this exercise in classes or seminars, it’s very rare anyone can ‘confidently’ predict which way they do it. Many people get it wrong.

Bearing in mind you've a 50% chance of getting it right, many people ‘get it right’. Just how many simply played the averages? Most people can't tell which way they fold their arms without going through the process of doing it.

Now try folding your arms the opposite way. If in doubt, do it your normal way first and then look at yourself in a mirror. Then try and reverse it. How does that feel?

Folding your arms in the usual way is a sub-conscious action. You've always done it that way. You don't have to think about it. Folding your arms the opposite way is a conscious action. You're aware of what you're trying to do. You have to think about it.

Do you generally cross your left leg over your right leg, or your right leg over your left leg? We all have a preferred "feels more natural" way. These are considered discovered actions.

Something in your childhood erred you towards your way.

Back to Max …..

Think about a baby being bottle fed. As its arms and legs grow longer the baby has the ability to hook its lower arm around the back of the mother, and its upper leg will naturally cross over the lower leg.

When Max was 3 months old he would sit in his buggy crossing his ankles. At 3 months this seemed very unusual, and this action would stop people in the streets, amused at such a young child, crossing his legs. It would seem to be an absorbed action from the way Jill breast-fed him, and then, being right handed, bottle fed him on one side only, the side that was comfortable for her.

ABSORBED ACTIONS

These are actions which are unconsciously copied from other people, from parents, friends, peers and social groups.

These actions vary from culture to culture, and group to group. The human race, by nature, is an animal that imitates for acceptability. It is impossible to grow up in a community over a period of years and not acquire that community's patterns of action.

Take the way we walk for example. We all have the similar physical structure, give or take some variances in height, shape or weight, so why would some black American youths who are portraying a particular image, walk with an apparent limp coupled with a bounce in their step. It's an adopted walk to ‘conform’ in their particular group.

Homosexual males don't have a particular walk or stance, or particular gestures that set them apart, until they associate with flamboyant ‘out of the closet’ gay groups.