Body language skills

If you want to communicate clearly you need to pay attention to your voice, gestures, facial expressions and posture, as well as being aware of other people's personal space. Albert Mehrabian's in his book Silent Messages, identified the following statistics for the way we communicate 7% by words, 38% tonality of voice, 55% body language.

With patience, persistence, and practice you can use nonverbal behavioral patterns to more easily detect truth and lies, project a more confident, powerful presence, read romantic attraction, CREATE romantic and interest in others without being obvious, persuade, influence, and sell better, put people at ease, create a sense of trust, make friends ... and even interact better with household pets!We realize that much of this is very exciting, and you will probably wish to run out and work with the techniques right away. Kudos!But before you do, please take a moment to consider this analogy. Working with body language is something like being a jazz musician. When (s)he performs, a jazz musician spontaneously breathes 'soul' into her music, which influences the other musicians with whom (s)he is playing.

However, it's a VERY rare jazz player who is born with this ability. Rather, the majority attain it by practicing scales and studying musical theory. This experience gives them options that people who haven't studied the scales just don't have. They know which notes are possible in a given situation, what impact they are likely to have in a particular sequence, at a particular volume, etc.

It's only after such practice that they are able to breathe 'soul' into their work. The scales eventually become second nature. When this happens the musician no longer needs to think about scales and theory, and is freed to connect with their feelings and the people around them, and their feelings then unconsciously flow right through their scales and musical theories, into their instrument.

Well, you are likely to have much the same experience in your work with body language (except that there are far fewer scales to master, and there is far less theory you must know). Initially, as you try many of these techniques, you will be practicing individual notes which are not yet fully connected to your 'soul'. As such you may feel awkward and you may not get the result you hoped for right away. But with time and patience, using body language will become second nature to you and you will 'breathe life' into it!

Last, it's important that you know that all people have built in B.S. detectors, so body language is much more effective when used to convey something you genuinely desire, feel, or believe. For example, if you want to put someone at ease, you'll need to find something that you genuinely like about that person and think about it while you smile, nod, position your feet towards them, lean in slightly, and pull your shoulders back. If you neglect the mental component So, with these two considerations in mind ...

1) The fact that body language techniques are like individual notes which only become soulful, spontaneous music only with practice

2) The fact that body language works best when you genuinely feel that which you are trying to communicate and only engage in the "techniques", people will see right through you and you won't have the impact you desire