Be careful what you read about body language

I'm a recent convert to Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) and was encouraged by Social Networking authority 'Mr Jurassic' - Chris Norton of Dead Dinosaur - http://www.deaddinosaur.co.uk/ - to install and manage my 'tweets' more successfully. I've done this and think the application is great - searching for key words and having access to more resources than I care to wish for. Cheers Chris, much appreciated.

It's been very, very interesting reading some of the articles flying around on 'body language' and how your physiology - stance, gestures and movements - are viewed/interpreted by the receiver of your communication. But what is highly innacurate are the generalisations made by some trainers about what they term 'closed styles' including 'aggressive, defensive, nervous and bored'. (See full article here)

I'm going to look at a few points made by the author of the post and make my own comments next to them to justify why they are potentially innacurate and over-generalised.

Closed aggressive body language
Hands on Hips - Might be a comfort thing/preference for that person
Legs too wide - Compared to what and how wide is too wide?
Eyeballing / Staring out - The persons 'attention direction'* is clearly focussed on the other person

Closed defensive
Crossed arms/legs - could be cold in the room
Poor eye contact - The persons 'attention direction'* could be 'scattered'

Closed nervous
Dry throat - might have a cold/throat issue you are unaware of!

Closed bored
Yawning - could be a parent with a 'new born' who is very tired - doesn't mean they are bored!!


It goes to show that the text books and authors of such material, need to account for 'the context' and the individual 'programmes' we run as human beings in communication contexts. These 'meta-programmes' refer to our personal 'strategies' we deploy in situations like face-2-face communication. Examples being how we are motivated, convinced, take action to name a few.

*Attention Direction refers to the amount of 'attention' a person gives during communication. A person may focus wholly on the other, on themselves or to and fro (scattered). On that basis its innacurate to say a person is 'eye balling' in an aggressive way if their AD programme is 'others' focussed. On the other hand, to say someone is defensive when they may have a scattered or 'self' AD programme is again, innacurate.

So. The message here is very clear. Classifying a person as open or closed, aggressive or defensive by their body language can be dangerous. What has to be taken into account is the context and their personality, not just thier physiology!

Goal setting framework

Some people have them, some don't, most do and nearly all have ceased by the end of January........

Whatever you choose to commit to next year, follow through with it!! As well as giving up chocolate, beer, commitment to the gym, what about your business? What are you going to commit to doing next year?

If you want to grow you have to take action. Whether its taking more risks, committing to employing people to assist you, up skilling yourself in certain areas, or anything else, these pointers I've enclosed help with 'goal setting' which I thought you may find useful.

First off - Identify your objective. Yet when you say it, how much of a positive edge does it have? If you can't say it with meaning or passion find another goal!!

Set a time frame for achievement.

Identify the steps you have to take to get it.

Identify other resources/people required to achieve it.

Make sure you can easily achieve the first step to get you going.

Make sure you can you achieve the goal in more than one way? Flexibility is key.

Check that your commitment to this objective fits in with everything else in your current situation.

Check that the goal is ecological (you may want a 2 seater car but you know deep down its impractical for your family and you don't get a decent feeling when you think about the wider consequences involved)

And finally.......Start it.

Happy goal setting and all the best for 2010!

Nick

How NLP Techniques Work - an example

Time to get straight to the point and describe for you how a particluar technique from the tool box works. The co-creators of NLP, Bandler and Grinder, developed a pattern that utilises what are known as 'submodalities'. These are the images, sounds and feelings associated with our experiences.

I'll describe it in laymans terms, non-techny, no jargon. What we are going to do is this. Below are a set of instructions, read through them one by one and take your time developing the images (you'll find out what I mean in a second or so). Be prepared to close your eyes and you may want to do that, as for some it heightens the effectiveness of the process.

TRY THIS SIMPLE PROCESS

Here you go, start now, after you have read the first part of this process:

Part 1 - Take a moment to think about where you live, your house, the place you go home to.

Imagine you are stood looking at your house, facing the front, looking at the front door, noticing some of the finer details that only you know exist or noticing some other feature.

(By doing this you have probably seen a visual image in your memory of your house)


Part 2 - Now. See that house image again, theone you just had and note the following:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

You should now have a set of data that describes a small section of the 'code' of that memory of your home. (There are many others involved across all of the senses. The questions contained here are from the 'visual' sense)



Part 3 - Now. Think about your workplace..

..and choose a task or situation where you experience a 'feeling' that is not the best feeling for the task to be completed to the best of its ability.

When you think about you doing that, or your memory of it, take a moment to think about it and you'll begin to recall an image/memory of that time. Let that happen.

Part 4 - Think of the image again and ask the following questions:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

By now you have a small part of the code of that experience you imagined.

Why ask the questions? What's going on?

These are some of the questions I ask my clients about their 'experiences of being in challenging situations' and when I say experiences I'm talking about things like public speaking, cold calling, meeting people for the first time, negotiating and many other challenges people face where they 'behave or feel' a way that is not productive to the task at hand.

What I'm doing by asking these questions about the memory is defining the 'code' of the experience. After that you ask a client 'what word describes how you feel' and then to 'point to where the feeling is.' I then go on to change some of the memory coding and that changes the position of the feeling and that in turn changes the word the client uses to describe how they feel. Same memory, slightly different in structure now and a different word to describe it.

Imagine a piano keyboard. From key 'C' up an octave to 'C' there are different keys that when stroked produce a different sound. The same applies here with this technique. The word panic is mostly associated with feelings in a different place to confident. The techniques allow you to play any tune you want to in any given situation.

Straight forward and effective change that gets results. That's what it's all about, changing your experience so you can feel different. You know as well as I do, when you feel different about something, you get a different result.

Marking out in time

Sports personality of the year brings back fond memories of child hood for me. It appears to mark out a certain point in time in the year that Christmas is upon us and all the things that happened earlier in the year are now behind us, or to the side, or somewhere else......

If you were to think about where you are now and were to point in the direction of the future, where would it be?
Go on, point to it.

After you've done that, point to where the past is.

Some people have what's called their 'time line' running through loads of different directions, up and down, left to right, diagonal, infront only, the list goes on.

When you are out communciating with someone next and they are using their hands to communicate, look at how they mark out items and timeframes in 'spaces' or locations. What direction are the movements in, what does that say about where they mark out their timings? For example someone might say, "last week I went to..." whilst pointing back over their shoulder. Alternatively, someone might say, "I was looking at buying this car" and all of a sudden their attention is away from you and they are looking into thin air......seeing the car again in whatever direction they are looking.

Why do we need to know this? When you are communicating back to them, maybe re-communicating certain things they have mentioned, you can refer to those areas by subtly pointing to them to acknowledge their existence. Afterall, from the other persons perspective, that is really where they are!

Communicate to them on their level and you'll get results.