Body Language Does Not Lie

People often wonder how representative Non-Verbals are when it comes to understanding people. Some are people are concerned with the consistency and universality of some of the concepts of NVC. Also, some people also want to know the degree of conscious control that can be exerted on your own non-verbals, which would lead those who can interpret it to be thrown off.

I want to share an experience from one of the workshops I conducted a few weeks back that is an amazing example of the power of nonverbal communication, and its usefulness in conveying the truth in any social situation.

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We were talking about status and dominance, and a participant wanted to know how he may tackle a few bullies who dominate him in certain social situations; he wanted to know how he could come off as equal status by using his non-verbals, because he was annoyed with constantly being in a subversive position with regard to certain individuals. So we decided to do a little role play, where he was to be domineering. It just so happened that taking up those large and self-assured body positions were hard for him, so much so that we had to get back to the exercise at the end of the program! When we did try it again, there was a large change, and he did manage maintaining strong eye contact with me, a huge sign of him not backing down.

What followed from that was what was what assured me that no matter what, your nonverbals can give away a lot of information that the other person may try to hide, by default in an attempt to portray something else. We spoke of this concept called mirroring (where an individual who is in agreement or looks up to you will mimic your body posture without consciously realizing it). So anyway, our participant was doing a great job taking the dominant position from me in our role play, when I decided to shoot my hands behind myself. And almost like hypnosis, so did our participant. Going to show that although he did come off as challenging my dominance, he jumped at the opportunity to follow my lead. This was a natural reaction, since I had spent the past two days with them and we had set up a good rapport.

There is another take away from this experience. If your feelings are not congruent with your nonverbals, i.e., you are trying to give radiate a certain state of mind (confidence, dominance, sadness, happiness) and you are not feeling it internally, your true feelings are soon going to betray your attempts to fake a disposition.