The Language of The Body

Anyone who lives with a dog knows that dogs can't lie. Excitement, guilt, boredom, love, jealousy, greed--their emotions are always in plain sight, written all over their bodies.

As good as dogs are at transmitting their body language signals, they're even better at reading them. Not coincidentally, dogs are also believed to have a rudimentary mirror system, similar to the one in the human brain. Dogs have been proven to mirror yawns back to their owners, and vice versa. And after 100,000 years of hanging out with humans, dogs have developed the ability to read our body language--and they know incongruence when they see it.

In a New Yorker article about Cesar Millan, the famous Dog Whisperer, Malcolm Gladwell credits Cesar's skillfully congruent body language for his ability to instantly control the most wild and violent dogs. Gladwell describes how Cesar managed to tame one particularly recalcitrant dog in just five minutes by combining his steady, symmetrical posture with a quick, definitive touch on the shoulder and brief "sh-h-h" when the dog got too close to a forbidden object. Gladwell believes that dogs trust Cesar because his body movements match his message, with absolutely no ambiguity. Dogs calm down because they know where they stand. They don't initiate a power struggle with him, as they often do with their owners, because there is no question of who is in charge.

Now, I'm not suggesting you become the alpha dog with every person you meet. After all, it's not just Cesar's dominance that makes dogs trust him--it's the way his body reflects that power, in every step and every movement. He meets the dogs on their home turf and takes a moment to understand their nonverbal signals, and his confident, response to them puts them at ease. Grateful to know that someone is in charge, the dogs follow his lead.

The same principle can and does work in any encounter between two human beings. First, you take an accurate read of the other person's thoughts and feelings by decoding her body language, then you respond with physical signals that both acknowledge her unspoken messages and accurately reflect your own.

When your body language and your spoken words con't match, people can detect dissonance, unease, and deception. But when they do match--whey they are "congruent"--you send signals of trustworthiness. Your new acquaintance's inner sensor says, "He means what he say. I can believe him. H is safe." And, with that, you become a "yes".

Excerpt from Tonya Reiman's The Power of Body Language.

What can I say, I like the article. It stresses that body language is the official language of the animal world. So, let's learn and apply the correct body language. peace,lvoe and succe Ss