What Do YOU Mean by That?When peopl

What Do YOU Mean by That?





When people ask me “What is the most common mistake people make in interpreting body language?” I think of the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each man
must describe the elephant—a completely foreign creature to all of them—by touching only one part.
When you conclude after a glance at someone’s crossed arms or half-smile that you know what that individual is communicating, you’re like one of the blind men. Your fragment of an idea could get you close to the big picture, but it’s more likely that your conclusion is far from accurate.
Learning the art and science of interrogation to serve in any en- vironment, military or law enforcement, involves cultivation of an ability to see intent. In training interrogators, I have taught them to look at a person holistically to see how word and deed come to- gether in a particular context.
How do you get to a point where you understand intent—that is, what a person is really communicating? First, you have to understand


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how he communicates. The developmental factors of nature and nurture provide the basic clues.
v Nature: Genetics play a fundamental role in how we express ourselves. After decades of observation, I’m convinced we are predisposed to certain types of communication. Whether we are loud or quiet, forceful or contained, to some extent the commu- nication that “comes naturally” really is natural for us. There is just a whole lot stuck in our heads that has to do with biology. We have the capacity to transform or overcome it—a little or a lot—but we do come with predispositions.
t Physical attributes: There are ways you can move your joints that I can’t move mine, and ways I can move my forehead that you probably can’t move yours. And those are just superficial examples of what constitute a complex array of possible differences linked to our physiology.
t Energy: Your natural energy level shows up in how much you like to move, your metabolism, and the speed and power you put into your communication. You can al- ter it artificially—watch a little kid after eating a candy bar—and you can alter it through habits, but your body has a natural level that affects your behavior. Much of the challenge of reading body language is linked to per- ceiving deviations from the norm or baseline in energy level.
v Nurture: The people who train you in using body language, whether formally or informally, could be your family, teachers, neighbors, and Big Bird on Sesame Street. Role models also af- fect your expression; you do what they do because you admire them, whether consciously or on a subconscious level. All of these people help cultivate your development in five areas that directly affect how you communicate:




What Do YOU Mean by That? 29


t Self-awareness.
t Sophistication.
t Personal style, or grooming.
t Situational awareness.
t A sense of others’ entitlement and what is proper.

Focus on Nurture
An in-depth look at the five factors of communication style spot- lights what comes out of nurturing that profoundly affects your body language. After that, I take you through the ways those factors de- velop so you can better track what happened to you, and how you might be affecting the next generation.

Self-Awareness
A friend’s 8-year-old son displayed unbridled enthusiasm about being at the rodeo with his dad. He jumped around screaming, not caring what anybody thought of him. Just for the heck of it, he went over to an iron gate and put his head through the bars. Claustro- phobia quickly set in. He flailed and screamed as people walking by laughed at him. After he got his head out, everybody who walked by him and smiled or laughed got him upset. He would get mad and try to go at them, even though they weren’t laughing at him or about him. In his mind, everyone who passed him with a look of amuse- ment had to be making fun of him. In five minutes, he went from be- havior that showed no self-awareness to behavior that showed acute self-awareness.
In general, the more self-aware you are, the less likely you are to broadcast information intentionally. You will control your hands in a job interview no matter how nervous you are, for example. But just as in a continuum of any kind, as you keep moving more and more to the extreme you find yourself manifesting the same




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behavior as someone on the other end of the continuum. Too much self-awareness, therefore, makes you less in touch with what you’re broadcasting. You expend so much energy and focus on self-awareness that emotions leak out involuntarily.

Sophistication
Sophistication is a two-pronged factor: first, understanding ex- actly where you fit in the hierarchy and what that means in terms of how you should communicate; second, understanding enough about your signaling through body language to know what a given piece of body language means. Only then can you know enough to fit into so- ciety and match your expression to that understanding. You know what your point is and can get it across to the audience in front of you. People who lack sophistication use the same signals and images with every audience and expect to get the same responses from them. Small children who only ever communicate with their parents find themselves saying and doing things that other adults may find incom- prehensible. This is an extreme example of a lack of sophistication.
A friend had two daughters. One had intelligence and sophisti- cation; she taught high school. The other had physical beauty; she was a stripper. The first had a keen sense of how people perceived her and how to treat them, but her appearance and movements sug- gested she had very little self-awareness. Her sister was intensely self-aware; she put herself together well and knew how to send mes- sages with her movements. She was oblivious about how people per- ceived her—to the point where it was a joke. Think of the caricature of the dumb-blonde gun moll from a 1940s movie and you get the picture.

Personal Style
You might also call this grooming. As you grow up, people rein- force certain of your behaviors and discourage others in an effort to polish your body language.




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All of us start off in life as little savages—some to a greater and some to a lesser degree, depending on predisposition. If society and interaction with adults and psychological development did not cur- tail that unrestrained activity, those of us who survived would even- tually turn into very strong toddlers with one desire: whatever struck our fancy at the moment. Along the way, nurture and psychological development temper how we respond to a given situation. As culture evolves so does the way we as individuals respond. Small Southern children of the past addressed all adults as Sir or Ma’am, and Mister or Miss. Even among the poorest and least-educated Southerners a child who overheard his parent call a friend Bill would use this same familiar term, and the parent would correct the child: “That’s Mister Bill to you.” This behavior was so ubiquitous in the South that even the most unpolished children always spoke to adults with deference.
The same patterns hold true for other cultures as well, whether in the United States or another country. Acceptable behavior is en- trenched in each of us as a child by those who serve as role models. Of course, each of these role models is sending messages based on her past role models, self-awareness, and sophistication, so the com- plexity is enormous. We have teachers, clergy, peer groups, men- tors, bosses, and even television characters to assist along the way. What was normal for the American South was very different from what was normal for Sister Mary Katherine in the northeast. As a consequence, children reared in the conservative Baptist South and children reared in the conservative Roman Catholic North had very different social norms. Just like the workers in the Tower of Babel village, if left to their own devices parents could dilute the behavior and create whole new social norms within their own domain. Fortu- nately (and unfortunately) parents are not the only role models to impact or groom us.
As Baby Boomers have matured in an age of globalized econo- my and social structure, and interstate migration has changed the face of the South among all strata of society, those old norms and




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social trends have disappeared to the point that it sounds odd to me today to be called Mister Greg by a young child. Each culture cre- ates acceptable standards for behavior. As we meld cultures across the United States, these cultural norms meld as well. Each of the interactions we have from childhood to death is constantly changing our personal style as we are groomed to behave in new ways.

Situational Awareness
The first three factors can easily fit into a style of individual skills. Situational awareness relies heavily on how the person pays atten- tion to an outside stimulus or what is going on around him and how he fits in the situation. Situational awareness has a profound effect on sophistication, primarily because it can be situation-dependent— that is, easily displaced in a person who is not fluid in moving from one situation to the next.
A savvy person can spend her entire life in a few square blocks of a large city and understand every nuance of the local culture. While she is in this area she is keenly aware of everything that goes on around her; she has a sophisticated view and situational awareness. At the same time, a person living in a rural area or small country town is doing precisely the same thing with his local group. Both are keenly aware of their situations for the same reasons, but with dif- ferent invitational signals and different warnings. But although their insular views of what body language is appropriate might make them