The Ultimate Body Language Book

Head down with hand to mouth is a “buy signal.” She’s considering the offer.
Body language is an exciting tool and I often refer to it as such because I can use it like a wrench or
screwdriver and sometimes even a hammer whenever I need it, but sometimes even just for fun. Most
everyone has had some sort of fascination with body language and has thought consciously about it at
one point in their life. However, not everyone will graduate from casual observer to expert or near
expert, as you will by reading this book. My biased opinion is that everyone needs to read at least one
book on body language, and since this is so, you might as well do it early in your life! Body language
works like compound interest, the sooner you know it, the sooner you can begin to benefit from it. We
will see that body language applies throughout many facets of our lives.
Certainly body language helps in sales and around the office or during an interview, but it can also help
in dating, in personal relationships, and even in marriage as speak from personal experience.
Understanding body language has helped me be more cognizant of my tact, or lack of thereof and has
allowed me to read my wife’s mind, sometimes to our her benefit and other times, to her annoyance. To
a husband, with a dry humour, who wishes to diffuse a distraught wife, pointing out his wife’s negative
body language as she stands over him with her arms crossed and her head down can be amusing. It’s
even more amusing to catalog her body language as it escalates when she discovers that instead of
paying full attention, you’re reading nonverbal cues instead! If you explain that words are not
necessary, she paints a vivid image without words, you might however, regain some respect.
Body language is useful in life because, no matter what we do, we are always dealing with people and
this fact becomes even more salient when understand that everything on the planet is currently owned
or controlled by someone else. That is, every piece of land, every tree, every desk, computer, television,
or rock, is the property of someone else or is controlled by someone else. Therefore to acquire anything
or everything you must formulate agreements with these people. Reading them becomes paramount.
Spoken language happened much later in our evolutionary history than non-verbal language and is
therefore deeply rooted in our minds. Nonverbal language is primordial, primitive and therefore
primary to speech. Our minds and bodies are tied together in language which is why we gesticulate
while we talk. We might try to bury or ignore our body language but it still creeps out when we aren’t
paying attention. For most people who have done no reading about body language at all, it is their
default mode and so they show us honest gestures. This is important to us as readers because we can
take these gestures more or less at face value.