The Ultimate Body Language Book

determine the thoughts, feelings and disposition of our targets. Open body language has been shown to
be linked to openness of the mind where people are more likely to be receptive to outside view and
having closed postures has been tied to having a closed mind or being unreceptive to new ideas. As in
most cases with body language, there is a strong connection between the gestures we make and our
emotions with each providing valuables clues to the other. In fact, it is often very difficult to separate
the mind and the body language that leaks from it, even with conscious thought, which is especially
true when it comes to primitive emotional language.
Openness can sometimes be confused with simply being relaxed or intense, and to some degree this is
true. For example, being open often means that attire is also relaxed, shirt collars are unbuttoned, ties
removed, the pants might hang loose and certain articles like jackets might be removed. Full openness,
therefore, is not always acceptable. Conversely, we might look at being open as simply a lack of
holding closed cues. That is, having open cues is the exact same as not displaying closed cues and is the
default position of the two. Being closed requires a certain amount of tensing of muscles and therefore
effort so the default of most people is having an open mind. In other words, people are open, unless
they say otherwise! It follows that there are far fewer cues to symbolize openness as opposed to closed,
since being open is more of a passive state.