The Ultimate Body Language Book

keep the conversation going. They’ll use more gestures in speech in attempts to draw attention to
themselves and generally take up more space. They will also tend to move about a room more and
jump from person to person trying to get as much stimulation from others as possible. A quick test to
verify extroversion from introversion is to watch how people break gaze. Generally speaking an
introvert will break their gaze by looking to the right whereas extroverts will break their gaze to the
left. This fact alone suggests that the differences we see between these two personality types has less to
do with environment and more to do with how the brains are hardwired.
To work productively with the introverted, formulate groups as small as possible. For the introverted
one on one represents the best scenario. Set up meetings in quiet areas with little distraction. Maintain
as much space as possible, talk quietly, reduce eye contact, use touch infrequently or not at all. To work
with the extroverted do the exact opposite. Talk louder with more expressions, touch frequently, be
dynamic, move in closer, and give plenty of eye contact. Extreme extroverts and extreme introverts will
be happiest at the end of their respective spectrum.
Chapter 1 - Why The Study Of Body Language Is Important
OK vs. Not Ok Personality Traits
Dr. Eric Berne, the founder of the psychological school of Transactional Analysis (abbreviated TA)
coined the terms “OK” and “Not OK” to describe two essential types of people. The “OK” types are
secure and confident in who they are and carry little emotional “baggage” whereas the “Not OK” types
are insecure about themselves and often feel inferior. Dr. Berne also helped to define certain terms that
were important in studying social interaction. When two people meet eventually one of the persons will
acknowledge the presence of the other person. He called this the “transactional stimulus” where a
“transaction” refers to a conversation between people. When people interact to each other, they talk or
express nonverbal body communication, they issue a “transactional response”. Those that are
(obsessively) interested in social dynamics often begin to think of interactions down to the unit. These
definitions, however, are merely presented for interest sake, since for our purpose they aren’t terribly
important.
Berne’s approach was much different from that of Freud who though perhaps too simplistically, that he
could learn everything about someone just by asking them, and then listening to their response. Berne
felt that therapists could learn more about people by watching their body language and facial
expressions instead of words by themselves.
Eric Berne published a very popular and interesting book called Games People Play in 1964. To date it
has sold over five million copies. The book describes the function and dysfunction that happens in
human interactions. Without getting into too much detail, let’s look at one example of a game.
The example I wanted to bring forward makes light of how we control our interactions with people by
the tone and words we choose. As a boss, if we attack an employee by taking up a controlling
“parental” role we will normally elicit a childish tantrum in return. The real way to deal with adult
situations is to attack them from a constructive integrity based position where we act like “adults”.
Adult actions normally yield adult responses, but as we see in Berne’s book, not everyone uses the best
framework to work through life. As he sees it, some people get stuck between three ego states, the
“Parent”, “Child” and “Adult”. Berne outlines well over ninety games that people play, some good, but
mostly bad. He defines games as social interactions that are counterproductive. Today, there are few
ardent followers that use the TA approach in any rigid way, even the ego states have been scrutinized,
however, the principles of the method do help us look at how we run our lives and the ways we hold