 | The Definitive Book of Body Language |
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Product Description
Available for the first time in the United States, this international bestseller reveals the secrets of nonverbal communication to give you confidence and control in any face-to-face encounter–from making a great first impression and acing a job interview to finding the right partner.
It is a scientific fact that people's gestures give away their true intentions. Yet most of us don't know how to read body language–and don't realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world's foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life.
Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior.
Discover:
• How palms and handshakes are used to gain control
• The most common gestures of liars
• How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do
• The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals
• The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup
• The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women
• How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want
Filled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1464 in Books
- Published on: 2006-07-25
- Released on: 2006-07-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.02" h x 6.24" w x 9.20" l, 1.43 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780553804720
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Review
"When Allan and Barbara Pease write, I read. And underline. And learn. And laugh. And steal. The Definitive Book of Body Language is a marvel of a book!"—Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence and Re-Imagine!
About the Author
Allan Pease has written eleven other bestselling books on the subject of human communication and body language, including, with Barbara Pease, Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps and Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need New Shoes.
Barbara Pease is CEO of Pease Training International and the author of the international bestseller Memory Language. She divides her time between England and Australia, trying to find her way home from the airport.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Understanding the Basics
Everyone knows someone who can walk into a room full of people and within minutes give an accurate description about the relationships between those people and what they are feeling. The ability to read a person's attitudes and thoughts by their behavior was the original communication system used by humans before spoken language evolved.
Before radio was invented, most communication was done in writing through books, letters, and newspapers, which meant that ugly politicians and poor speakers such as Abraham Lincoln could be successful if they persisted long enough and wrote good print copy. The radio era gave openings to people who had a good command of the spoken word, like Winston Churchill, who spoke wonderfully but may have struggled to achieve as much in today's more visual era.
Today's politicians understand that politics is about image and appearance, and most high-profile politicians now have personal body-language consultants to help them come across as being sincere, caring, and honest, especially when they're not.
It seems almost incredible that, over the thousands of years of our evolution, body language has been actively studied on any scale only since the 1960's and that most of the public has become aware of its existence only since our book Body Language was published in 1978. Yet most people believe that speech is still our main form of communication. Speech has been part of our communication repertoire only in recent times in evolutionary terms, and is mainly used to convey facts and data. Speech probably first developed between two million and five hundred thousand years ago, during which time our brain tripled its size. Before then, body language and sounds made in the throat were the main forms of conveying emotions and feelings, and that is still the case today. But because we focus on the words people speak, most of us are largely uninformed about body language, let alone its importance in our lives.
Our spoken language, however, recognizes how important body language is to our communication. Here are just a few of the phrases we use:
Get it off your chest. Keep a stiff upper lip.
Stay at arm's length. Keep your chin up.
Shoulder a burden. Face up to it.
Put your best foot forward. Kiss my butt.
Some of these phrases are hard to swallow, but you've got to give us a big hand because there are some real eye-openers here. As a rule of thumb, we can keep them coming hand over fist until you either buckle at the knees or turn your back on the whole idea. Hopefully, you'll be sufficiently touched by these phrases to lean toward the concept.
In the Beginning . . .
Silent-movie actors like Charlie Chaplin were the pioneers of body-language skills, as this was the only means of communication available on the screen. Each actor's skill was classed as good or bad by the extent to which he could use gestures and body signals to communicate to the audience. When talking films became popular and less emphasis was placed on the nonverbal aspects of acting, many silent-movie actors faded into obscurity and only those with good verbal and nonverbal skills survived.
As far as the academic study of body language goes, perhaps the most influential pre-twentieth-century work was Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, but this work tended to be read mainly by academics. However, it spawned the modern studies of facial expressions and body language, and many of Darwin's ideas and observations have since been validated by researchers around the world. Since that time, researchers have noted and recorded almost a million nonverbal cues and signals. Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer researcher of body language in the 1950's, found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only) and 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection, and other sounds) and 55 percent nonverbal.
It's how you looked when you said it, not what you actually said.
Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell pioneered the original study of nonverbal communication–what he called "kinesics." Birdwhistell made some similar estimates of the amount of nonverbal communication that takes place between humans. He estimated that the average person actually speaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day and that the average sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds. Birdwhistell also estimated we can make and recognize around 250,000 facial expressions.
Like Mehrabian, he found that the verbal component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 percent and that over 65 percent of communication is done nonverbally. Our analysis of thousands of recorded sales interviews and negotiations during the 1970's and 1980's showed that, in business encounters, body language accounts for between 60 and 80 percent of the impact made around a negotiating table and that people form 60 to 80 percent of their initial opinion about a new person in less than four minutes. Studies also show that when negotiating over the telephone, the person with the stronger argument usually wins, but this is not so true when negotiating face-to-face, because overall we make our final decisions more on what we see than what we hear.
Why It's Not What You Say
Despite what it may be politically correct to believe, when we meet people for the first time we quickly make judgments about their friendliness, dominance, and potential as a sexual partner–and their eyes are not the first place we look.
Most researchers now agree that words are used primarily for conveying information, while body language is used for negotiating interpersonal attitudes and, in some cases, is used as a substitute for verbal messages. For example, a woman can give a man a "look to kill" and will convey a very clear message to him without opening her mouth.
Regardless of culture, words and movements occur together with such predictability that Birdwhistell was the first to claim that a well-trained person should be able to tell what movement a person is making by listening to their voice. Birdwhistell even learned how to tell what language a person was speaking, simply by watching their gestures.
Many people find difficulty in accepting that humans are still biologically animals. We are a species of primate–Homo sapiens–a hairless ape that has learned to walk on two limbs and has a clever, advanced brain. But like any other species, we are still dominated by biological rules that control our actions, reactions, body language, and gestures. The fascinating thing is that the human animal is rarely aware that its postures, movements, and gestures can tell one story while its voice may be telling another.
How Body Language Reveals Emotions and Thoughts
Body language is an outward reflection of a person's emotional condition. Each gesture or movement can be a valuable key to an emotion a person may be feeling at the time. For example, a man who is self-conscious about gaining weight may tug at the fold of skin under his chin; the woman who is aware of extra pounds on her thighs may smooth her dress down; the person who is feeling fearful or defensive might fold their arms or cross their legs or both; and a man talking with a large-breasted woman may consciously avoid staring at her breasts while, at the same time, unconsciously use groping gestures with his hands.
The key to reading body language is being able to understand a person's emotional condition while listening to what they are saying and noting the circumstances under which they are saying it. This allows you to separate fact from fiction and reality from fantasy. In recent times, we humans have had an obsession with the spoken word and our ability to be conversationalists. Most people, however, are remarkably unaware of body- language signals and their impact, despite the fact that we now know that most of the messages in any face-to-face conversation are revealed through body signals. For example, France's President Chirac, U.S.A.'s President Ronald Reagan, and Australia's Prime Minister Bob Hawke all used their hands to reveal the relative sizes of issues in their mind. Bob Hawke once defended pay increases for politicians by comparing their salaries to corporate executive salaries. He claimed that executive salaries had risen by a huge amount and that proposed politicians' increases were relatively smaller. Each time he mentioned politicians' incomes, he held his hands a yard apart. When he mentioned executive salaries, however, he held them only a foot apart. His hand distances revealed that he felt politicians were getting a much better deal than he was prepared to admit.
Why Women Are More Perceptive
When we say someone is "perceptive" or "intuitive" about people, we are unknowingly referring to their ability to read another person's body language and to compare these cues with verbal signals. In other words, when we say that we have a "hunch" or "gut feeling" that someone has told us a lie, we usually mean that their body language and their spoken words don't agree. This is also what speakers call "audience awareness," or relating to a group. For example, if an audience were sitting back in their seats with their chins down and arms crossed on their chest, a "perceptive" speaker would get a hunch or feeling that his delivery was not going across well. He would realize that he needed to take a different approach to gain audience involvement. Likewise, a speaker who was not "perceptive" would blunder on regardless.
Being "perceptive" means being able to spot the contradictions between someone's words and their body language.
Overall, women are far more perceptive than men, and this has given rise to what is commonly referred to as "women's intuition." Women have an innate ...
Most helpful customer reviews
258 of 286 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting
By T. Hooper
This book introduces body language from the point of view of business executives. The authors specialize in the use of body language for business and politics. I found the illustrations and photos that accompany the text to be very funny and appropriate. This is not a very scholarly book, so if you're looking for a very serious and academic book about the study of body language, then this isn't the volume you're looking for, but if you'd just like an introduction to body language from a practical point of view, then this is a perfect book to read. In addition, it is very easy and entertaining to read, so I can recommend this to anyone.
176 of 202 people found the following review helpful.If you sell anything, including your ideas --- study this book!
By Dirk J. Willard
This is a fascinating book! What I liked most were the many illustrations demonstrating the authors' points throughout the book. Read the text though--there is so much more to this book. The author's sense of humor, though a little dry, added entertainment to an already enlightening read. I especially liked the courtship section. It is amazing that women send signals an average of 5 times before the men they are interested in respond. It just shows you how dense we men are. I found it unsettling that if you are interested in another woman at a party, the woman you are with will pick up your signal is a New York minute. And, if another woman starts flirting with you from across a room, the woman you are with will send recognizable body language to the other female: "hands off, he's mine--you're looking at trouble."
After reading this book, I guess I will never go into another meeting without subconsciously, or consciously, trying to recall the lessons in this book. I hope someone in the Harvard business school considers teaching this text in a course.
If this review was helpful, please vote. Thanks,
143 of 167 people found the following review helpful.
Reflection of soul Indeed!
By Ilaxi S. Patel
I got this book a year ago and indeed this book is a reflection of the soul! What people say to us is different from what they think and feel! With Body language wiz by Allan Pease, one can correctly interpret other people's thoughts by their gestures. This book has quick references as 'How To' :
1. Find out if someone is lying
2. How to be more likeable to others
3. How to get cooperation
4. How to successfully conduct interviews and handle business negotiations
5. How to pick up a partner
More n more - What I like about this marvellous book of Allan is the illustrated Gestures. The eye signals and Hand-to-face gestures are simply terrific illustrated readings and Allan sure has deep roots to indepth study of Body Language, it seems. Hand and arm gestures,way of using cigars,cigerettes, glasses, head gestures, courtship gestures and signals and more wide areas are selected which is very interesting. A good Interesting read and good to explore.
http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/0553804723
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