Self Help

Did you know that a person can NOT communicate? Though he or she may decide to stop talking, it is impossible for her to stop behaving. The behavior of a person - their facial expressions, posture, gestures, and other actions - provide an uninterrupted stream of information and a constant source of clues to the feelings they are experiencing. The reading of body language, therefore, is one of the most significant skills of good listening.

Only a small portion of the understanding one gains in face-to-face interaction comes from words. One prominent authority claims that a mere 35 percent of the meaning of communication derives from words; the remainder comes from body language. Researcher Albert Mehrabian stated in a widely quoted article that in situations he examined, only 7 percent of the impact was verbal - the remaining 93 percent was nonverbal. You may question the specific percentages arrived at by these researchers, but few people dispute the general direction of their findings - that body language is a very important medium of communication. You easily put everything into this statement: No words are so clear as the language of body expression once one has learned to read it.

Nonverbal communication was the only language used throughout most of humanity’s existence. For many, many centuries there was absolutely no oral or written language. Therefore, body language was the sole means of communication. When language finally developed, people commonly allowed themselves to be distracted from body communication. Some, however, continued to focus on nonverbal cues. An ancient Chinese proverb warns, “Watch out for the man whose stomach doesn’t move when he laughs.” In the eighth century B.C., the prophet Isaiah commented, “The show of their countenance doth witness against them.”

While body language has been a source of interpersonal understanding from the very beginning of the human race, only in the past few decades have behavioral scientists started making systematic observations of nonverbal meanings. They have developed intricate notational systems, filmed people interacting for slow-motion frame-by-frame analysis, and conducted thousands of other experiments. The scientific study of body language is still in its infancy, and though conclusions are somewhat speculative, major contributions have already been made to our understanding of human interaction. When we add this research of modern scientists to the observations of sensitive people throughout history, we have a significant means of understanding others through reading body language.