Reading Body Language - Part 2

June 10, 2011

Interview with Joe Navarro, author of the book What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People

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Mike Carruthers:
To some degree you already know how to read body language - every human being does.

Joe Navarro:
Our species assesses for danger first and then assesses for hierarchy second and then we look for other things like emotions and so forth.
 

Former FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro, author of the book What Every BODY is Saying...

And that's why sometimes we'll be in a room with someone and they'll make us really uncomfortable and that may be because they're a predator and our brains are detecting the fact that this person may be a threat.

And we need to listen to those messages.

That's what Gavin de Becker was talking about in his book The Gift of Fear - that our limbic brain is designed to preserve us and it detects danger. If you don't feel comfortable on a date, getting into a car, getting into an elevator - just get out because your brain is actually communicating to you that something is wrong. For instance, social predators stare at us longer than the average person. That we react to that is absolute - it makes us uncomfortable and we should never turn that off - ever.

Body language is very accurate and Joe says it's very hard to fake it.

And that's why we have both a true smile and a false smile. A true smile pulls up towards the eyes; it's very difficult to fake. A fake smile is the one that we often use socially, it pulls towards the ears.