The Definitive Book of Body Language
by Allan and Barbara Pease (2004)
Now, this is a great book for anyone interested in body language, how we communicate non-verbally by the way we sit, move, and set up our surroundings. While it is written in a very readable, often humourous style, every single page is full of useful observations and generalizations about how to interpret body language.
The authors describe many of their own experiments. For example, by using namecards they rearranged the seating in training rooms and moved all the previously keen learners from the front to the back and sides of the room. This had the effect of reducing their learning and interest in what the trainer said. Conversely, the people who were moved into the front and center had a big increase in both learning and motivation. Along with their own research, they have explored the major research by Paul Eckman and many other body language researchers, and the back of the book contains a rather impressive seven pages of tightly typed references. What the authors have achieved is to summarize this research into highly useful and readable chunks that are accessible to the everyday reader.
In every one of the 19 chapters, there were moments when I just had to stop and go “wow, so that’s what was happening in that situation – if only I had known.” Maybe that’s simply because I’m a man, and men are notoriously worse at noticing body language than women. The female brain is organized for multi-tracking, to identify different conversational tones easily, and to subconsiously read the body language of other women and men. The promise of this book is that men can learn to achieve this through consciously reading the signals, and that everyone can learn to do it much much better.
The authors cover a huge range of topics which are shown below, and even the shorter chapters are packed full of useful information. This is a long-term reference book as well as a good read.
- Understanding the Basics
- Hands
- Smiles and laughter
- Arm signals
- Cultural differences
- Hand and thumb gestures
- Evaluation and Deceit Signals
- Eye Signals
- Territories and Personal Space
- Legs
- Common Everyday Gestures
- Mirroring – how we build rapport
- Secret signals of cigarettes, glasses and makeup
- Body pointing
- Courtship displays and attraction signals
- Ownership, territory, and height signals
- Seating arrangements
- Interviews, power plays and office politics
- Putting it all together
For NLP work, it is useful to ask: Does it work? There is no doubt that much of body language is common and can be judged relatively accurately using the information in this book. This is supported by the research by Ekman, the authors, and others. However, what is important is to always calibrate – the person in front of you is the most important person to be dealing with, and it is quite possible that they will deviate in some systematic ways from the information in this book. The key word here is ‘systematic’ – you still need to calibrate the person who is sitting in front of you to understand what any particular gesture or cluster of gestures means for that person. The greatest value in books of this type is that they raise our awareness of the sensory distinctions that we can use to improve our own sensory acuity. This book is a very fine map of the world of body language and highly recommended for anyone involved in NLP, but it is also useful to keep in mind that the map is still not the territory.