The Impact Of Body Language

Who is this guy? Why should I be sharing with him?

Wouldn’t I just get more pleasure if I hit the couch and read that advertising book?

All these thoughts ran through my head in an instant, as I looked over my shoulder and across the chair into the eyes of Scott.

 

Less than 10 seconds ago, meeting Scott had been the highlight of my day. A successful, philosophical, self improvement oriented dude who I could really talk to and learn with.

But then our pursuit of knowledge led us to this little experiment, and just like that our friendship evaporated.

Bad Body Language

They’re obviously into me

But let’s take a step back…

I’m procrastinating at the Notman House (read, entrepreneur’s frat house), when in walks a couple new guys. So I play host, telling them the environment of our little entrepreneur haven.

One of the guys, Scott, turns out to be an entrepreneurially curious, philosophical inclined, inventor. My kinda guy.

 

So, after riffing on the more interesting points of life for an hour or two, we wind up the topic of the power of body language. And that’s when the experiment was born. One of us (Scott, I think) proposed we try an experiment to see the effects of negative body language.

So we pushed a chair in between us, crossed our arms & legs, turned side ways to each other, each facing the opposite direction. And then

we tried to connect.

 

Our sentences had devolved into short, clipped, spurts of words.

“Okay, uhm, what’s your favorite fruit.” – That’s me

“…I don’t want to share with you” – scott

 

Gah! In synchronicity, we broke our negative holds, kicked the chair out from between us, and opened up to eachother once more.

Some nervous laughter, and mutual amazement at what had just happened, and our comradery was back.

 

And there it was, a solid truth. Even when we know exactly what our body language is supposed to do to our minds, we can’t stop it from happening.

The mind follows the body. And the body follows the mind.

Body language cannot lie. Not for long anyways.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2012 at 11:48 pmand is filed under Experiments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://3rddimension.wordpress.com/ War in Heaven

    Hey there it’s War in Heaven from Tynan’s site. Anyway here goes!

    Interesting observation. A while back I was trying to tackle a similar question – is the body just a slave to chemical reactions or can our wills alone force the bodies chemical reactions to change to match what happens in the mind?

    After reading Tynan’s blog it seemed like the mind was the number one factor as he does a ton of things that he doesn’t want to do but after pushing thru it with self discipline the body kind of ‘shapes up’ and listens to its master. Steve Pavlina wrote about a similar experience in his long Self Discipline article.

    Your experiment seems to challenge the assertion that the mind is indeed omnipotent. Maybe you can probably force yourself thru discipline to connect with bad body language but it’d be a uphill battle. Given that even though the mind is omnipotent we’d make our jobs a lot easier if we got our chemicals to match as well.

    A lot of people these days claim to have chemically/biologically induced stress/depression etc… in which even though they don’t want to be in that state the right chemicals will push them into it and the right combination of drugs may push them out. Given that maybe we have a 65/55 situation going here where the mind is greater but the body exerts an almost equally powerful pull.

    If this is so then the optimal strategy is a two prong one in which we both sharpen our wills and optimize our biological systems to only produce chemicals/hormones/reactions that align with our goals.

    • Anonymous

      Completely agree man.

      As all pickup artists know, awesome body language covering total lack of confidence leads to nothing. Deep confidence and slumped shoulders lead to the same thing (though I’ve never seen a confident guy with bad body language).

      My approach: Assume the body language of someone I admire, run through a few philosophies in my head (like knowing that what I think other people are thinking is probably wrong, and that assuming the best often creates the best), and then use a surge of willpower to overcome any barrier that is left.