Observe the labeling. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black? My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied?
The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia] with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents.
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me? Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far-off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how.
Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum. Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.
Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items. There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being.
No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred. Indeed, can we even describe a tree? Surveying the histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused by accident. All [seeming] accidents are subject to these causes, and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state as a result of a single battle.
In short, it is the general pace of things which draws all particular events along with it. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment period, took Montesquieu a step further by developing a concept for a permanent peaceful world order. The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics pledged to non- hostility and transparent domestic and international conduct. The Enlightenment philosophers ignored a key issue: Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities the Burkean view?
The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist rather than the organic view of political evolution. In the process, they contributed— unintentionally, indeed contrary to their intention—to an upheaval that rent Europe for decades and whose aftereffects reach to this day. So it was with the French Revolution, which proclaimed a domestic and world order as different from the Westphalian system as it was possible to be.
It demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French Revolution.
Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime. The broader the revolutionary coalition, the greater its ability to destroy existing patterns of authority. But the more sweeping the change, the more violence is needed to reconstruct authority, without which society will disintegrate.
Reigns of terror are not an accident; they are inherent in the scope of revolution. The French Revolution occurred in the richest country of Europe, even though its government was temporarily bankrupt.
Its original impetus is traceable to leaders— mostly aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie—who sought to bring the governance of their country into conformity with the principles of the Enlightenment. It gained a momentum not foreseen by those who made the Revolution and inconceivable to the prevailing ruling elite.
At its heart was a reordering on a scale that had not been seen in Europe since the end of the religious wars. For the revolutionaries, human order was the reflection of neither the divine plan of the medieval world, nor the intermeshing of grand dynastic interests of the eighteenth century.
The popular will, as conceived in that manner, was altogether distinct from the concept of majority rule prevalent in England or of checks and balances embedded in a written constitution as in the United States.
These theories prefigured the modern totalitarian regime, in which the popular will ratifies decisions that have already been announced by means of staged mass demonstrations. In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies; because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail, had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by imposing its principles.
The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth, and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society.
The concept of an international order with prescribed limits of state action was overthrown in favor of a permanent revolution that knew only total victory or defeat.
In November , the French National Assembly threw down the gauntlet to Europe with a pair of extraordinary decrees. It also declared war on Austria and invaded the Netherlands. In December , an even more radical decree was issued with an even more universal application. To achieve such vast and universal objectives, the leaders of the French Revolution strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition.
Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of the s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the s and s. Eventually, order was restored, as it must be if a state is not to disintegrate. The essence of the Great Man was his refusal to acknowledge traditional limits and his insistence on reordering the world by his own authority.
The Revolution no longer made the leader; the leader defined the Revolution. As he tamed the Revolution, Napoleon also made himself its guarantor. But he also saw himself—and not without reason—as the capstone of the Enlightenment. He created the Napoleonic Code, on which the laws that still prevail in France and other European countries are based.
He was tolerant of religious diversity and encouraged rationalism in government, with the end of improving the lot of the French people.
It was as the simultaneous incarnation of the Revolution and expression of the Enlightenment that Napoleon set about to achieve the domination and unification of Europe. By , under his brilliant military leadership, his armies crushed all opposition in Western and Central Europe, enabling him to redraw the map of the Continent as a geopolitical design.
He annexed key territories to France and established satellite republics in others, many of them governed by relatives or French marshals. A uniform legal code was established throughout Europe. Thousands of instructions on matters economic and social were issued. Would Napoleon become the unifier of a continent divided since the fall of Rome? Two obstacles remained: England and Russia. As it would a century and a half later, England stood alone in Western Europe, aware that a peace with the conqueror would make it possible for a single power to organize the resources of the entire Continent and, sooner or later, overcome its rule of the oceans.
England waited behind the channel for Napoleon and a century and a half later, for Hitler to make a mistake that would enable it to reappear on the Continent militarily as a defender of the balance of power. Napoleon had grown up under the eighteenth-century dynastic system and, in a strange way, accepted its legitimacy. In it, as a Corsican of minor standing even in his hometown, he was illegitimate by definition, which meant that, at least in his own mind, the legitimacy of his rule depended on the permanence—and, indeed, the extent —of his conquests.
Whenever there remained a ruler independent of his will, Napoleon felt obliged to pursue him. Napoleon could not live in an international order; his ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for that his power fell just barely too short. Not until Napoleon succumbed to the temptation to enter territories where local resources were insufficient for the support of a huge army—Spain and Russia—would he face defeat, first by overreaching himself, above all in Russia in , and then as the rest of Europe united against him in a belated vindication of Westphalian principles.
The defeat in Russia was by attrition. After the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon refused settlements that would have enabled him to keep some of his conquests. He feared that any formal acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. The Napoleonic period marked the apotheosis of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the examples of Greece and Rome, its thinkers had equated enlightenment with the power of reason, which implied a diffusion of authority from the Church to secular elites.
Now these aspirations had been distilled further and concentrated on one leader as the expression of global power. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
Its strength raised fundamental issues for the balance of power in Europe, and its aspirations threatened to make impossible a return to the prerevolutionary equilibrium. The liberties of Europe and its concomitant system of order required the participation of an empire far larger than the rest of Europe together and autocratic to a degree without precedent in European history. Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully.
It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun.
Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent.
Everything about Russia—its absolutism, its size, its globe-spanning ambitions and insecurities—stood as an implicit challenge to the traditional European concept of international order built on equilibrium and restraint. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears.
The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty — and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era.
Europe was coming to embrace its multipolarity as a mechanism tending toward balance, but Russia was learning its sense of geopolitics from the hard school of the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed borders. There raids for plunder and the enslavement of foreign civilians were regular occurrences, for some a way of life; independence was coterminous with the territory a people could physically defend.
Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors. In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources.
Thus the American man of letters Henry Adams recorded the outlook of the Russian ambassador in Washington in by which point Russia had reached Korea : His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed on the single idea that Russia must roll —must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way … When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent.
With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements.
It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states on average, , square kilometers annually from to When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status. When it was weak, it masked its vulnerability through brooding invocations of vast inner reserves of strength.
In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to dealing with a somewhat more genteel style. Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security. In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold.
A common Christian faith and a shared elite language French underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had been born in into a still essentially medieval Russia. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested modern techniques and professional disciplines personally.
Yet the suddenness of the transformation left Russia with the insecurities of a parvenu. This is clearly demonstrated by the following Observations. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them, however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking.
According to recent polls, Stalin too has acquired some of this recognition in contemporary Russian thinking. It is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places. Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but would even have proved its entire Ruin. Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance.
The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity.
Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit. Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!
By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler. A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations. For on behalf of its new vision of legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power.
Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he oversaw an unprecedented review of , Russian troops on the plains outside the French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations.
In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned.
Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.
The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the Atlantic Alliance.
It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war.
After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war. The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes.
But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in were in a radically different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia.
The application of Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent, or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions.
The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution or of Napoleon. A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in , bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by French armies.
That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.
Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. These were large and polyglot roughly present-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland , and now of uncertain political cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests. Their territory had to be redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium.
The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real- time contact with their capitals.
They receive minutely detailed instructions down to the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin so at least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance , three weeks for a message to reach Paris; London took a little longer.
Instructions therefore had to be drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the diplomats were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own.
And because one could never foresee which particular piece would be missing in any given instance, he was totally unpredictable.
But they did not have congruent perceptions of what this would mean in practice. Their task was to achieve some reconciliation of perspectives shaped by substantially different historical experiences. Our in-depth analyses of youth participating we're providing data and insights on their engagement and impact at every level in the election. Explore the Latest. K Civics Next Item. Educating for American Democracy. Preparing all young people to be engaged and effective participants in their communities and in democracy requires more than just reinvesting in civic education: it requires reshaping it to meet the needs of a diverse 21st century student body.
Poll: Youth Poised to Keep Engaging. Similarly, I have to thank Dr. Marc Reeser, who was with me in the trenches catching spies for so long, also deserves my recognition. I developed a friendship with many of these individuals, including David Givens, who heads the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington, and whose writings, teachings, and admonitions I have taken to heart.
Their research and writings have enriched my life, and I have included their work in this volume as well as that of other giants such as Desmond Morris, Edward Hall, and Charles Darwin, who started it all with his seminal book The expression of the emotions in man and animals.
My dear friend Elizabeth Lee Barron, at the University of Tampa, is a godsend when it comes to research. I am also indebted to Dr. Phil Quinn at the University of Tampa and to Professor Barry Glover, at Saint Leo University, for their years of friendship and willingness to accommodate my busy travel schedule.
This book would not be the same without photographs, and for that I am grateful for the work of renowned photographer Mark Wemple. My gratitude also goes out to Ashlee B. I also want to thank Tampa artist David R. Andrade for his illustrations. Matthew Benjamin, my ever-patient editor at HarperCollins, put this project together and deserves my praise for being a gentleman and a consummate professional.
My praise also goes to Executive Editor Toni Sciarra, who worked so diligently to finalize this project. Matthew and Toni work with a wonderful team of people at HarperCollins, including copy editor Paula Cooper, to whom I owe many thanks. And as before, I want to thank Dr. Marvin Karlins for once again shaping my ideas into this book and for his kind words in the foreword. My gratitude goes out to my dear friend Dr. Elizabeth A. Murray, a true scientist and educator, who took time out from her busy teaching schedule to edit the early drafts of this manuscript and share her voluminous knowledge of the human body.
To my family—all of my family, near and far—I thank you for tolerating me and my writing when I should have been relaxing with you. To Luca, muito obrigado. To my daughter, Stephanie, I give thanks every day for your loving soul. All of these individuals have contributed to this book in some way; their knowledge and insight, small and large, is shared with you herein. I wrote this book with the sober knowledge that many of you will use this information in your daily lives.
To that end, I have worked assiduously to present both the science and the empirical information with diligence and clarity. If there are any errors in this book, they are my responsibility and mine alone. In many ways, writing is no different; it is a process of learning and discerning, which at the end of the day has been a pleasure. It is my hope that when you come to the end of this book, you too will have gained a profound knowledge of how we communicate nonverbally— and that your life will be enriched, as mine has been, by knowing what every body is saying.
It was much more down-to-earth than that. It was an interest born of necessity, the need to adapt successfully to a totally new way of life. When I was eight years old, I came to America as an exile from Cuba. We left just a few months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and we honestly thought we would be here only for a short while as refugees.
Unable to speak English at first, I did what thousands of other immigrants coming to this country have done. I found that was a language I could translate and understand immediately. In my young mind, I saw the human body as a kind of billboard that transmitted advertised what a person was thinking via gestures, facial expressions, and physical movements that I could read.
Over time, obviously, I learned English—and even lost some skill with the Spanish language—but the nonverbals, I never forgot. I discovered at an early age that I could always rely on nonverbal communications. I learned to use body language to decipher what my classmates and teachers were trying to communicate to me and how they felt about me.
One of the first things I noticed was that students or teachers who genuinely liked me would raise or arch their eyebrows when they first saw me walk into the room. I used this nonverbal information, as so many other immigrants have, quickly to evaluate and develop friendships, to communicate despite the obvious language barrier, to avoid enemies, and in nurturing healthy relationships.
Many years later I would use these same nonverbal eye behaviors to solve crimes as a special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI see box 1. Based on my background, education, and training, I want to teach you to see the world as an FBI expert on nonverbal communication views it: as a vivid, dynamic environment where every human interaction resonates with information, and as an opportunity to use the silent language of the body to enrich your knowledge of what people are thinking, feeling, and intending to do.
Using this knowledge will help you stand out among others. It will also protect you and give you previously hidden insight into human behavior. As an investigator, I used eye-blocking behaviors to assist in the arson investigation of a tragic hotel fire in Puerto Rico that claimed ninety-seven lives. A security guard came under immediate suspicion because the blaze broke out in an area where he was assigned.
One of the ways we determined he had nothing to do with starting the fire was by asking him some very specific questions as to where he was before the fire, at the time of the fire, and whether or not he set the fire.
After each question I observed his face for any telltale signs of eye-block behavior. His eyes blocked only when questioned about where he was when the fire started. He was questioned further on this topic by the lead investigators and eventually admitted to leaving his post to visit his girlfriend, who also worked at the hotel. Unfortunately, while he was gone, the arsonists entered the area he should have been guarding and started the fire.
In the end, three arsonists responsible for the tragic blaze were arrested and convicted of the crime. The security guard, while woefully negligent and burdened with tremendous guilt, was not, however, the culprit. Nonverbal behaviors comprise approximately 60 to 65 percent of all interpersonal communication and, during lovemaking, can constitute percent of communication between partners Burgoon, , — A suspect in the case was brought in for questioning.
His words sounded convincing and his story was plausible. While my colleagues jotted down notes about what they were hearing, I kept my eyes on the suspect and saw that as he told the story about turning left and going home, his hand gestured to his right, which was exactly the direction that led to the rape scene. But once I saw it I suspected he was lying. I waited a while and then confronted him again, and in the end he confessed to the crime.
It is the goal of this book to teach you how to observe the world around you and to determine the meaning of nonverbals in any setting.
This powerful knowledge will enhance your personal interactions and enrich your life, as it has mine. One of the fascinating things about an appreciation for nonverbal behavior is its universal applicability. It works everywhere humans interact. Nonverbals are ubiquitous and reliable. Once you know what a specific nonverbal behavior means, you can use that information in any number of different circumstances and in all types of environments.
In fact, it is difficult to interact effectively without nonverbals. If you ever wondered why people still fly to meetings in the age of computers, text messages, e-mails, telephones, and video conferencing, it is because of the need to express and observe nonverbal communications in person.
Nothing beats seeing the nonverbals up close and personal. Because nonverbals are powerful and they have meaning.
Whatever you learn from this book, you will be able to apply to any situation, in any setting. Because poker is a game that emphasizes bluffing and deception, players have a keen interest in being able to read the tells of their opponents.
For them, decoding nonverbal communications is critical to success. While many were grateful for the insights I provided, what startled me was how many seminar participants were able to see the value of understanding and utilizing nonverbal behavior beyond the poker table. Two weeks after the session ended I received an e-mail from one of the participants, a physician from Texas.
The nonverbals you taught us in order to read poker players have helped me read my patients, too. Now I can sense when they are uncomfortable, confident, or not being entirely truthful. I know this because for the past two decades I have taught thousands of people, just like you, how to successfully decode nonverbal behavior and use that information to enrich their lives, the lives of their loved ones, and to achieve their personal and professional goals.
Accomplishing this, however, requires that you and I establish a working partnership, each contributing something of significance to our mutual effort. To help you on the training side, I want to provide you with some important guidelines—or commandments—to maximize your effectiveness in reading nonverbals.
As you incorporate these commandments into your everyday life and make them part of your routine, they soon will become second nature to you, needing little, if any, conscious thought. Do you remember the first time you gave that a go? If you were like me, you were so concerned with operating the vehicle that it was difficult to track what you were doing inside the car and concentrate on what was happening on the road outside at the same time. It was only when you felt comfortable behind the wheel that you were able to expand your focus to encompass the total driving environment.
Once you master the mechanics of using nonverbal communication effectively, it will become automatic and you can focus your full attention on decoding the world around you. Commandment 1: Be a competent observer of your environment. This is the most basic requirement for anyone wishing to decode and use nonverbal communications.
Imagine the foolishness of trying to listen to someone with plugs in our ears. Yet, when it comes to seeing the silent language of nonverbal behavior, many viewers might as well be wearing blindfolds, as oblivious as they are to the body signals around them.
Consider this. Just as careful listening is critical to understanding our verbal pronouncements, so careful observation is vital to comprehending our body language. What it states is critical. Concerted effortful observation—is absolutely essential to reading people and detecting their nonverbal tells successfully. The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr.
Such people are oblivious to subtle changes in their world. In fact, various scientific studies have demonstrated people to be poor observers of their world. Ask them to go into a strange room filled with people, give them a chance to look around, and then tell them to close their eyes and report what they saw. You would be astounded by their inability to recall even the most obvious features in the room. I never had a clue she was unhappy with our marriage.
I had no idea he had a drug problem. I never saw it coming. I had no idea I was going to be fired. Such inadequacies are not surprising, really. There are no classes in elementary school, high school, or college that teach people situational awareness. Fortunately, observation is a skill that can be learned. Furthermore, because it is a skill, we can get better at it with the right kind of training and practice.
You can overcome your weakness in this area if you are willing to devote time and effort to observing your world more conscientiously. What you need to do is make observation—concerted observation—a way of life. Becoming aware of the world around you is not a passive act.
It is a conscious, deliberate behavior—something that takes effort, energy, and concentration to achieve, and constant practice to maintain. Observation is like a muscle. It grows stronger with use and atrophies without use. Exercise your observation muscle and you will become a more powerful decoder of the world around you. By the way, when I speak of concerted observation, I am asking you to utilize all your senses, not just your sense of sight.
Whenever I walk into my apartment, I take a deep breath. One time I detected the slight odor of lingering cigarette smoke when I returned home from a trip. My nose alerted me to possible danger well before my eyes could scan my apartment. Fortunately, he was a welcome intruder, but there could just as easily have been a burglar lurking in the next room. The point is, by using all my senses, I was better able to assess my environment and contribute to my own safety and well-being.
Commandment 2: Observing in context is key to understanding nonverbal behavior. When trying to understand nonverbal behavior in real-life situations, the more you understand the context in which it takes place, the better you will be at understanding what it means. For example, after a traffic accident, I expect people to be in shock and to walk around looking dazed. I expect their hands to shake and even for them to make poor decisions like walking into oncoming traffic.
This is why officers ask you to stay in your car. The result of this hijacking includes behaviors such as trembling, disorientation, nervousness, and discomfort. In context, these actions are to be expected and confirm the stress from the accident. During a job interview, I expect applicants to be nervous initially and for that nervousness to dissipate. If it shows up again when I ask specific questions, then I have to wonder why these nervous behaviors have suddenly presented again.
Commandment 3: Learn to recognize and decode nonverbal behaviors that are universal. Some body behaviors are considered universal because they are exhibited similarly by most people. For instance, when people press their lips together in a manner that seems to make them disappear, it is a clear and common sign that they are troubled and something is wrong.
This nonverbal behavior, known as lip compression, is one of the universal tells that I will be describing in the chapters to follow see box 4. The more of these universal nonverbals you can recognize and accurately interpret, the more effective you will be in assessing the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of those around you.
My British client had asked me to sit through their contract negotiations with a huge multinational corporation that would be outfitting their vessels. I agreed and suggested that the proposed contract be presented point by point, with agreement being reached on each item before moving forward. That way I could more closely watch the corporate negotiator for any nonverbals that might reveal information helpful to my client. When a clause detailing the outfitting of a specific part of the vessel was read—a construction phase involving millions of dollars—the chief negotiator from the multinational corporation pursed his lips, a clear indication that something in this part of the contract was not to his liking.
I passed a note to my client, warning him that this particular clause in the contract was contentious or problematic and should be revisited and discussed thoroughly while we were all still together. By confronting the issue then and there—and focusing on the details of the clause in question—the two negotiators were able to hammer out an agreement face-to-face, which ended up saving my client Universal nonverbal behaviors constitute one group of body cues: those that are relatively the same for everyone.
There is a second type of body cue called an idiosyncratic nonverbal behavior, which is a signal that is relatively unique to a particular individual. The better you know an individual, or the longer you interact with him or her, the easier it will be to discover this information because you will have a larger database upon which to make your judgments. For example, if you note your teenager scratches his head and bites his lip when he is about to take a test, this may be a reliable idiosyncratic tell that speaks of his nervousness or lack of preparation.
In order to get a handle on the baseline behaviors of the people with whom you regularly interact, you need to note how they look normally, how they typically sit, where they place their hands, the usual position of their feet, their posture and common facial expressions, the tilt of their heads, and even where they generally place or hold their possessions, such as a purse see figures 1 and 2.
Eyes are relaxed and the lips should be full. A stressed face is tense and slightly contorted, eyebrows are knitted, and the forehead is furrowed. Commandment 6: Always try to watch people for multiple tells—behaviors that occur in clusters or in succession. Your accuracy in reading people will be enhanced when you observe multiple tells, or clusters of behavior body signals on which to rely. These signals work together like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces of the puzzle you possess, the better your chances of putting them all together and seeing the picture they portray.
To illustrate, if I see a business competitor display a pattern of stress behaviors, followed closely by pacifying behaviors, I can be more confident that she is bargaining from a position of weakness. As this is a yearly ritual, you have stood with your son on numerous occasions while he waited his turn to say hello to everyone. He has never hesitated to run up and give family members a big hug. However, on this occasion, when it comes time to embrace his Uncle Harry, he stands stiff and frozen in place.
What should you do? In the past, he has never hesitated to greet his uncle with a hug. Why the change in behavior? Perhaps there is no justified reason for his fear, but to the observant and sensibly cautious parent, a warning signal should go off.
Then again, this behavior might indicate something much more sinister. A child who is exhibiting giddiness and delight at the prospect of entering a theme park will change his behavior immediately upon learning the park is closed. Adults are no different. When we get bad news over the phone or see something that can hurt us, our bodies reflect that change immediately.
Careful observation of such changes can allow you to predict things before they happen, clearly giving you an advantage—particularly if the impending action could cause harm to you or others see box 6. Commandment 8: Learning to detect false or misleading nonverbal signals is also critical. The ability to differentiate between authentic and misleading cues takes practice and experience. It requires not only concerted observation, but also some careful judgment.
Commandment 9: Knowing how to distinguish between comfort and discomfort will help you to focus on the most important behaviors for decoding nonverbal communications. Having studied nonverbal behavior most of my adult life, I have come to realize that there are two principal things we should look for and focus on: comfort and discomfort. This is fundamental to how I teach nonverbal communications.
Learning to read comfort and discomfort cues behaviors in others accurately will help you to decipher what their bodies and minds are truly saying. If in doubt as to what a behavior means, ask yourself if this looks like a comfort behavior e. Companies need to ensure that as these workers assume leadership roles, they are fully prepared with the knowledge they need to guide the organization.
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