Body Language

Any modern study of communication must inevitably involve an analysis of non-verbal language, popularly called ‘body language’. This is a deep and fascinating subject and is well-documented elsewhere. Therefore this is going to give you a brief introduction to the subject. Integrated personality, non-verbal language is the complement of verbal language. In personalities susceptible to confusion of emotional contradiction, or if a person is not telling the truth for some reason, verbal and non-verbal language battle with each other. The manifestation of the struggle sometimes unmasks the individual’s real intentions.
For the entrepreneur, it is mandatory to understand how to read body language not only in the other person, that is to say the potential investor, but in themselves. The entrepreneur should be aware of how to put this to use in influencing the potential investor. It is also vital for the entrepreneur to make sure that he or she can control his or her own body language to prevent any misunderstanding by others.

Body language is basically a counterpart of verbal language. To understand body language, it is first necessary to understand verbal language and how it developed through the ages.

The absence of credibility

Obviously if you can spot the contradictions in a person’s verbal language and their non-verbal language you are not going to give the person good marks for credibility. In fact, incongruous gestures and faulty blending of verbal and non-verbal gestures can turn the potential investor off completely, and rightly so. If there is the slightest suspicious that a person is using contradictory verbal and non-verbal gestures, a person, i.e. the entrepreneur, is probably in the middle of perpetrating some kind of falsehood. Generally speaking it is natural for verbal and non-verbal gestures to coincide, to blend smoothly together to impart a picture serenity.

Yet, like all sweeping generality, this statement is not completely true either. Some people simply do not manage to get themselves together with enough skill to be in sync with their personas. Their images are imperfect, a little blurred at the ages, a bit out of focus. It is the person who’s instincts are not quite right who becomes negatively affected by the inability to blend verbal and non-verbal into a clear picture of credibility and naturalness.

What nervous tics and twitches mean

Desmond Morris, the well know anthropologist studied a number of people examining them to see if they exhibit non-verbal signs of nervousness when they are engaged in telling lies. He conducted experiments by making his control subjects tell lies deliberately at certain times and the truth at others. He found this both interesting and relevant to the interface between entrepreneur and potential investor.

He discovered that in telling lies, the two easiest to control are the voice and the face. He discovered the hardest non verbal expression to control is the body.

Lying he found causes a person to fidget and move about nervously in the chair. Moving about nervously also involves touching various parts of the body such as the nose and the mouth, for example whilst speaking.

The control subject sometimes scratch their wrist, rub their shoulders or toss their hair about through their fingers. Some even scratch their noses, swing their legs, twirl pens and pencils, fiddle with jewellery, scratch their heads, tap their fingers and so on. This indicates tension in dozens of other ways.

While Morris’s experiments concerned lying, the same manifestations occur when individuals are under tension for one reason or another . They also tend to fidget like the control subjects described earlier.To prevent people from thinking you’re a liar, it is best to try and suppress fidgets that, rightly or wrongly, give the impression to others that you are up to no good.

One way to stop your hands from fumbling about is to dig the nails into your palms. The pain elicited should stop you!

Link
http://www.go-betweenuk.co.uk