UK Life Coaching Journal

Body Language     Comments (0)

As we progress through life, we gain a lot of experience of how to survive in the world through the simple process of trial and error. We learn about the sharpness of needles, and the hotness of ovens, the hard way. But when it comes to interpersonal communication, what can we do when someone we are meeting for the first time says something like, ‘You can trust me!’ True, or false? What attitude are we personally to adopt in response to this particular statement? It’s no good flipping back through our memory files to see what happened in the past when other people said precisely the same thing to us. Even if our attitude then proved to be the correct one, how do we know that this particular person, a stranger, is telling us the truth?  Everyone has a unique personality structure, different from any other we’ve ever come across. There’s no way you can possibly rely on your past experience to check this personality’s main function. Does it act as a cover-up to his or her unadmitted negative emotions? Or, alternatively, is it a channel for the communication of heartfelt and accurately perceived truths?

If you really want to know what’s going on, you’ll need to pay close attention, not just to the words that come out of a person’s mouth, but also to the movements and physical attitudes that the rest of his or her body is expressing. That’s another way of saying, we need to step back so we can get a perspective on the person as a whole. The words that come out of the mask can, as we’ve seen, be either true or false. But, the language of the body never lies.