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Reading Body Language Can Make You a Better Listener

This is a direct quote from a recent participant in my body language seminar.

"Patti, I attended you public seminar in Philadelphia. I found that out of all the benefits of attending your body language program, the biggest was becoming a better listener. Yes, learning to read others body language has actually made me a better listener. I know that sounds strange, but I would often have a lot of “mental noise” that kept me from truly listening to someone. When I would be in a sales meeting the other person (prospect) would be talking and I would be thinking about my answers or what I wanted to say next, etc. Now that I know body language I am not just listening to the words, I am watching my clients. This has helped me eliminate all my mental noise and allowed me to focus, listen and engage much more effectively."

Attractiveness, skinny, funny

I have been blogging about our love of skinny woman and horrible prejudice against those who are overweight. You may not know that I am constantly working on my weight and I got this joke from speaker Nigel Risner today.

"Inside me there's a thin person struggling to get out, but I can usually sedate him with four or five cupcakes." -Bob Thaves

In my case it would two or three Dove bars.

Politician's body language: Lying and Trust

Question from a reader "How do I predict politicians future behavior from past body language?"
I have a separate category for Politicians on my Levels of Liars list that I created for my Deception Detection public seminar. Here is what I have observed and read in the research:

• Any person whose success is based on deceit can begin to rationalize that he or she must lie to succeed. By the way, men tend to lie more often about their success than woman.
• Anyone who believes that they are lying for some perceived greater good (for example, “Once I get into office I will do right for the people.”) will lie with less guilt and will give fewer cues of deceit making it harder for us to tell if they are lying.
• Repeating the same information, true or false, overtime can make it possible for someone to believe their own lies. This is an interesting result of how the brain reacts to dissonant information.
• Staff members giving misinformation is another problem that is rather unique to politicians. They are able to rely on their staff, speech writers and others to give them correct information and unless the politician is very smart and does their own fact checking before they speak and is savvy enough to create a staff made up of people with integrity, he or she can run into trouble. Before I do a body language read of a politician I like to study their staff to check the integrity of their 'spin doctors'. Read a case in point--the fall out from the recent Vanity Fair piece on Sara Palin. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24392.html

Body language treatment of the obese and over weight

Another report has more bad new about body language behavior and the obese. The article says, "America condemns the fat and blames them for their condition. Americans tend to see in fat people the loss of control that they fear in themselves (Angier 1992). Americans also associate fat people with a wide variety of negative characteristics. Studies published over a 20-year period demonstrate that Americans see fat people as "unattractive . . . aesthetically displeasing . . . morally and emotionally impaired . . . alienated from their sexuality . . . and discontent with themselves" (Crandall 1994)
The following report on size discrimination also says, " In other cases, it has led to weight-focused job interviews, forced resignations, denials of promotions and insurance coverage, and exclusion from office social functions. It has also led to lower incomes ($6,700 a year less) and higher rates of poverty (10 percent higher) among obese women than among their nonobese peers(Gortmaker 1993). And it has negatively affected the wage increases of the obese: when they increase, they increase less rapidly than the wages
of the nonobese (Averett 1994)."

Are you as disturbed by these findings as I am?

Body Language changes when dealing with the overweight or obese

Body language and Obesity. Obesity rates in adults rose in 23 states and more than 1 in 4 adults in 31 states are obese with Mississippi in the lead for adults according to Trust for America's Health quoted in USA today. The report also said that Medicare spends 1,400 to 6,000 dollars more a year on health care for an obese senior. There is quite a long list of research on how people discriminate against people based on their weight.There is body language research on nonverbal behaviors of store clerks dealing with overweight shoppers. "Sales clerks tend to subtly discriminate against overweight shoppers but treat them more favorably if they perceive that the individual is trying to lose weight, according to a study by Rice University researchers. (www.news-medical.net) The research found that, "Based on data from interactions in 152 stores in a large mall, the researchers found greater levels of interpersonal discrimination directed toward obese shoppers than toward average weight shoppers. The findings were based on the observers' and customers' reports of the sales clerks' eye contact, friendliness, rudeness, smile, premature ending of the interaction, length of interaction time, and negative language and tone. Almost three-fourths of the sales clerks were women." This again shows the difference in body language and interpersonal behaviors due to attractiveness or perceived lack of attractiveness.