The body can betray you

By VIKKI BLAND

Why should you never cross your legs in a job interview? Or touch your face during a customer presentation? Why do some managers govern and motivate staff so smoothly while others constantly have their authority challenged?

The answer, says human behaviour author Allan Pease, is the body language people use.

"We know from extensive research that body language is 60 to 80 per cent accurate in revealing the emotions of individuals in certain situations," Pease says. "So depending on how an individual is feeling, the advice to 'just be yourself' could be the worst advice of all."

Body language experts concentrate on eliminating gestures which can make colleagues, staff or potential employees feel negatively towards a person. This can be as simple as not crossing your arms or legs - a typical defensive body position - during a job interview.

"Body language is a gauge of your emotional condition and it affects how you perceive information and others perceive you," Pease says. "When you force people to change their body language it affects the way they feel." Pease, 53, says bosses want someone confident to do the job, so if individuals feel unsure or defensive during a business presentation, staff meeting or job interview they should adjust their body language and "fake it till they make it".

"Once people reflect confidence in their body language they begin to be treated as confident and that actually helps them to be confident," says Pease.

Pease and his wife, Barbara, have had considerable success with eight best-selling books on human relations and body language. Their latest title, The Definitive Book of Body Language, was published this month. Pease, a two-time cancer survivor, has sold 20 million books and doesn't plan to stop any time soon.

He says knowing how to understand and manipulate body language is a powerful asset in the employment arena.

"The whole world is into communications and personal relationships. People want to know who they are, how their relationships are going and how to sell themselves better."

And they want to know when they're being lied to.

Pease says liars tend to bring their hands to their face during conversation - touching eyes or nose, pulling ears or covering mouths.

"Researchers have put heat-seeking cameras on people and monitored blood flow to the extremities when lying occurs. They have found more blood flows to the extremities during lying, causing nerve endings to tingle, which brings the hands to the face," Pease says.

But how reliable is body language and is it even fair to try reading it? What if a job candidate with a bad case of facial dermatitis isn't hired because the employer fancies himself as a body-language expert and takes any itching as lying?

Pease says the answer is to never assess a sole body-language clue in isolation.

"You need a cluster or sentence of at least three body-language clues to be able to read a person's emotions about 80 per cent accurately," he says.

Pease is big on gender differences and says because women's brains are better at reading body language, men and women would do well to play to each other's strengths in the workplace.

"In our own business negotiations I ask most of the questions and Barbara does most of the observing. We then get the whole picture."

Pease says that when men and women are put in front of a silent film featuring human interactions, men score well below women in determining what is happening.

"This gives women an enormous advantage in business because of the relationship-based nature of business today."

Career climbers who work in the international arena should realise that body language differs between cultures.

"While the basics are very much the same everywhere, there are big differences between cultures in how much eye contact you can have, how often you can touch and how close you can stand to another human being.

"Other examples are things like the 'okay' sign made with the thumb and forefinger. In most places it means 'okay' but in France it means zero or the lowest score and in Japan the gesture stands for money."

Pease says there are no discernible differences in body language between people from New Zealand, Australia and Britain.

However, if a city bank manager is conducting business with an outback farmer they are advised to stand well back - and not just to avoid the inevitable farming odours.

"Workers from major cities have a personal spatial need of about 46 centimetres, so they stand about a metre apart. In the country, they tend to stand about 1.5 metres apart. It's simply to do with how much space they're used to having," Pease says.

New Zealanders keen to establish good working relations with Americans should not pull away if they see an American arm reach out for a hug.

"In America and parts of Europe, business colleagues who are almost strangers will stand there and put their arm around you or even lean in to give you a hug or kiss," Pease says.

"If that happens, the worst thing you can do is to kiss the air. It is the most insincere form of contact."

And business colleagues who are usually at loggerheads but practising unity for the sake of appearances won't pull it off without "mirroring" - a term used when two or more people copy each other's body language.

"You can tell a lot at a glance from how two people have positioned themselves - who is in the front when they are walking together, who smiles first and whether the other one smiles in the same way soon after.

"These are all subconscious clues as to how one person feels about the other. "We can even tell you why Bill Clinton had sex with that woman," he laughs.

Even the common handshake is apparently a dead giveaway. Pease says 1960s United States President John F. Kennedy is a fascinating study in body language, although he presided during an era when the impact of body language was barely acknowledged or discussed. "The origin of the handshake is arm wrestling and it's almost as if JFK knew this. He always stood to the left for a photograph so the other person had to approach him from his left.

"This meant the handshake always had his hand on the top pointing straight down. When we cut the heads off JFK handshake photos and ask people which person they think is more dominant they select the guy in the blue suit [JFK] every time."

However, Pease says that while it's beneficial to use body language to determine how people feel or think or to manipulate it a little for business benefit, using body language to make a judgment on a person's entire character is damaging in places of immense business or personal impact - such as the courtroom.

Pease says that working with body language is immensely satisfying and rewarding. "We have helped high-profile business people and ordinary people with work and personal relationships and even helped politicians with campaigns and credibility."

Bill Clinton obviously missed that seminar.

* Allan and Barbara Pease's book The Definitive Book of Body Language costs $29.95 from bookstores or online at The Knowledge Gym. The website has details of Allan Pease's seminars in New Zealand next week or call 09 415 9024.