Body language isn’t really a language. It is an oxymoron or a poor description with incongruous words of what experts call nonverbal communication or more correctly non-linguistic communication.
Truthfully body language is the conscious and unconscious signaling of attitudes, desires and our inmost feelings of our bodies, actions and tone of voice, sometimes difficult to interpret by the novice but understanding it reduces uncertainty and it is highly necessary, because the truth is, they are more powerful than the spoken words.
Like a birdwatcher who does not study birds in order to shoot them, you should seek to understand them, to read the secrets of their unspoken language. It is this value and delight in understanding and appreciating it that enlightens and enriches our daily life and that is the truth about body language.
Your body language provides accurate evidence. And that it is not mere talk or hypothesis or ambiguous; as most people can develop this basic understanding with a basic training and to learn these skills is not difficult if imparted by specialists.
It is here where the Body Language Surveillance Society of Malaysia organizes yearly public programs to teach others this fascinating subject and to help them to be effective with their daily business life, like sales, negotiations, investigations, interviews and their social situations including appearance.
Hence understanding the different functions of bodily communication with theory as well as experiential findings, and how bodily communication plays a central role in the generation of social behavior is important and a great help for social performance and a strong guide for personal develoment trainings. These practical applications of non-verbal communication, can also be used to treating mental patients and to even improving politician’s speeches to social adroitness.
The first book ever in the world that used body language indicators to defend and vindicate a celebrity from false police charges through identifying body language indicators of truth thus upholding the celebrity from been charged in a court of law is no fiction but was a reality in Malaysia.
When in 2004, “55 Reasons Why Sharifah Aini Was Not Lying” was written to provide justification and vindicate the late singer and entertainer Datuk Sharifah Aini. Among others the book revealed the twitch of a liar that we fail to read or the stare of the liar who pauses before he lies.
Often you don’t realize that when you sometime tell a lie the grimace that accompanies it often tells the truth. Your postures, hand gestures, and facial expressions that accompanies your true feelings is sometimes more often than not is hidden under the mask of convention.
It may amaze most of us now, but the world is beginning to learn a lot with new discoveries that are constantly been revealed by chance and academic research.
It was in the late sixties that led to the scientific community to conclusive evidence of the universality of the then six emotional expressions of anger, enjoyment, sad, fear, surprise and disgust and subsequently only much later that the universal 7th facial expressions of contempt came.
Today, in the United States with security always in full alert after the September 11 attacks, (2001) and with technological advancements from cameras. We have what is now called the 8th facial expression and possibly a universal one.
This expression is of a real life potential assassin or killer just before he kills. An expression that has been seen in real life situations just prior to a real life murder in public either to an important person in a surprise attack for political or religious reasons or in a revenge killing. An expression that is involuntary and without display rules that are culturally bound.
It will certainly be good for providing security communities maximum protection from danger and for security reasons a private police force and their bodyguards can be now trained to identify this 8th facial expression before any attempt is made and to ward off a killing from happening or arising.
Today, Clinical psychologist too believe in the truth about body language and teach it religiously. They too study and want to know how to see if their patients and others are lying to them.
Surprisingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were in fact late comers to the truth about body language. In the book “What Is Everybody Saying,” retired FBI agent Joe Nevaro, (2007) admits that they were wrongly trained by the FBI, that when people averted their gaze they were lying and when they were truthful they looked at you more.
This acknowledgment of been wrongly trained by the FBI is also recorded in his interview with a television presenter who interviewed him upon releasing his book in 2007. (You tube, Joe Nevaro)
It should certainly disconcert the FBI today that the book written in Malaysia in 2004 page 397 clearly states on the subject of: Shifty gaze or too much eye contact. That deceivers not only have shifty gaze or look away (lack of normal eye contact) when communicating with the one they are telling lies to.
They also on the other hand, may have too much eye contact when lying, because he or she tends to over compensate his or her tendency to avoid looking straight into the eyes of the one he or she is seeking to bluff and also to see if you are believing their lies. A study of body language will therefore help you avoid professional and pathological liars who can’t stop lying and who believe their lies. You may be then helped to detecting, seeing and hearing deceptive behaviors in them in their almost daily dishonesties.
Jackson Yogarajah President Body Language Surveillance Society of Malaysia.