ZTLSS - Bodylanguage and Human Behavior

So there's people who want to see lies and know when they are betrayed, people who want to empathize with others on a better level and psychopathic social engineers who want to know everything about your behavior to then change it and have fun with you. Anyhow if you want to see whenever people mask something there's plenty - PLENTY - of things you can keep track of. This is gonna be a long list of plain information; enjoy!

The NAS

The NAS - or spelled out Nervousness Activation System - is responsible for making you sweat, increasing your heartbeat and breathrate and increasing your bodies temperature whenever you get emotional. Between some emotions are slight differences in the relation of each symptom however those are neglectable due to individual differences beeing larger.

As you probably know it is impossible to always keep track of all the signals everyone is giving throughout conversations. In face-to-face conversations it might be but not in group conversations. Thus I discovered for myself it works good enough to only pay attention to one's NAS and if it triggers while the conversational partner acts as if there wasn't any emotion. Only when this happens I start to look for deceit or concealment of information, if the topic promotes it (if your friend is playing it nice that he got to do a chore after losing a bet it's not worth confronting deceit).

Breathing

While this is included in the NAS breathing can sometimes give other clues too. When someone makes a statement and awaits your response but is holding his breath then you know it's a critical statement of which he knows there is a thing to that you might not like. For example a car salesman who is about to make a deal but states the last thing about 'the car has a minor problem but its neglectable' holds his breath. Then you as educated behavior analyst would know about his attempt to conceal something.

Besides these there of course are things like increased and lowered breathing rate (=stress/relaxation).

Bodylanguage in general

Bodylanguage is a large field of study so I will not get into detail. If you want to read into it yourself I recommend Joe Navarroe's books. However if you notice bodylanguage incoherence after the NAS activated and notice more than one or two weird aspects then you are onto something. Make sure to talk around the topic a little more and ask yourself whether it would be worth it to confront the person with anything. It's often better to slowly talk into it or ask nicely and with skilled phrasing.

The eyes

Why the hell the eyes as seperate segment - You ask? Well the eyes are most giving. You learn to mask emotions with your mouth, your arms, your body in general but you barely pay attention to masking with your eyes. Especially when it comes to sadness, anger, fear, happiness, ... actually any emotion. While the feet are still the most certain and true part about one's bodylanguage the eyes give the best microexpressions. If you learn to read eyes you learn to read emotions. A small checkup of emotional indicators I always look out for:

Anger: narrowed eyelids

Fear: both eyelids pulled upwards; the lower pupil won't be visible anymore

Sadness: more water in the eyes;lower eyelid raised

Happiness: both eyelids raised; wrinkles around the eye; sometimes more water in the eye

Alright so there's this thing called 'human needs' and we all seek to have these fulfiled. People of course vary in what need must be satiafied more than another thus making it subjective. However everyone needs at least a minimum level of satisfaction for each need throughout the day. I will list up the human needs as depicted in Chase Hughes Ellipsis Manual - a great read by the way - and explain them regarding the basics.

The four As

There are four main needs/needs out of which at least one is always in focus for a person. Those are Appreciation, Approval, Admiration and Acceptance.

Appreciation

People who put focus on beeing appreciated are usually generous and kind. They thank others often and show their appreciation of people around them to make others happy and appreciate them back. They often enough carry handkerchiefs or similarly simple things with them and make sure people don't feel left out of the social groups. Those sort of people are usually extraverted and empathetic.

To appeal to appreciation-seeking people you treat them thankfully. Give them frequent geniune thank yous while making eyecontact and smiling at them. Make sure to appreciate them whenever they do an action to help out others.

Approval

These people seek to be approven of their skills and knowledge. They are competetive and focused on improving themselves. They will look out for approval from people they acknowledge as smarter or more skilled than they are.

It is difficult to appeal to this group of peoples need because they first have to acknowledge you as superior to them. However if you get acknowledged then a considerate amount of approving them will make them behave in a way you recommend them to.

Admiration

The last big A is the admiration-seeking person. You could put them in a nutshell by saying they are prideful however this is not true. Some are actually prideful and arrogant however the other amount of admiration-seekers will not admit they feed off beeing admired. They will rather stay on the same level as the people who admire them as advancing themselves above them by saying 'Well I am awesome' could lead to the admirers disliking you. Noone likes arrogant people.

It's easy to appeal to those peoples need since you only need to become a fan of theirs. Admire them and keep on telling them how you look up to them and how awesome they are at what they take pride in (even if they don't tell others they do take pride in something because it could seem arrogant they still do take pride in it). Emphasize how you really think they are unique in how good they are and how they really are above your league and how you wish you could be as skilled as they are or even be like them in general.

Acceptance

Pretty self-explaining but here goes: this group of people must make sure they are accepted by their peer. They know how it's like not to be accepted so they know to value beeing accepted. This often coinheres with appreciation-seeking people however the main difference lies in acceptance seekers willingness to change their behavior to suit the group. They make good roleplayers and liars because they need these skills to survive socially.

Those people are the easier to exploit because of their struggle to seek acceptance. If you ensure them to accept and even like them the way they really are and not just the way their facade is you easily get them to follow your advise. You can also give them social advice for how people behave (since you as a reader probably know a lot about this) to make them trust and follow you.

As said everyone has at least one of these needs as main need and every human can be exploited by simply appealing to them. However there are twelve smaller needs which I am only gonna list up since they are pretty much self-explaining:

Protection, freedom, strength, respect, intelligence, pleasure, comfort, privacy, pity, attractiveness, uniqueness and success.

Let's have a small talk about asking the most spoken question of 'why?'.

Think about it - but how?

Whenever you ask yourself 'why?' and feel clueless to what the direct reasons could be, ask yourself what requirements would be for the current situation to have happened. Try to divide the steps into as many as possible so you get rid of as many biases as you might have because most of the time the obvious reasoning won't be the happened reasoning.

For an example you find yourself in a room with two glasses on a table but three watercircle-stains in shape of the glasses. Two below the glasses themselves and one at another seat besides one of the glasses. So what are requirements for this to happen? A circle-shaped figure must have stood at the place where now only the shape is left. This figure likely was a glass. It might have been one more glass which was taken from the table. It might as well have been one of the two glasses before the connected person changed seats for any reason. It might as well have been a completely different thing but it must not be any of this.

You see... if you want to make people do stuff for you it certainly helps if they feel bad for not helping you. Problem is people know about guilt-tripping and have a certain understanding of when they're manipulated. So how do you still apply this?

The loop of guilt-tripping

1. The first favor

Every once in a while people will offer assistance to you. Not really regarding huge things - especially not if you are no friends with them (yet) - but if you dropped your pencil or something minor and they have a better position to help you out they will offer assistance (or seek initiative on their own). Either way as it comes to that thank them and emphasize how kind they are. Appeal to their need for appreciation, admiration or approval. Satisfy their needs and make sure they start liking to help you because you reward them with a 'thanks, you're so kind'. To go even further you can point out how 'others aren't as helpful as you are and don't care about fellow (for example) americans anymore'. Tell them they are unique and show them all you got in store for a future they might spend serving you. Make them feel special, kind and unique.

2. The first guilt

Eventually everyone forgets something, is too busy, simply doesn't want to do something and says s/he forgot or has any other reason for not doing what you expected them to do. Once you notice your subject forgot to buy the milk or whatever s/he promised assistance in, tell them it's no big deal they forgot and that they're still great and all. Make them feel bad for not beeing as forgiving as you are and not using their kindness or helpfulness which you keep on telling them they have uniquely much of. There are a few different follow ups you should always use one of to keep the subject in the loop.

A) You continue by mentioning how one or more people they care about lost something out of their bad. This can include your loss but rather put the loss of others in foreground else it appears egoistic.

B) You continue by telling about what they can do to make it up. "Don't worry about it. You usually are great at this so I don't mind. Just make sure you buy the milk tomorrow." By default they one of two cases happen: They forget about it again and feel even worse -> use A). Or they do the job and have a little bonus guilt/did a better job than expected/...

C) If you are certain it's human flaws and if they repeatedly don't do promised things because of these flaws then feel free to escalate a little and leave the room. Later on apologize and say how sorry you are until they feel bad for putting you into this miserable position where you could not control yourself and until they feel bad for you as also admire your capability of admitting flaws and apologizing. This way you show them how important things can be and how they should act if they forget something. A child can't solve maths if you don't show it how.

3. The loop

You basically repeat the steps from 2 for ever until the person eventually stops and starts to see through it or until you can't really appreciate the person anymore and get bored of him/her.

Conclusion/tl;dr

The general idea

This topic is rather small yet quite helpful and telling. To wrap it short: think about what synonyms could be used for the emphasized words and what the slight difference for the used one is. However in longer conversations it's only usual to start using synonyms at some point to keep it interesting; even then the two or three words chosen still can be few out of many. Think about why those and not others.

Adjectives as special case

Furthermore adjectives are usually not emphasized but rather flown over while speaking. Keeping track of the adjectives one uses and categorizing them into positive/negative not only let's you know the general attitude of the person (common use of exaggerations -> wants attention and engagement of others, mostly bad adjectives could indicate a bad worldview or simply a bad day; baselining is important, ...) but also let's you know what adjectives to mirror when responding.

My technique to keep track

I use a personal technique to keep track of the words each individual uses. Whenever they say an adjective or emphasized word somehow connect it to an accessoir or piece of clothing of theirs. As example 'his scarf is beautiful' if he uses beautiful within his sentence.

Conclusion

The importance of guestures

You make use of guestures all the time to make something easier to understand for your conversation partners. Without guestures describing different images or scenarios can quickly become quite difficult. There are different types of guestures I will talk about and how they are usually used as also how you can make conscious use of them.

Drawing Guestures

These guestures focus on drawing an image for your conversation partner. The classical fisher measuring his oh-so-large catch, your friend drawing the shape of his recently crafted tone-figure or anything where you want to tell an image. I list them only because they are to be seperated from the others.

Pointing guestures

Pointing at yourself, your conversation partner or the 'other people' are regular guestures. For example: "Those guys from this political party are dumb" is probably acompanied by a guesture pounting away from the conversation onto the imaginary others. These guestures can easily be used consciously in order to manipulate others. To paraphrase an example from Chase Hughes 'Ellipsis Manual': imagine you enter a store and meet a worker there. You approach him and want to ask for assistance: "Hi, you (guesture towards him) seem to know what you're doing and notice opportunities (guesture towards yourself) to help customers. Can you help me find ... please?" A phrasing and guesturing of this manner will make them connect you with an opportunity and themselves as a good worker. This often makes it easier to receive the seeked assistance. Make sure you use the pointers and guestures on a half-conscious level.

Emphasizing guestures

A lot of times it's easy to convey the importance of a subject by raising your voice of putting verbal emphasis on the words. The same applies to your body language. Whenever you talk about something important you will support it by exaggerating your guestures and moving your arms accross a larger area. When you notice your conversational partners becoming moreintense in their movements, make sure to let them know you fully understand them and repeat one or two of their reasonings before you tell them other ideas. They will be too emotionally inclined to convey their message to listen to reasoning - assuming you got a (seemingly) better idea you want to discuss.

Supporting guestures

These guestures are supporting stylistic devices. For example enumerations. By counting off your fingers you make it easier to keep track of the amount of reasons. Quick hint inbetween: Whenever you list reasons for or against something list the worst ones at the beginning and the best ones at the end; else your conversation partners will often focus on only the last one or two reasons and neglect them in order to “win” the argument - although usually all reasons are to be taken seriously and neglected. Another stylistic device often accompanied by a supporting guesture is a contrast. Or literally the “on one hand... on the other hand...”. You use your hands to keep track of which side you are currently telling a reason for.

Conclusion

Let’s take a minute to talk about how to build up empathy for you in others and making them trust you more.

What is mirroring?

In everyday life you show your friends how much you like them and your foes your discomfort with them. This happens on a subconscious level through your body language and wordchoice. It’s all coming down to mirroring. This means, when you are around your friends you will mirror their behavior (body language and choice of words).

Mirroring through body language

If you mirror another persons body language it means you subconsciously take on the stance/position they have. Important is that you do not mirror every single guesture they use or their conscious or half-conscious movements. For example if you sit with your one leg resting on the other legs knee and leaned backwards your friend will most likely mirror this behavior (unless of course your friend is not capable of sitting; but even then s/he may cross their legs while standing). Some common positive stances are crossed legs, a tilted head, hands in pockets (without thumbs! hiding your thumbs signals insecurity. Slight detail - large difference) and slow guestures.

Bad Body language to copy

There are a lot of stances you do not want to imitate.This is because when people get into heated discussions one starts by building him-/herself up. Most importantly to prevent heated arguments do not stand opposed to the conversation partner but rather besides him/her to literally face the same direction. Nontheless once you notice your conversation partner to prepare for a heated discussion moving besides him will most of the times not work; instead simply try to not copy his/her stances (arm crossing, putting hands on hips, putting the legs straight below the shoulders) but rather use calming or submissive poses (cross your legs, put your hands in your pockets). This helps to get rid of a heated situation but must be supported by a wise choice of words (instead of “but this is different“ use “to my knowledge this is different because of ...) and do not interrupt them - even if they interrupt you.

Mirroring through your choice of words

The same applies to the choice of words. Your friends share a lot of adjectives and verbs with you and during a conversation you will use the same choice of words for the same objects described (i.e. if you use “pretty neat” they will most likely describe the same object with the same wordchoice “pretty neat” instead of using another choice of words for themselves like “quite nice”).

Anti-Mirroring

A complete opposite of mirroring applies to interactions with people you dislike. You will subconsciously put effort into distanciating yourself from them as much as possible by using different words and body language. However you can prevent heated arguments as depicted above or best you simply avoid them or keep company around you. People will usually not “attack” you while you are in a group.

Making strangers empathize with you using verbal mirroring

What is confidence?

To understand how to appear confident let's first take a look at what the word itself means. A confident person is open, extraverted and a social leader. You go into a room and the people in there think “that guy knows what he’s doing”. That’s what it means to be confident.

How to appear open

So I will start with talking about how to look open. Most important therefor is to actually open your body up; do not cross your arms or put any barriers between you and your conversation partner(s) and make sure there is air between your arms and body as also your legs. Simply open up your body.

Coming accross as extraverted

Next up is extravertedness. Extraverted people make use many gestures and use up much territory with their body(-language). I can only recommend to try out different movements and feel whatever suits you best regarding your 'vocabulary'. Make conscious use of your guestures during conversation until you do it subconsciously.

Beeing a social leader

Last but not least by 'becoming a social leader' I mainly mean you should start interactions with others and take initiative in whom you talk with. There are a few more feats about social leaders (e.g. responsibilty handling, group handling, not blaming others but rather looking at what can be done with the situation given,..) but I may get into that whole topic in a future post.

Conclusion

To appear confident you must become confident - to a certain degree at least. There is no way to appear confident without usually beeing a confident person; you can not imitate a state of mind you aren't used to. People with an average EQ (Emotional Quotient) will most likely see right through it. I can not put enough emphasis on the practice of the theory; it can take months to change such an important part of your personality; especially if you are extremely introverted.