This week’s Book Learning is from ‘What Every Body is Saying’ by Joe Navarro –
As Book Learnings of late are threatening to become a course of Psychology :), I thought we would take a break this week and the next and look at the principles I took away from an interesting book on Body Language by an ex CIA agent. In many ways, these 2 learnings are the summary of everything I took away from the book. First up, we will look at 2 underlying principles to get us started..
1. Bottom to Top = True to Maybe not True: The truest indicator of a person’s mood is his legs. As we move from bottom to top, we are increasingly able to mask our true feelings with our faces taking the cake! So, if you want to really know how a person is feeling or how two people feel about each other, look at their legs.
E.g. 1: If two people are in a conversation, you can tell if they like it by seeing if their legs are pointed to each other, or away.
E.g. 2: If a couple are having dinner at a table, a leg lock is a sign that things are great!
2. Covering any part of the body = Lymbic reaction: As human beings, we are built for survival and built to cover our most precious organs. So, when we are threatened, we always cover some part of our body.
E.g. 1: Observe a soccer player’s first reaction on seeing danger – covering his groin!
E.g. 2: Notice how, on the first day of college, more freshman girls cover their chests with books than as they move through the semesters..
E.g. 3: Now you know why folding arms are seen as a sign of low confidence. Aside from our sexual organs, our chests cover some of the most vital organs (heart, lungs etc) and folding arms is a sign that we aren’t comfortable
While this book doesn’t fall into the ‘read it now!’ category in my case, I found the underlying principles very interesting and have, of late, been increasingly observant and find myself drawing insights thanks to these principles.. More to follow next week!
Here’s to keeping a look out for lymbic reactions this week!
A Learning a Day 
