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Body Language Basics

By Heather Hatfield

Using Body Language to Your Advantage

"If you want to better manage your own body language, you need to think about every aspect of your day and how you behave," Wood says.

While you might think you are friendly person, if you go straight to your office and avoid eye contact with anyone, it can send the wrong signals to your co-workers, she explains.

Go through your morning routine—what you do at lunch, how you spend your afternoon and evening—and ask yourself questions like: Do I smile? Do I make appropriate eye contact with people? Once you better recognize your body language, you can start to manage it in a more meaningful way.

On the flip side, how can you use the body language of others to your advantage? Most important is to trust your gut.

"Body language says so much that you can use it to gauge the sincerity of what a person is saying," Wood says.

If a person is telling you something, and he's covering his mouth, he might be lying, she explains. If a person's hands rub from his forehead down across his face, he could be wiping away an emotion, like stress or anxiety. Either way, if what a person is saying contradicts his body language, your intuition might be picking up on something that is not quite right.

Still, whether you are trying to manage your body language better, or understand that of others, remember the value of words.

"If you become too attentive to body language, instead of what you are saying or someone is saying to you, you miss out on the larger process of communication," Buck says.
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SOURCES: Ross Buck, PhD, professor, communication sciences and psychology, University of Connecticut, Storres, Conn. Patti Wood, MA, certified speaking professional; author, Success Signals: A Guide to Reading Body Language. Angel Rose, assistant vice president, Oneida Bank, Rome, N.Y.

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