The eloquence of the human body Nature has endowed us with two ears, two eyes, but only one tongue, so that we look and listen more than we speak. Socrates It is often difficult for people to understand each other. One of the reasons for this problem is the so-called language barrier. Today on planet Earth there are more than six thousand different languages ​​and dialects, and the words in each of them in the vast majority of cases have more than one meaning. With such a “Babylonian mixture,” speech itself can no longer be effective enough for building human relationships. It needs to be supplemented with something universal, understandable everywhere, always and to everyone. Fortunately, each of us has such a tool. Even Catholic monks, who take a vow of silence in order to preserve the concentration necessary for spiritual growth, constantly use it, sometimes without even noticing it. We are talking about body language, which Israeli actor Sami Molcho called “the direct recoding of consciousness into matter.” The eloquence of the human body is reflected even in verbal language: “hang your head” (get upset), “close your eyes” (deliberately not pay attention), “wash your hands” (retire from business), “throw yourself on your chest” (express joy about a long-awaited meeting with a dear person), “press your ears” (be wary), “show your teeth” (show aggression), “bite your lip” (hold back your emotions), “scratch your head” (think), “raise your eyebrow” (surprise), etc. BODY LANGUAGE IS A UNIVERSAL TOOL OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION “Without the assistance of the hands, all speech is weak and insufficient.” Quintilian The main advantage of body language is its universality. Being innate and unconscious, it is independent of the wearer’s membership in a particular social, ethnic or any other community. It is the only language that has remained relatively unchanged for millennia, having once formed at the dawn of the history of the species homo sapiens, when man was barely able to utter articulate sounds vaguely reminiscent of modern speech. At the same time, each people, developing their culture, left an individual imprint on the use/understanding of body language: southern peoples (Italians, Spaniards, etc.) are proud of the expressiveness of their plasticity and actively “express themselves” with the help of facial expressions and gestures, while northern peoples peoples (Germans, English, etc.) are much more restrained in their movements during a conversation. Another example: each of us understands what a wide open embrace or a palm held out in front of us means. However, if a Bulgarian nods his head, accompanying the nods with the sound “ts-ts-ts”, this should be interpreted not as the usual “yes”, but on the contrary, as a firm “no”, while the Greek “ne” often shocks tourists its paradoxically positive meaning. Also in Greece, the greeting in the form of waving your hand can be misinterpreted. A similar gesture here signifies a terrible curse: “Let the blood from the five wounds of Christ be shed on your head!” Agree, after such a wish, maintaining a good relationship will be much more difficult. BODY LANGUAGE IS THE WAY TO AN HONEST DIALOGUE “Language is given to a person to hide his thoughts.” Talleyrand As mentioned above, body language is a predominantly unconscious tool. This makes it not only a powerful universal unifying factor, but also a natural “lie detector.” There are still heated discussions in scientific circles about its reliability, but in everyday life each of us uses this knowledge without any doubt. For example, if a person blushes during a conversation, it means he is not confident enough or feels ashamed; Often, a change in complexion is interpreted as direct evidence of the dishonesty of the “flaming” interlocutor. This trust in nonverbal signals is primarily due to the fact that they are very difficult to hide and/or imitate, unlike speech, which is initially conscious and therefore much easier to control. Researchshow that despite the fact that men are much better than women at recognizing attempts to deceive by non-verbal signs, women decipher the gestures and facial expressions of other people much more accurately. This happens thanks to the maternal instinct, which allows you to accurately guess the needs of a baby who does not yet know how to speak any of the human languages. Scientists have also proven that body language significantly speeds up communication. So, to answer the question of whether we like the person we see for the first time, we need to spend an average of 1/25 of a second. The maximum speed of perception of spoken language is only 2.5 words per second. Agree, the numbers are more than incomparable! THREE FACTS ABOUT BODY LANGUAGE If you sit a group of people so that none of them can see their communication partners and ask them to talk about some topic, you can almost immediately feel how unusual and even uncomfortable such communication will be . It turns out that hearing phrases is not enough - for full contact it is also important to see how they are pronounced. At the same time, the widespread development of telephone and Internet communications is eroding this need. We gradually get used to communicating with pure text, and this, unfortunately, distances us even more from our own body. If you raise your eyebrows and try to evoke aggressive feelings in yourself, you can encounter great difficulty. Raising your eyebrows is a sign of interest in new information. The body is not designed to scare away desired information with angry or sullen facial expressions. On the other hand, if you try to frown your eyebrows in a “house” manner and try to open up to something new, the effect will be similar. If you relax your chewing muscles as much as possible and do, for example, arithmetic calculations in your head, it will take much longer than usual to get the correct answer . The fact is that a sagging jaw is a signal of great surprise, embarrassment, or even fear. Naturally, such a state interferes with sober mental operations. At the same time, this exercise can be useful for activating creative abilities in situations where pure logic will not get you far. BODY LANGUAGE CAN AND SHOULD BE STUDYED “... showing teeth in a smile once meant a warning like: “I may bite”” . G. Wilson, K. McClaughlin The human body constantly sends and receives a variety of signals, but the crazy pace of life in the metropolis makes many of us perceive our physical shell separately from our own existence, thinking with annoyance about the need to take care of it. No wonder Igor Guberman wrote: “Yesterday I ran to fill a tooth, and I laughed as I ran: all my life I have been dragging around my future corpse and zealously taking care of it.” Our body not only requires constant attention and, as described above, with almost one hundred percent probability of telling a lie, but also reliably reflects all our feelings and thoughts, desires and anxieties, responds with pain to any stress and fatigue, accumulates all heavy memories, etc. Seminars on body language, behavioral training, courses in rhetoric and practical psychology help a person not only hear the quiet voice of his own body in the flow of city life, but also learn to consciously manage some of its “statements” in order to improve his own well-being , learn to influence other people and maintain good relationships with others. However, one should not be under the illusion that non-verbal signals can be memorized like vocabulary in a foreign language, and then use what you have learned to deceive yourself or your interlocutors. Artificial gestures, no matter how virtuosic they may be, always look false. On the other hand, nature has arranged it in such a way that our consciousness is capable of receiving signals from the body, so by consciously transforming them, we can significantly influence our psycho-emotional state. For example, it makes sense to learn to smile even when you are sad. A smiling person feels better both outside and inside, and is more pleasant to be with..