How do you tell whether someone is on your side or not? The basic body language to look for to determine whether
people are allied to you or opposed is overall physical stance -- their orientation. This makes for entertaining people watching.
Once you’re on to this aspect of behavior, you’ll find it’s easy to pick up.
Quite simply, people who are in agreement tend to mirror
one another’s behavior. One will lead, and the other will follow. This is especially easy to tell when
there are three people present, and you want to figure out who’s on your side
and who isn’t. Look for the one who has the same basic body orientation as you.
For a test, move and see if the other person follows suit in the next thirty
seconds.
Spouses, partners, and lovers usually mirror one another’s
physical orientation when they’re together or with others and they’re in basic
agreement. It’s interesting to watch couples for signs of mirroring — and its
opposite. You can often detect trouble in the relationship before the couple is
aware of it.
What happens in mirroring is more profound than just
agreement or even connection, however. Because persuasion is an emotional as
well as an intellectual activity, it comes from deep within the brain. When we
agree with someone, we do so with our whole bodies. You can use this to drive
agreement and create persuasion. Adopt a posture, and watch for others to adopt
it. Once they have, change it slightly. If the others go along, you’re well on
your way to persuading the room.
Your control of the body language in the room will both
create and test the strength of your persuasion (or lack thereof). The reason is that people’s bodies tell
them what they’re thinking, not the other way around. It’s counterintuitive but
true. Our minds basically say to ourselves, I’m aligned physically with this
person, so I must agree with her. That’s because we don’t like to think
of ourselves as acting with no reason.
You must use this control of the physical orientation of
other people with sophistication and subtlety. It must be combined with a
series of steps that include other kinds of consensus building. It won’t work
merely to come into a room, adopt a physical position, and expect everyone else
to adopt your intellectual position too.
First, build agreement by adopting their positions,
dealing with their concerns, and generally building on your openness to them
and their openness to you. Do this work carefully while you’re talking through
the issues important to the situation.
What you’re doing is aligning your two conversations and using both of
them to persuade the others in the room. It takes considerable practice to do
this with subtlety and effectiveness, but once you master it, you’ll find that
your ability to persuade others will increase enormously.
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