CHAPTER 1The Five C’s of Body Language

BODY LANGUAGE IS LIKE A COMPUTER. We all know what it is, but most of us are never exactly sure how it works. That’s because the process of receiving and decoding nonverbal communication is often done without our conscious awareness. It simply happens. Human beings are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioral cues and to quickly understand their meaning. We see someone gesture and automatically make a judgment about the intention of that gesture.

And we’ve been doing this for a long, long time. As a species we knew how to win friends and influence people—or avoid/placate/confront those we couldn’t befriend—long before we knew how to use words. Our ancestors made survival decisions based solely ...

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