Body language: Common Pitfalls and Misconceptions

There is a big possibility that you didn’t manage to understand people’s personalities using body language with high accuracy. If this happened to you, then don’t worry because there are some common pitfalls that people who are new to body language don’t consider, so they get incorrect results.
Learning how to avoid pitfalls will help you read body language with very high accuracy.
The pitfalls are as follows:
- Cultural differences and body language: In body language, there are some slight differences between cultures. For example, Italians may keep a small private distance when talking to you, while English people may keep a big distance. Interpreting the private distance in both cases without considering cultural differences may result in inaccurate readings.
- Body language and thoughts If someone made the negative evaluation posture as soon as he saw you, this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like seeing you, but instead, he may have been thinking about a bad thing right before seeing you.
- Body language detects states of feelings and not personality: If you found someone taking the body language confidence posture, this does not mean that he is a confident person, but it only means that he is feeling confident. However, you can still know someone’s personality by watching for the repetition of the same postures over and over. If that person always takes the body language confidence position everywhere, then he is confident by nature.
- Body language and habits: some people have the habit of folding their arms or putting their hands in their pockets; make sure you filter out the habits to read the body language correctly.
- Use your mind. Some people may take the defensive posture because the weather is cold, and others may scratch their noses because they want to scratch it. To avoid wrong results, use your mind in addition to the knowledge you have about body language.
- Gestures have multiple meanings. Some gestures have multiple meanings, and that’s why you can only make good use of them if you tried to understand them within the situation. For example, a person usually folds his arms when he gets defensive, but this doesn’t always mean that he took that gesture. After all, he felt shy as he might have taken it because he felt offended.
- Believing in nonsense without testing it: Most sites that talk about body language give incorrect information copied from inferior sources. Before you accept a new fact about body language, test it on yourself, try to find out whether this gesture really has the meaning you read about. If you found it correct, then keep it. Else discard it because wrong body language information is more popular than correct information.
Body language takes time.
Don’t be in a rush. It will take you some time before you master the gestures you learned about. Of course, there is a lot you can do from the first day using body language but be patient until your mind absorbs these new facts.
The use of body language can help you become more attractive. If you used the body language of confidence, you will appear more attractive and increase the chance of attracting people.