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October 30, 2010

Retaining positive impression of hand shake

We've seen how a good and positive hand shake is exercised. It's time to know that which things need to be avoided to retain positive impression that hand shake builds. Avoidable things mentioned below negatively affect the very basic purpose of this ritual - expression of openness, cooperativeness, enthusiasm, and harmless state. Just charge yourself with faith and self-esteem before engaging in a hand shake.

Do not touch, scratch, pinch or rub any parts of your own body; it could invite irritation from other side. If you engage in hand shake first time with other person, it's very important not to touch his/her body parts also. Don't put free or hold it behind your back because it communicates lack of enthusiasm or suspicion.

Don't exercise hand shake with gloves put on as much as possible. Don't put free hand on hips because it's a sign of aggression and domination. Don't point at any direction by the free hand; it communicates disorientation.

Don't point by fingers at the person you're engaged with in hand shaking because it's invading. Don't keep any objects between you and other person like chair, table, file, folder, cup, mug etc. Don't shake hand over the walls, roofs or partitions if possible. Don't look downward or upward after the hand shake.

Simply give brief glance at the eye level to either side and return gaze to other person with a smile. Don't cross hands over chest after the hand shake. Also, exchange some good words with open and empty palm of the other hand by keeping it clearly visible to the other person.

Most important thing is not to exercise a hand shake every now and then during an initial interaction or while being introduced. It simply communicates that you're imposing yourself on the other person or want to get more out of the deal.

In only few cultures, it's permissible or normal to exercise a hand shake frequently. Almost globally, hand shake at the beginning and at the end of interaction is a normal practice. Generally, women don't offer a hand shake on their own in most societies and cultures.

Only after the rapport between you and other person gets established over a time after multiple interactions, it's appropriate to briefly touch his/her wrist, elbow or shoulder to express trust and also to boost union.

This would help to reduce formality and to promote friendliness between individuals who are familiar with other. It should be exercised between equal ranking personals or should be offered seniors to sub-ordinates.

Related Articles:
1) What is hand shake? 2) What hand shake conveys about person? 3) Why we hug? 4) Why we smile? 5) The Power of Handshake

Women are body language experts

Women are supposed to be better and faster than men in interpreting body language because of they have such extraordinary abilities and instinctive skills to do so in the first place. In short, women are the real body language experts and they have accurate judgements about someone's character. They may not consciously analyze each nonverbal clue separately like an analyst but they can sense or feel them together. While men try to interpret, women intuit or feel instinctively. They are inborn body language experts. Why is it so in the first place?

Today's mechanized, industrialized and economically liberal environment existing world over is a recent achievement in the entire known human history. Before modernization and industrialization, most women remained dependent on their tribe's male members for safety, security and resource gathering throughout the millions of years of the human evolution. Most young males were protectors, hunters, fighters, foragers and navigators whereas most females were care-takers, socializers, farmers, cultivators, food preparers and preservers.

Unlike men, women give birth to children. They face a great challenge of understanding every condition that babies are going through only by observing their facial expressions, gestures, postures, movements and voice (tone and pitch) since babies can't communicate verbally like an experienced, grown-up, learned or trained person. This very challenge has transformed them into the excellent care-takers. Higher level of Estrogen makes women emotionally intelligent, empathetic and very sensitive to people's feelings.

Emotional interaction with babies is secret of social awareness.

Also, they resonate to baby's facial expressions and vocal tone to sympathize and create a strong bond. They unconsciously use brain's both prefrontal hemispheres to process emotional and para-linguistic data. Understanding others and responding to them properly was critically important for survival and propagating (fitter) genes to next generations. Otherwise, what would have happened to the entire human race is just beyond our wildest imagination. Isn't it?

Tribal men used to resolve most of the issues, overcome their challenges and meet the demands by using muscles, getting physical, using tools and skills, fighting and competing. On the other hand, women chose an entirely opposite approach to resolve and overcome issues with harmonious, non-confrontational and non-harming solutions. That's why they are more expressive, sensitive, empathetic, verbally skilled, articulating and diplomatic than most men.


Due to enormous responsibility of rearing children and assuring continuation of genetic lineage, women are the great social observers, people readers, character scanners, behavior profilers and lie detectors in comparison to the most men. Most women can quickly detect men cheating on them while most men are poor in detecting who is cheating on them, let alone women. Also, women are really good at clandestine intelligence gathering.

Men too can become experts or at least better in reading body language like women, only with developing the habit of keen observation and accurately analyzing different clues in the given situation or circumstance. Developing the contextual awareness in different situations can help men in mastering people reading. The ability to empathize with others is required to become a good communicator.

[Special Note: According to Google Analytics, women share more than 60% of total visits to this website from September 2010. This numeric fact profoundly proves that women are more sensitive to social dynamics and reading people.]

Related Articles:
1) The ways woman provokes her man to be protective 2) Evolution of Nonverbal communication 3) "The expression of emotions in man and animals" 4) "Nonverbal" is alien way of communication? 5) Emotional expressions are manipulated 6) Unlimited potentials of nonverbal knowledge 7) Basic emotional expressions 8) Survival of communicator 9) Woman’s Courtship Body Language (Part 1) 10) Woman’s Courtship Body Language (Part 2) 11) Observation is the key 12) Child inside us 13) Social Footsteps 14) Body Language of James Bond 15) Genders affects body language reading 16) The face of liar(?)

October 25, 2010

What is Hand shake?

Hand shake is almost a global ritual for establishing mutual confidence and faith with equality, cooperativeness, and friendliness. Handshake is an initiating gesture and more formal way of connecting with people and encouraging them for further interactions.

A hand shake can make or break the deal in no time. Not offering or receiving it appropriately i. e. not considering the kind of environment, gender, age, authority, mood of person could invite shame, rejection or even hostility.

How the effective hand shaking should be? Let's try to find out how it evolved in the first place in our social behavioral repertoire. Until we don't know the same, we wouldn't realize its importance in today's context.

Basically, hand shaking is to communicate the harmless state. According a story, roman soldiers used to check each other by touching or running their fingers on wrists, forearms and elbows to ensure that they are not holding or hiding any arm or weapon.

Furthermore, holding and shaking hands together would let any blade or dagger fall to the ground. Isn't that interesting? Keep in mind that shaking hand is to let others know that you are approaching them friendly and want to connect.

A positive and formal handshake is exercised by two persons by standing upright, facing each other at comfortable distance, pointing feet towards each other, keeping neck straight and not stiff, smiling on face, meeting gaze, touching each others palm in vertical direction by firmly griping fingers over them and slowly moving hands up and down at least 2-3 times.

Related Articles:
1) Retaining positive impression of hand shake 2) What hand shake conveys about person? 3) Why we hug? 4) Why we smile? 5) Job Interview Tips 6) Importance of Touch 7) The Power of Handshake

Emotional Intelligence and Success

We think that our materialist knowledge and skills to operate and handle many things would help us in achieving what we want in our life. Do you really think that this assumption is true? If it was the case then we might not have run in many issues in our lives related with emotions. We live in a world that is full of people with different interests, motives and orientations.

We can neither keep fighting with others all the time nor let ourselves completely surrender to the others for getting successful in our lives. Nevertheless, we surely can try to understand each other in terms of emotions, feelings, intentions and motives only because of the shared commonalities.

Prof. Dr. Howard Gardner

It's not at all possible until an individual isn't capable of understanding its own emotions, feelings and motives to be able detect them in others. Howard Gardner (the founder of Multiple Intelligence theory) greatly emphasizes on emotional awareness. Success mostly depends upon how an individual precisely understand other's emotions and reponds appropriately i. e. whether the individual is emotionally intelligent or not.

Traits like openness, ingenuity, tolerance, politeness, resilience, courage, diligence, determination, confidence, cooperativeness, compassion, competency, consistency, commitment, comfort level, maturity, self-esteem, strength, enthusiasm, trustworthiness, respectfulness, kindness, foreseeability and affection give clear insight of individual nature. In short, body language and nonverbal communication clues gives an overall idea abut an emotional character of a individual.

We have an inherited ability to realize an emotional interplay at an unconsciously level even we don't emphasize or not paying enough attention to nonverbal clues we collect unconsciously.

All individual characteristics can only be judged through face-to-face interactions or deliberate observations but most of us don't pay much importance to the same and ultimately invite many troubles everywhere.

Until we don't realize the great importance of emotional intelligence and social situational awareness, we would keep the most valuable body language clues undervalued and ignored at all time.

Emotions are common and natural but traits and temperaments of an individual broadly determine its destiny. Want to know your own EQ (Emotional Quotient)? Please don't at all forget to take this test.

Related Articles:
1) Evolution of Nonverbal communication 2) "The expression of emotions in man and animals" 3) "Nonverbal" is alien way of communication? 4) Emotional expressions are manipulated 5) Unlimited potentials 6) Basic emotional expressions 7) Social Footsteps 8) Botox hampers emotional awareness 9) Should leaders show emotions?

October 18, 2010

Emotional expressions are manipulated

We are the smartest liars.
All non-human creatures of our planet survive and reproduce naturally in their respective ecosystems. They survive with their sheer physical capabilities, instincts, reflexes and predictive behaviors while lacking verbal abilities like us. Hence they find no difficulty in understanding, judging each other and responding accordingly.

This is not entirely true in human world because everybody of us isn't predictive every time at all. We need to spend more mental energy in predicting what other person sitting or standing in front of us might be thinking (about us) at the very given moment. This is exactly what every parents needs to teach their children along with the words and numbers.

Actually, all verbal languages came into existence for accelerating exchange and spreading the information rapidly to many individuals at the same time. Even though the languages are the greatest gift to the mankind, verbal communication enables us to lie, mislead, deceive, divert and distract on a large scale. Other creatures can't do the same.

If we consider this as a thumb rule then nonverbal expressions should match with verbal message that anyone conveys. This doesn't happens every time because thinking is an unique quality that gives us an enormous amount of power to control, suppress and manipulate true emotional expressions on purpose.

Picking clues of distress
For securing personal or social interests, both verbal and nonverbal message is consciously regulated to inhibit or tamper actual underlying motivations. Expressions discord with words while deceiving, betraying or diverting somebody.

Brain immediately anticipates the threat of being exposed or getting caught and tries to get rid of it somehow. Therefore defensive, distracting or submissive gestures, postures and expressions are automatically adapted or given away.

Some of us are very good lie detectors because they can accurately pick nonverbal clues like fear, sadness, guilt or nervousness being suppressed by the liars. We wonder about abilities of such individuals but they have nothing but proven expertise of monitoring and interpreting emotional expressions of others and most importantly - their own.

Many a times different emotions are expressed in form of subtle facial muscle movements in which they occur in only a part of the face or otherwise at a very low intensities. A recent research has shown that the ability to recognize the subtle emotional facial expressions is an extremely advantageous in detecting deception.

Humintell's Subtle Expression Recognition Training (SubX) tool was originally funded by and developed for the different governmental agencies within the United States of America (USA). I've passed the same course with Proficient level of accuracy, at the speed of 200 milliseconds.



Related Articles:
1) Evolution of Nonverbal communication 2) "The expression of emotions in man and animals" 3) "Nonverbal" is alien way of communication? 4) Emotional Intelligence and Success 5) Women are body language experts 6) Unlimited potentials of Nonverbal Knowledge 7) Basic emotional expressions 8) Survival of communicator 9) My career saving lie detection 10) Recognizing emotional expressions: Scientific viewpoints 11) Are you a 'flying' terrorist? 12) Entire body can’t lie

October 10, 2010

Unlimited Potentials of Nonverbal Knowledge

Today, robots, machines, cell-phones, devices and computers are being taught or programmed to interpret emotions and respond them appropriately. This overtly underlines the profound effectiveness and necessity of nonverbal communication. If machines will communicate with us nonverbally in future then why not we, surviving from millions of years using the same channel of communication, master it again by ourselves?

We're one of the best moving and living creatures that the mighty mother nature has developed, shaped and modified over a millions years. We inherit nobody other than our own ancestors. In comparison to any artificial and non-biological machines, it's very easy for us because we inherently have everything that is required to gain mastery in human nonverbal communication (HNVC).

Whenever detecting, analyzing, recognizing, understanding and decoding emotions, attitudes, sentiments, moods, feelings, phobias, drives, desires, wishes, ambitions, motivations, intentions, intuitions, inclinations, urges, emergencies, needs, stances, temperaments, biases, orientations, experiences, opinions, social statuses and trustworthiness is necessary in interacting and working with people then involuntary, instinctive, spontaneous, obvious, overt, micro, subtle, leaking or even suppressed nonverbal clues can be analyzed as per their availability.

Therefore knowledge of body language, emotional expressions and nonverbal communication can be harnessed not only in personal, professional and social life but also in different fields like education, sports, entertainment, media, fashion, advertisement, performing arts, public relationship, psychoanalysis, counseling, human resource, marketing, servicing, tourism, hospitality, disaster management, rehabilitation, health care, counseling, security, intelligence, law & order, international relationships, defense, diplomacy, administration, strategic planning, ergonomics etc.


Lawyers, doctors, therapists, teachers, trainers, psychotherapists, politicians, diplomats, media analysts, businessmen, traders, counselors, negotiators, sellers, investigators, detectives, security officials, secret agents and even con-artists closely and routinely interact with people and influence them as an integral part of their occupation.

They need to be very smart, quick and also accurate enough to interpret people nonverbally in real time. Matter of fact is our own parents, grand parents and great grand parents had to be well-versed in reading people nonverbally in the first place.

Almost everybody can develop such an enormously advantageous skill within oneself. It’s for sure that proficiency in decoding body language and nonverbal communication would let you know yourself and others way better like never ever before.

Also, it would pave a super-path way towards success, harmony and happiness. Moreover, rise in consciousness towards our own body would fulfill a great purpose of being in harmony with the world full of people and different creatures.

Related Articles:
1) Evolution of Nonverbal communication 2) "The expression of emotions in man and animals" 3) "Nonverbal" is alien way of communication? 4) Emotional expressions are manipulated 5) Women are body language experts 6) Survival of communicator 7) Basic emotional expressions 8) Emotional Intelligence and success 9) Genius of acting 10) What is Nonverbal Communication? 11) Is Human Communication 93% Nonverbal?

October 05, 2010

Evolution of Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal Communication simply means communication without or in absence of words. We mostly communicate nonverbally throughout our lives but many of us don't really understand what Nonverbal Communication is exactly since we've become massively dependent upon spoken and written languages. So let’s try to understand that why and how exactly nonverbal communication evolved in the first place.

We all know that our ancestors faced same challenges like any other creatures. To survive successfully, any creature has to 1) defend itself from predators and adverse climatic conditions 2) mark and defend certain geographical area for shelter 3) find and preserve food to live upon 4) attract a mate, protect it and produce off-springs 5) take care of off-springs and teach them same techniques and manners 6) cooperate and coordinate with members of same species as well as others to seize opportunities and minimize risk to life.

To have aforementioned skills and capabilities, an intelligent system came into existence which senses each factor subjected with survival and responds to it appropriately. We know that sensory organs send signals to brain, brain processes them and finally signals are sent back to various parts of body and organs. It's an entirely closed-loop communication system.

Capability of sensing and reacting to and by various forms of signals like sounds, vocal tones, movements, gestures, facial expressions, postures, body positions, smells and colors are basic characteristics of nonverbal communication. All of these nonverbal communicational characteristics are deeply rooted in our expression of emotions, feelings, motives and intentions.

Word “Emotion” has been derived from word “Emote” and it simply means as “to drive”. An emotion can be generally defined as “a pre-defined or hard-coded survival strategy of reacting to environment, incidents or entities”. We all share and live under the influence emotions because they have deeper, wider and crucial importance for us.

Emotions and their elaborate expressions evolved in mammals as behavioral reflexes or fixed response patterns. They have helped our ancestors and they help us with each specific emotion securing a distinct survival interest.

Different emotions have different purposes.

What each emotion or reflex basically does? Fear helps body to move way from source of danger, anger to reprove or retaliate, anxiety to anticipate risks or dangers, suspect to demand assurance, pride to challenge rivals, respect to secure favors from others and affection to create bonds.

Unconsciously, we reciprocate, react with and respond to people, environment and entities around us on the basis of emotions and feelings only that take shape inside our own brains.

Related Articles:
1) Survival of communicator 2) "The expression of emotions in man and animals" 3) "Nonverbal" is alien way of communication? 4) Emotional expressions are manipulated 5) Women are body language experts 6) Unlimited potentials of nonverbal knowledge 7) Basic emotional expressions 8) Body Language Brain 9) Fear Factor 10) What is Nonverbal Communication? 11) Why we clench fist after victory? 12) Is Human Communication 93% Nonverbal?