Communication through Body Movement

Communication through Body Movement

All of us are trained in the use of speech, to communicate what we mean in a way that other people will understand. And most of the time, others understand what we mean. In a telephone conversation, we communicate through speech alone. In a face-to-face meeting, part of the communication is carried in a non-verbal form, what is often called “body language” or “body movement”. In the next paragraphs, I am going to show what are the positive and negative of “body language” and why it is important to us.

Body language and non-verbal communication play a major role in determining how effective we are as presenters. The cues and messages that we send out while we are speaking during our presentations can either reassure our audience and therefore reinforce our spoken message, or detract from our credibility and in so doing dramatically reduce our effectiveness.

For example, imagine that that you are watching through a window as someone does a presentation to a group of people in a room. You can't actually hear the presenter's voice, but he or she seems to be speaking clearly, is making eye contact with various people in the room, is emphasizing points using appropriate hand gestures, appears to be in command of the material, and exudes enthusiasm. Without even hearing what they are actually saying, your impression will be one of competence, sincerity; even leadership on the part of this presenter, and you will have made these determinations on the basis of body language alone.

On the other hand, imagine that you are watching under similar circumstances while a second person does a presentation. This time, you notice that the person avoids direct eye contact with their audience, keeps th...

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...s words and body language are consistent, we believe that person. When their words and body language say different things, we tend to believe the body language and doubt the words. For example, you say to a friend, "How was your interview boss?" Your friend says. "O.K." Then her smile vanishes and her hand tightens around the notebook she is carrying. Did your friend really do O.K. in that interview? Probably not, but she does not want to talk about her true feelings right now. When a person's facial expression differs from their words, your experience tells you to go with the visual cues, not the words.

Body language or body movement is very important in our lives. We use in every single day in order to make clarity of words that we cannot express in language or speech. We must be aware that every body language we make could have different meaning with others.