What Those “Body Language” Books Aren’t Telling You - with Chase Hughes

One of the things that, that I learned from you, that I've never made that connection, but now, you know, makes sense, is when you were. Were looking into body language and reading people, at what point did you start to understand that the body language books weren't. Didn't work? That that only works in the context of the reaction to something.

And so a lot of that stuff that we've read in sales or, you know, in leadership training and that sort of thing, most of that stuff in context of, you know, if somebody has their arms crossed or whatever it is really is of no value unless you understand the context of what is happening and what it is in reaction to. And then even then, it's like you want to add up a couple of those in a sense, just one thing might not tell you. When did you discover that there was a difference from the textbooks to actual application with people?

I think it was. I lived in a town in Hawaii called Mililani. It's the coldest town in the state of Hawaii, and it's kind of in this valley. And this young lady was visiting, and she was standing outside waiting for me to open the gate to this hot tub area. And her arms were crossed, and she was really rigid. And I remember my first thought being, oh, she's being withholding or closed off. And I asked her, like, why are you crossing your arms? And she said, I'm freezing my off.

And I thought that that wasn't in the body language book. They don't, they don't tell you that. And there's so much that where the second part of this is like, if I'm at a seminar and I'm up on the stage and somebody's got their arms crossed, I could ask them, why are your arms crossed? And resounding answer from everybody in the entire crowd is, because it's comfortable. Everyone says the exact same response, but it feels comfortable. Our body language feels comfortable because it matches an internal emotion. So I asked the same person, like, if you were at a Foo Fighters concert, crossing your arms would probably feel uncomfortable because it's a completely different environment and different context and an emotional state. So I wanted to get to a point where we weren't just teaching. Here's what each little body language thing means, because we're looking for groups of behavior. And the number one mistake that I see people make is to assume there's this still image of arms being crossed, not arms crossing. That's a big difference, that we're in the. In the business as a behavior profiler in change detection. So I'm looking for changes, not these still images of a person touching their face or crossing their arms or covering their groin. We're watching for changes in that person and when those things occurred. So if I'm in sales, the moment that I start talking about the terms of agreement or how long this is going to take to pay something off, I see someone lean back in their chair and pull one of their hands kind of over their groin just a little bit. Or maybe their lips get tight and they go, oh, okay, that sounds fine. And they look like that. It sounds fine on the surface if you're watching it on a video. But if you understand behavior in that exact context, you know that that isn't a sales objection. That just happened with their body. They didn't verbalize it. And that's when the biggest mistake people make in sales, maybe the second biggest, is waiting until the end. I'm going to wait till the end of this sale when I make the close, to figure out whether or not I've got everything figured out.

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