SO, HERE IS OUR critical thinking process, which you are going to learn and master by applying it to the case studies you read in this book. It’s a simple four-step process:
S: Suspend judgment and be more descriptive.
C: Take in the Context.
A: Ask “What else?”
N: Form a New judgment and test it.
You can easily remember our process with the acronym SCAN.
S: SUSPEND JUDGMENT AND BE MORE DESCRIPTIVE
You get an instinct about what is going on in a situation, and rather than running with it, you suspend that judgment by employing mindfulness in the moment, taking a step back to examine as fully as possible all the details you sense—what the other person is doing, the key body language signals they display, how they sound, how your initial response makes you feel. This detailed examination—your description—engages your critical thinking and moves you away from knee-jerk judgments and wrong assumptions.
C: TAKE IN THE CONTEXT
Where are you? When? Who else is there? What is the situation? What is the background? Think about the conditions around and within the description—physical, psychological, digital and social.
A: ASK “WHAT ELSE?”
Think wider and deeper about other contexts in which the behavior may be at play. Consider details and “what if?” possibilities by asking what else you know or can bring to bear on the situation.
N: FORM A NEW JUDGMENT AND TEST IT
Refine or replace entirely the initial judgment you made with a more informed theory of mind. Get feedback by testing the new idea you have about the situation, or the old one if that is what you have returned to.
WE WILL BE USING our SCAN process to explore body language within three of the most important relationship umbrellas under which we make judgments about other people’s feelings and intentions toward us:
These areas of our lives can easily define our most important, impactful and difficult-to-do-without relationships.
We begin each chapter by describing, within each of these three main categories, common and relatable scenarios as well as classic assumptions and judgments we make about what others are thinking when we “read” their body language.
We explore face-to-face situations and those within the digital world. We review a diverse human landscape, looking at what binds us as humans through our behavior. There is always more that links us nonverbally as human beings than differentiates us.
We uncover and delve into the powerful nonverbal signals that can trigger us to make assumptions, taking into account the truth of our own behavior in the moment and how that may affect the assumptions we make.
Each chapter includes a dose of scientific fact or theory to help explain why and how we make these assumptions; our responses; popular hearsay; wisdom and new contributions from other experts in the fields of body language, behavior and culture. From all of this, you’ll gain a greater insight into why people may be giving off the impressions they do, and based on your own emotional state and the context, how accurately you are judging what thoughts inform their body language, giving you a fuller and more rounded way of thinking around this.
Finally, we offer strategies to test in real time your changed or refined judgments, and then give you tactics for how you might respond to situations, be it in the physical or digital world, to give you the advantage.
Ultimately, this powerful method will allow you to read and effectively use body language within the most modern framework of science and expert opinion, both face to face and in the digital world. You are about to become someone with the power to differentiate for themselves the truth and the lies.