For my last post in this series on body language, I’m going to try to turn your thinking on its head.  If you’re like most of us, you think about body language as follows.  I’m pretty much in charge of my body.  I direct it, from the control tower in my head.  I tell it what to do.  ‘Make coffee’ I say, and it goes through the motions. "Now drink it’ I say, and it obliges.  Sure, there are activities like breathing that I let it handle on its own, but that’s mostly low-level stuff I don’t think much about.  In short, I live in my body, my brain rules it, and that’s the deal. 

But actually it’s much more complicated than that.  In certain realms, like the realm of emotion, and relationship, and personal safety, just to pick three, your body literally thinks faster than your conscious mind, and rules the roost accordingly. 

In other words, the older, lower part of your brain, the one beneath the cerebral cortex, ‘thinks’ non-verbally.  And it thinks faster than your conscious cerebral cortex.  So many of those things that you do, like hugging your spouse when you see her at the end of a long day, you do because you’ve had an emotional/physical thought first, and a conscious ‘Nice to see you, honey’ thought only afterward.  The body is in charge, in some significant areas of human expression. 

Why should public speakers care about this?  Because what I’ve found in working with a thousand speakers over the years is that what your body does under adrenaline, your mind begins to think.  So, for example (and this is important), if you’re one of those people who tends to freeze under stress, the kind of speaker that stands in one place, speaks in a monotone, and gestures minimally if at all, then gradually your conscious thought will become more and more restricted as well.  You will experience the phenomenon I’ve seen again and again where the speaker becomes verbally limited, getting tied up in word knots and using the same few words over and over again.  Or, you’ll miss an obvious answer to a question, or forget to give an important part of your speech. 

The body rules.  Especially under adrenaline.  It’s just trying to keep you alive.  So pay attention to it.  What can you do about this phenomenon?  If you find yourself getting stuck in some way, climb out of the rut!  Force yourself to move, to change the subject.  Announce a short break, or walk to the back of the room, or ask the audience to stretch with you.  Anything that’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening and that gets you doing something different.  You’ll find that your conscious mind and your verbal facility will come to life once again when you do.