Readers of this blog will know that I’m passionate about good communications, public speaking, and body language.  The revolution in brain research over the past couple of decades, and especially the last ten years, has provided those of us in communications with a whole new way to think about “the two conversations” – content and body language – and how they work together to create great – and awful – communication. 

But there are other, older traditions that have concerned themselves with encoding ancient wisdom about communications and body language, and those traditions can enrich our understanding enormously.  Recently, I received a copy of a book entitled Winning Body Language, by Mark Bowden.  Mark’s a successful communications coach of politicians and executives in Canada and the UK.  He draws on a number of these traditions in his work, including mime, theatre, and other sources, to create a fascinating take on how to use non-verbal communications to persuade, charm, and even control your audiences.  Mark and I have chatted over the last several years about our practices and approaches, and so I was eager to read his book. 

Most books on body language fail miserably because they adopt the 20th-century approach to understanding non-verbal communications.  That approach came out of the study of “emblems,” or gestures that have specific meaning, like the peace sign or the “single-finger salute.”  The result was a century-long attempt to decode hand gestures, for example, in terms of single, specific meanings.  The hand waving that accompanies speech got largely ignored, because it resisted this kind of decoding.

But it turns out that the hand waving is where the action is, and it is the most important for communications.  The recent brain research shows us that most of our thinking is unconscious.  We get an intent or an emotion deep within the unconscious part of our minds.  That motivates gesture – that’s the hand-waving – and only after the gestures have begun do we get conscious thought.  It’s literally true that our conscious minds spend a good deal of time explaining to ourselves why we have just done something.  Decisions are taken by the unconscious mind and only later justified by the conscious mind.  Those hand-waving gestures cue us – and those around us – to what we’re thinking before we’re aware that we’re thinking it. 

So the old approach to understanding body language isn’t either accurate or helpful, because it teaches people to try to think consciously about their specific gestures, which means by definition that it happens too late in the intent-gesture-thought sequence.  The result is something watchers of politicians have often seen:  the perpetrator looks awkward and fake.  What then is the right approach? 

People wishing to master their body language and thus the impression they make on others need a more holistic system, one that utilizes the power of the unconscious mind.  I’ve put forward such a system in my book Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  So naturally I was inclined to dismiss Mark’s system in his book at first as completely wrong.  Call it a natural competitive reaction.  Primitive, wasn’t it?

But I’ve pondered the differences and similarities between the two systems a little longer, and I’ve realized that I’ve done Mark an injustice.  There is actually quite a lot of common ground between the two of us, and in any case Mark deserves respect for having worked out an holistic approach to the mastery of body language.  In spite of the advances of brain research, this is still largely new territory, and those of us who are passionate about pushing knowledge forward should be grateful for the good work of others in the same field. 

I’m going to use the rest of this blog, therefore, to give Mark a platform to discuss the tenets of his system, with my thanks for his generous participation and willingness to debate something we are both passionate about. 

Nick:  Mark, thanks for joining us!  You mention a number of sources for your work, including ancient practices like mime and acting gurus like Jacques Lecoq, as well as Moshe Feldenkrais.  Can you tell us how these gurus and traditions have shaped your thinking?

Mark:  Thanks, Nick. It is always good to discuss this area with someone prepared to dig deep into the existing knowledge on nonverbal communication and open to new theories, science and practices.

So to start with: Lecoq was a gymnast, physiotherapist, theatre practitioner and Frenchman who reinducted the western world into its hidden legacy of physical performance styles and élan. In doing so, he fundamentally revolutionized world performance culture including innovators such as Cirque de Soleil, Julie Taymor and Oscar winning actors such as Geoffrey Rush.

Lecoq taught out of his school in Paris and internationally for over four decades until 1999 under his tenant “tout bouge”—everything moves. His belief and practice as I studied and understood it was that movement is the universe’s common currency and to understand its vocabulary is to be available to express more about ourselves. Lecoq created a mime pedagogy within which his students could be provoked by physical impulses into authentic feelings. As artists they could then utilize these emotional reactions in their performances.

Some of my techniques are an extension or distillation of Lecoq’s work and so draw a line back through history to the anarchic, irreverent satire of the Italian Commedia dell ‘Arte, into the ecstatic, cathartic and politically influential ancient Greek Tragedy, and way back to the first performers telling the story of the hunt and acting out its animal behaviors to bond their tribe in a relationship with a bigger, perhaps spiritual universe.

As you rightly say, Nick, “give your speech and change the world,” and mime (from the Greek memos—to imitate or copy) has provoked and influenced human perceptions and actions for thousands of years. So much so that under Pope Benedict XIV, the Commedia were forbidden to speak and so the silent style that so many now believe all mime to be, or to ever have been was enforced. The philosophies, skills and practices that had stood the test of thousands of years were driven underground as performers were outlawed as thieves, vagabonds, rogues and gypsies for close to two centuries, only to start a reemergence in Europe in the early 1900’s.

Now Moshé Feldenkrais on the other hand was an Israeli nuclear physicist, spy and martial arts expert partly responsible for Judo’s journey from East to West. After suffering a debilitating injury he set about creating a movement system designed to improve both physical and self awareness. He studied how the physical twists and turns in a person’s muscular-skeletal frame could congruently cause twists and turns in their psychological outlook. Feldenkrais died in 1984 leaving a legacy of students well trained in the effects, application and teaching of Awareness Through Movement, and his techniques, taught through renowned theatrical movement practitioners such as Monica Pagneux, have had a profound effect on the artistry of Oscar winning establishment actors such as Emma Thompson, and mavericks
like Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Both Lecoq and Feldenkrais were pioneers in exploring and codifying the way specific movements could predictably supply an impulse to a specific intention or feelings in both the performer and the observer. It is this practice of “working from a physical impulse” to produce feelings totally authentic to each moment of a performance that I have brought to the training of leaders when communicating.

Nick:  Mark, what are the key tenets of your system?  Can you explain to us what you mean by the grotesque and truth planes, for example? 

Mark:  The key tenet of the GesturePlane system is that the feeling evoked by a verbal message can be radically and predictably changed in the performer and the perceiver simply by (amongst other things) the horizontal height at which the performer holds their hands.

For example when the hands are held in the TruthPlane (navel height) the message is perceived by both performer and audience as more sincere, honest and factual; when in the GrotesquePlane (below the waist line) the message is perceived by both performer and audience as disinteresting, depressing and quite often over before it has begun.

I clarify this further in the book (it makes up a good quarter!), and the full model of the whole gesture plane system and how to use it to your advantage is also comprehensively explained in Winning Body Language.
Simply put, these techniques use specific, consciously produced physical movements to “kick-start” a wave of feeling totally authentic to that moment of performance. This “from the outside in” approach to performance forms the basis of the traditional European school of acting and the more modern American school attached to the Meisner Technique; both distancing themselves from the much publicized and historically isolated “Method” approach of Lee Strasberg, which capitalized on the 1950’s popularization of Freudian theory and evolved a teaching style akin to psychotherapy where the analysis of human thought was deemed the perfected route to authentic actions.

Physically stimulating the unconscious mind to produce sustained emotion has proven throughout the history of art and culture a rich avenue to truthful expression. With any technique, there are those who do it well and those who do badly either through ignorance, laziness or poor training. The good examples… well, you just can’t see the technique!

Nick:  What’s next for Mark Bowden? 

Mark:  I’m writing the preface for the Chinese translation of my book (now in five languages), and I’m collaborating with the award winning British TV writer Shaun Prendergast on a new book for our publisher McGraw-Hill Business and Academic which looks at how story functions in confronting audiences with a finite number of human dilemmas that are universally engaging. This is a unique insight into the purpose,  power and underlying mechanics of story beyond the common—“there are only (pick a number) stories” and the “three act narrative” structural analyses most readily available today from McKee, Field et al.

The book will be for anyone who needs to engage an audience with story and wants to understand and utilize the deeper mechanics behind the human compulsion for a narrative journey. Our goal is to produce a work that most helpfully maps out some defined routes to moving your audience emotionally.

Nick:  Mark, Thank you very much. 

Readers, there you have it.  I encourage you to read both books, Trust Me, and Winning Body Language, and decide for yourself. 

And finally, please weigh in with your experiences.  What is your experience of working with your own body language?  What have you tried?  How well has it worked?  Let us hear from you!