For public speakers the body language news is both good and bad.

The good news is that you are already an unconscious expert, for the most part, in reading some of the body language cues and the concomitant underlying emotions of people familiar to you. For example, arriving home, you can tell in an instant if your significant other is in a bad mood, right? Or at work, you know instinctively if your boss is in a really good mood for some reason or another. Or you can tell when a colleague is stressed out and unlikely to help you with something.

Unfortunately, an audience is only somewhat familiar to you in that sense.  That is, you’ve done your research, you know who they are, but you don’t know them deeply like you do a loved one or a work colleague.  (Unless of course you’re talking to your work colleagues.)

So what can you use to decode an audience’s intent?

Your unconscious mind. It’s already hard at work, practically 24/7, reading the body language of everyone who comes into your field of ken. What it looks for is intent. It checks people to see if they’re powerful or subservient, friend or foe, on your team or somebody else’s, and liable to tell the truth or lie—basic, simple intents like that. Intents that are very important for how you might interact with them as a speaker.

How do you put this unconscious mind to work, deliberately?  Consciously?

What you’re going to do is strengthen the relationship between your conscious and unconscious minds in reading other people, so that you can do so swiftly and accurately.

First, we need to establish some basic categories of clues to look for to begin to solve the problem of too much information. Then, with that grounding, you’re going to tune your unconscious mind to look for the answers to particular questions you have about audiences in real time.

All of this is going to take some initial work, and for the long term, it will mean some mental preparation before any speech or presentation when you want to be attuned to body language. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll find that your body-language expertise becomes quite strong and adaptable.

For speakers, you want to focus primarily on two areas of interest that are of paramount importance:  alignment, and power.  That is, is the audience agreeing with what you’re saying – is it aligned with you?  And, is it granting you the provisional authority you need to get your points across – is it yielding the power in the room to you or is it planning an insurrection because for some reason the audience isn’t buying what you’re selling?

The idea here is to narrow down what you’re looking for. That will train both your conscious and unconscious minds to begin to develop the expertise you need.

In terms of power, you often want to know, in both work and life, who’s in power here? Who’s the top dog, the decision maker, and who are the underlings? And who’s in power at this moment, in this case, in front of this audience?

With alignment, we’re looking for signs of fundamental agreement or its absence. Is this audience on my side?  Are they happy with the way things are going?  Are they paying attention?  Or are they tuning out?

This blog series is adapted from my new book, Power Cues:  The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact, published May 13, 2014 by Harvard. You can order it here.  

Next time:  the conclusion of this series.