1. If you are part of a commercial company that has no competition, holds a monopoly over a vital product or service for a very large population, and is totally at ease with the level and style of communication that it has with its captive audience. Frankly, you don’t need to communicate more effectively—if at all.

2. If you are in a position within your organization where you wield total executive power, with no threat of demotion, review, or overthrow (maybe you have taken control of the business using extreme force and in doing so have neutralized all opposition), it’s a good guess that you have no real need to engage with your colleagues in a way that wins their trust and compels them to help your goals. Great communication skills for persuading and influencing others are therefore totally pointless for you.

3. If you are planning on leaving the world of business to become a reclusive cave-dwelling hermit for the rest of your life, living off worms and moss, totally independent of any human interaction and society to help you further your personal goals, then communication is likely top of your “must not do” list.

To sum up, if you find yourself and your business totally unthreatened by the usual market forces, poor public perception, or difficult human interactions, and so unable to see any benefit in exponentially increasing any ability to communicate, then I look forward to never interacting with you again.

For everyone else around the globe who is still reading, congratulations: you recognize the fact that the feelings people have about you and your work are fundamentally based upon what is communicated by what they see you do in relation to what they hear you say—and that is a real issue for any real business.

To learn more and receive free chapters of Mark Bowden’s new book Winning Body Language sign-up to TruthPlane’s newsletter here.

There is already an abundance of commentary on news sites and blogs speculating as to the meaning of Tiger Woods’ body language during his apology to family, friends, colleagues and the public in general today. And so as someone referred to as an expert in this arena, here is what I am pretty certain of with regard to body language and meaning in this case:

In 1985, Dr. Paul Ekman (the man who the deception detecting hero of Fox TV’s Lie To Me, Dr. Cal Lightman is based on and considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century) did some experiments and found that most of us (including highly trained experts in nonverbal indicators) have not much better than a 50/50 chance at consciously detecting the meaning of a piece of nonverbal communication. For example, what are often mistaken for signs of insincerity can be indicators of stress and even pacifiers relieving that stress.

Ekman’s work suggests that we humans are not very good at consciously detecting the deceivers amongst us. You see, body language can tell you someone’s feelings but not the source of those feelings. In the case of Woods he certainly looks and sounds at times, tense, detached and under stress (as many have already suggested), but the reason or reasons for this are debatable. Without interviewing Woods directly about how we have perceived his reactions around certain elements of his verbal statement, and then judging his nonverbal reactions again to this investigative questioning–it’s all pretty much guess work.

As I describe in my new book Winning Body Language published by McGraw-Hill: for the majority of us the only dependable use for an understanding of body language is to concentrate on controlling the signals we send out (to communicate clearly with others our feelings, intentions and motives, and build trust to gain influence), rather than fantasizing that we can get the upper-hand on others by reading their minds.

Sign-up here to receive free chapters of Winning Body Language before it publishes and be the first to read it and understand step by step how to gain positive influence with the people who matter using the power of your body… or keep on reading the comments of the body language pundits who simply state the blindingly obvious, or just plain guess at the psychology behind the stars.

Remember you are statistically most likely to be just as expert as they are!

Watch Tiger’s Apology Here and judge for your self.

So called body language experts still talk endlessly about how nonverbal communication is the key to determining if someone is lying. Law enforcement officers, security agencies and the general public have bought into this, and especially with shows such as Fox Television’s “Lie to Me”.However in 1985, Dr. Paul Ekman (the man who Lie to Me’s hero, Dr. Cal Lightman is based on) looked at this and found that most of us have no better than 50/50 chance at detecting deception. What are often mistaken for signs of lying (nose touching, mouth covering etc.) are really pacifiers that help us to relieve stress. These self-soothing behaviors are employed both by the guilty and innocent to relieve the anxiety of being put on the spot. Ekman’s work has been replicated many times since, only to prove again that we humans are not very good at consciously detecting the deceivers amongst us.The danger of this is that we can all often perceive behaviors that can happen when we are tired or under stress, as I describe in my book “Winning Body Language”.The solution is for us all is to concentrate on understanding and controlling the signals we send out rather than looking for deception in those we receive. And that is what Winning Body Language is all about.Sign-up here to receive free chapters of Winning Body Language before it publishes and be the first to read it.

Consider a leader who is evaluated as not fulfilling promises made. This leader decides to learn about keeping commitments—to satisfy the evaluator. The leader reads the latest leadership books with chapters on commitment and responsibility. Now intellectually knowledgeable on the subject the leader can speak quite convincingly about it, yet does nothing to modify any actions.

A team from the University of Durham researchers say people with autism have problems recognising physical displays of emotion, but also general difficulty perceiving certain sorts of motion. They suggest in Neuropsychologia this may contribute to problems with social interaction, characteristic of autism.

13 adults with autism were studied and found to have difficulty identifying emotions such as anger or happiness when shown short animated video clips.

The characters in the clips had no faces, nor did they speak, so the participants were asked to judge the emotion based on the body language of the figure alone.

Along with 16 adults with no autism diagnosis, they were also shown a number of dots on a computer screen and asked which way they were moving. A proportion of dots moved noticeably to the left or right, while the others moved randomly.

The performance of the autism group was significantly below that of the others in both tests, leading researchers to speculate that there may be serious differences between the ability to process visual information.

They point to an area of the brain needed for the perception of motion called the superior temporal sulcus, and cite previous research which has found that this area responds differently in people with autism.

“The way people move their bodies tells us a lot about their feelings or intentions, and we use this information on a daily basis to communicate with each other. We use others’ body movements and postures, as well as people’s faces and voices, to gauge their feelings,” said Anthony Atkinson, who led the research. “People with autism are less able to use these cues to make accurate judgements about how others are feeling.”

**Thanks to Bob Bissett at Mentoric (http://www.mentoric.com Twitter: twitter.com/Mentoric) for alerting me to this BBC news report.

If a specific communication has not had the intended effect, when looking for where your message has been let down, it is best to keep in mind the computational communication model described by the acronym “GIGO”.This principle was first described by the philosopher and engineer Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first programmable machine. Babbage comments in his autobiography Passages From the Life of a Philosopher (1864) that when asked (by eminent British members of parliament no less) if the outcome of a calculation would be correct even when incorrect data was placed into that calculation, he replied “I am not able rightly to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question!”

Thus GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out!

The lesson if you are receiving what appears, feels to you, or you fully comprehend to be nonsense, it could well be because you fed a stream of similar nonsense in the first place!