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Feb 18, 2013, 08:58 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by riotgrrrl
Don't underestimate body language. We speak loud and clear without words.. A friend of mine who is intelligent, witty, successful, and very nice, far better a person than I, told me years later that she hated that I made friends easily when we were younger. She said that people would come up to me and want to be my friend. She didn't think back at how she was tho - she would be sitting in a corner of the pub, body language showed she was closed and wary. She is a great friend, but she was more suspicious than I and it took her longer than I to trust people. I was always friendly, open and always smiling in my youth. This is attractive to others, always was, always will be, and nothing about me being a better person.
Envy, being wary, lack of confidence, shyness - all these things we show in our body language.
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Hmm…I've talked about this enough times to know that everyone else will disagree with me, which is fine, but I don't agree with the body language thing.
People don't 'read' body language, they make assumptions based on what they see, and those assumptions can be wildly inaccurate. In fact, I don't think they have enough accuracy in them to warrant consideration, but, again, this is all my opinion. People have told me that I come off as angry or unhappy because I don't smile or laugh much, but that's not reading me, it's an assumption about me. Just because I don't express myself with lots of smiles and laughter doesn't mean I am angry, and that's why I hate it when people buy me stuff, because they expect this excited happy response and I can't do that. It doesn't mean anything about what I am feeling. Just means I don't express myself the same way.
You can't possibly tell if someone is confident, shy, wary, or envious from looking at them; it's all assumptions. Someone could be having a bad day, could be tired, could have difficulties expressing themselves, a lot of reasons.
Again, others will disagree, and that's fine, but this is how I see things. Instead of always making judgements I think it would be better if people were more open and talked to each other.
Fortunately, I find that older folks don't seem to have this issue, and that's why most of my 'friends' are in their 50s and older. None of them are remotely concerned about 'body language' and whether someone is confident or not. I would imagine their response to something like that would be, "Welcome to being a human," that there are lots of folks with low confidence and mental health issues and that this shouldn't be the defining factor to be around someone. Older folks are so much easier to be around and talk to!
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