Reading someone’s body language is something a lot of people tend to do when meeting someone new. It tells us a lot about the other person’s thoughts and their relation towards us. It’s also important to show our body language to someone whether this be coming across as confident, interested or showing different emotions. This falls into the category of encoding.
Encoding means to send someone cues, come across a certain way and control how others feel about you. A good example of this can be the posture. While being hunched over and walking with the face down can portray someone as a rather insecure person, the opposite can make someone, even if they feel insecure, look confident and have a positive effect on their day-to-day life. On the other hand, it is just as important to show good decoding signs to create a positive environment, and relationships and give them the feeling of being listened to and understood.
A great example I’m sure everyone can or did relate to at some point in their life is holding a presentation. Body language is in my opinion just as important as the contents of the presentation. It immediately gives the presentation a professional look and can catch the viewer’s attention. One of the key points is good eye contact. It seems rather unprofessional to look at cards or a laptop screen all the time instead of speaking without looking at notes. Nevertheless, eye contact can also be too much and make the other person feel uncomfortable. So how do you know when it’s too much? The answer is that simple, you don’t. Body language is something that humans learn by doing and is different for each person.
Further gestures that decoding and encoding can be used for are facial expressions, tone and the speed of talking. As easy as it is to learn how to show certain emotions more, it’s just as simple to fake certain emotions or de- & encode a message the wrong way. This makes people not trustworthy and can be hard to understand the person’s actual intentions and thoughts.
