The Art of Heart, Mind (and Body Language) Reading

I often write on the wisdom of Balthasar Gracian, and his Art of Worldly Wisdom, consisting of 300 wise aphorisms. This offering below (in the quotation marks) talks mainly about reading the intentions of mind and heart.

“Comprehend their dispositions with whom you deal... so as to know their intentions. Cause known, effect known, beforehand in the disposition and after in the motive. The melancholy man always foresees misfortunes, the backbiter scandals; having no conception of the good, evil offers itself to them.

“A man moved by passion always speaks of things differently from what they are; it is his passion speaks, not his reason. Thus each speaks as his feeling or his humour prompts him, and all far from the truth. Learn how to decipher faces and spell out the soul in the features. If a man laughs always, set him down as foolish; if never, as false. Beware of the gossip: he is either a babbler or a spy. Expect little good from the misshapen: they generally take revenge on Nature, and do little honour to her, as she has done little to them. Beauty and folly generally go hand in hand.”

Reading Body Language

This is one of the biggest cues to reading people. I was interested to note a colleague recently at a meeting (and since) spend large amounts of time with a worried look on his face and a hand over his mouth. This tells me he could’ve been thinking that the speakers (including myself) were hiding something.[1]

Likewise, if it was him speaking with his hand covering his mouth, it could've indicated he was hiding something. This is but one example of the advantage of being able to interpret body language. It’s no perfect science, but it gives us food for thought, and that’s all we need to commence our interest in others and what’s going on for them.

Learning to watch for facial expressions, gestures of the arms and stance, for instance, can give us a window into the reality for the other person, and we are then able to see the world from their view, and not become upset by things they might do and say... because we understand their disposition and motives. Their words and actions might have little to do with us.

The melancholy person and the backbiter are cited above as examples of people seeing the reality of their own internal perspective--they’re blinded by the other-than-rose-coloured glasses they see the world through. Once we know this, the light goes on for us, and we see these people consistently seeing a world that doesn’t exist, except in their own minds; but at least we can understand them, and what’s more, predict them.

The golden lesson for us in this above aphorism is the fact that passion can blind reason. It’s good to be passionate, but not to the extent that we become eccentric and unbalanced. Forever remaining reasonable (as far as possible) is a key to life.

Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

[1] Allan and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of Body Language (Buderim: Pease International, 2006), p. 149.