164 I Can Read You Like a Book
A fortune teller without any special powers, except of the knowl-
edge of communication filters, will be able to do the same thing.
You walk away $100 poorer, convinced that she saw into your past:
therefore, she must know something about your future.
If I know you spent the first 20 years of your life in upstate
New York, with no heavy ethnic orientation, I can make certain
assumptions about your body language. The kind of movements you
make will be somewhat at odds with what is normal and acceptable
for someone from the backwoods of Georgia. The cadence of your
speech, word choices, and other aspects of your verbal, vocal, and
non-verbal communication will help me profile you.
Now turn around all of these things I’ve said about filters and
focus on yourself. If you can’t identify your own filters, recognize
how they affect your view of others, or learn to control them, your
ability to read someone else’s body language will be impaired.
Assumptions, projections, and biases can clog your ability to sense
and intuit information about someone.Gender
Men and women can more easily understand each other than
act similar to each other. That said, understanding each other is far
from easy. The biological and anatomical differences that influence
behavior also switch on powerful filters that make it hard for us to
eliminate biases we have about the opposite sex. In briefly reviewing
those differences, I want to center your attention on both. Why
gender-related filters have such control over our thinking and how
they operate, and how men and women differ in their body language.