The Golden Rule: Baselines and Context

Establishing the Baseline: Normal Behavior

The golden rule for interpreting body language accurately is to never judge a gesture in isolation.

Before you can understand the meaning of any nonverbal signal, it is critical to establish the person's baseline.

This refers to her normal pattern of behavior when she is calm, relaxed and unpressured.

How does she usually sit, what is her normal level of eye contact, does she gesture a lot or a little, what is her usual tone and pace of voice? Without knowing this individual norm, interpreting any deviation becomes pure guesswork.

For example, if someone is always fiddling with a pen, that behavior during a tense meeting does not necessarily indicate nervousness about the meeting itself; it could simply be their baseline.

Observing and getting to know a person's habitual behavior is the indispensable first step to a reliable nonverbal reading.

Context is everything: External factors (allergies, temperature, etc.).

In addition to the individual baseline, the context in which a nonverbal behavior occurs is absolutely crucial.

The same gesture can have completely different meanings depending on the situation.

External, environmental or physiological factors can greatly influence body language.

For example, someone might rub their nose not because they are lying, but because they have seasonal allergies.

Crossing the arms could indicate defensiveness, but it could also simply be a reaction to the coldness of the room.

Stress from other areas of a person's life can also manifest nonverbally.

Ignoring these contextual factors and attributing a fixed meaning to a gesture (such as "arms crossed always means resistance") is a common mistake that leads to misinterpretations that are misleading and potentially damaging to the relationship. One must always ask: What else is going on here?

Deviance detection: The starting point for insight.

Once you have a sense of a person's baseline and consider the context, the real starting point for gaining insight through nonverbal reading is deviance detection.

What really gives us valuable information is not so much the gesture itself, but the change from that person's normal behavior in a similar situation.

If someone who is normally very expressive and maintains firm eye contact suddenly becomes rigid, averts his gaze and reduces his gestures, that change is significant.

It signals that something has altered th