How do you tell whether someone is on your side or not?  The basic body language to look for to determine whether people are allied to you or opposed is overall physical stance — their orientation.  This makes for entertaining people watching. Once you’re on to this aspect of behavior, you’ll find it’s easy to pick up.

Quite simply, people who are in agreement tend to mirror one another’s behavior. One will lead, and the other will follow.  This is especially easy to tell when there are three people present, and you want to figure out who’s on your side and who isn’t. Look for the one who has the same basic body orientation as you. For a test, move and see if the other person follows suit in the next thirty seconds.

Spouses, partners, and lovers usually mirror one another’s physical orientation when they’re together or with others and they’re in basic agreement. It’s interesting to watch couples for signs of mirroring — and its opposite. You can often detect trouble in the relationship before the couple is aware of it.

What happens in mirroring is more profound than just agreement or even connection, however. Because persuasion is an emotional as well as an intellectual activity, it comes from deep within the brain. When we agree with someone, we do so with our whole bodies. You can use this to drive agreement and create persuasion. Adopt a posture, and watch for others to adopt it. Once they have, change it slightly. If the others go along, you’re well on your way to persuading the room.

Your control of the body language in the room will both create and test the strength of your persuasion (or lack thereof).  The reason is that people’s bodies tell them what they’re thinking, not the other way around. It’s counterintuitive but true. Our minds basically say to ourselves, I’m aligned physically with this person, so I must agree with her.  That’s because we don’t like to think of ourselves as acting with no reason.

You must use this control of the physical orientation of other people with sophistication and subtlety. It must be combined with a series of steps that include other kinds of consensus building. It won’t work merely to come into a room, adopt a physical position, and expect everyone else to adopt your intellectual position too.

First, build agreement by adopting their positions, dealing with their concerns, and generally building on your openness to them and their openness to you. Do this work carefully while you’re talking through the issues important to the situation.  What you’re doing is aligning your two conversations and using both of them to persuade the others in the room. It takes considerable practice to do this with subtlety and effectiveness, but once you master it, you’ll find that your ability to persuade others will increase enormously.