Regular readers of this blog (and my book Power Cues) will know that I’m an advocate for a version of mindfulness that involves first learning to monitor your own body language, then others’ and then controlling your body language in order to control the conversation you’re having with other people, whether it’s a meeting, or a presentation, or even a simple one-on-one chat.

But why should you do that work? It’s unnatural, in terms of regular person behavior. And it’s hard. We normally don’t think at all—at least, in the casual sense of the word think—about where we are in space, how we’re gesturing, or what kind of impression we’re making on the people around us.

Most of that activity is left to our unconscious minds most of the time. So when we do think consciously about such things, it’s very distracting. Precisely because these chores are normally left to our unconscious minds, when we make them conscious, they tend to drive out other thoughts. That’s what’s hard about getting conscious about your body language.

It’s virtually impossible to monitor where you are in space, keep track of all your hand gestures, focus on the people around you, and keep up a steady flow of witty and to-the-point conversation, all at the same time – without a lot of practice. We may think consciously about body language on rare occasions, noticing when someone touches us or suddenly moves very close to us, but that kind of awareness is intermittent and brief and created by unusual body language, rather than the ordinary stuff. Constant self-monitoring is simply too difficult for most of us to manage. As the neuroscientists say, it takes too much cognitive load.

But is it necessary? Why can’t we leave that monitoring to the unconscious where it’s usually resides? Unfortunately, the answer is that we do have to develop some way of consciously creating the right kinds of body language in ourselves, especially in moments of great importance, because leaving it to chance won’t work. We’re far too likely to make two critical mistakes if we leave things to the gods.

First mistake? You’ll project your nervousness and fail to command at the key moments of opportunity. Say you’re heading into a really important meeting, one on one, with your boss. The topic is your salary and, particularly, whether or not it should be raised. Let’s say, not to beat around the financial bush, you need the money. You’ve moved to a new town when you took the new job, and the expenses of the new burg are proving to be higher than you expected.

There’s a lot riding on the meeting, in short, so you’re nervous. If you just leave your body language to chance, then you’re going to convey your nervousness to your boss. Unless she’s completely clueless and lacking in negotiation skills, she’ll register that nervousness, unconsciously, read it as weakness or perhaps that you don’t think you deserve the raise, and act accordingly. You’ll be far less likely to get the money you were hoping for.

The second mistake you’re likely to make, if you leave your body language to chance, is that you’ll just convey a typical person’s typically distracted state of mind. When you let your mind wander on an ordinary day, you might think about your to-do list, picking up milk on the way home, the TV show you saw last night, how sleepy you are, how you’re not making any progress on your New Year’s resolution to lose fifteen pounds, how annoying your office mate’s voice is—all in the space of a few seconds

If you walk into your boss’s office thinking about all of that, your body language will reflect that mental list and it will be as diffuse as your mind. You will not be charismatic, powerful, or focused. Once again, your chances of getting the raise will be small to nil.

So do the work. Learn to think consciously about your body language. When the stakes are high, you can’t afford not to.