Most people come to body language wanting to read everyone else. I start somewhere else entirely — with you. Before you can decode another person's lip-press or sudden stillness, you need to know what your own face and body are doing when you're nervous, defensive or trying to please. That is why the intermediate level of my Mastering the Body Language course opens with self-awareness, and why I've given it far more room than people usually expect.
Why self-awareness comes first
If you don't notice your own blocking gestures, your own pacifiers, the way your shoulders climb when you're under pressure, you'll read those same signals wrongly in someone else. Self-awareness is the calibration step. Once you can see your own baseline clearly, every other observation becomes more honest and less of a guess. I've covered this part in real detail rather than treating it as a quick warm-up.
Faces, emotions and micro-expressions
From there we move into facial expressions, the basic emotions, and micro-expressions — those flashes that cross the face in a fraction of a second and leak what someone genuinely feels before they manage it. I teach these with video examples, because you can't learn to spot a micro-expression by reading a description of one. You have to see it, pause, and watch it again until your eye catches it in real time.
First impressions and last impressions
We look at what actually makes or breaks a first impression, and the things worth doing deliberately in those opening seconds. The lasting impression matters just as much — how you leave a room often outweighs how you entered it. Alongside this we cover touch and space: how much a single appropriate touch can signal, and how much physical distance you should hold non-verbally, which shifts with culture and context.
Gestures, postures and the cues people miss
This is where we go past the surface. You'll learn common gestures and postures, where cultural differences change their meaning, and two categories that reveal a great deal once you know them:
- Blocking behaviour — when the body quietly puts a barrier between a person and something they find uncomfortable.
- Pacifiers — the self-soothing gestures we reach for to calm ourselves under stress.
If you've watched my Instagram videos, you've seen how much weight these small movements carry. Here I take them well beyond the headline version and show you how to read them in context, never in isolation.
Voice, words and power dynamics
Body language isn't only what we see. We also examine voice and vocal displays, the words people choose, and euphemisms — the softer language we use to dodge a harder truth. There's a section on power dynamics too, which tends to be genuinely useful in a professional setting, where status and influence are negotiated as much through posture and tone as through what's said.
A first look at deception detection
As a bonus, we touch on deception detection. Not the whole subject — that deserves its own depth — but enough to introduce you to how the work begins, and to remind you that cues suggest patterns, never certainties. No single gesture proves a lie.
The course runs to nearly eleven hours of recorded video, so it's self-paced. You can download the material, learn in your own rhythm, and practise. Every session ends with tasks, and I mean it when I say the tasks matter — that's where reading turns into skill. Do go through the disclaimers carefully as well. And if something needs clarifying, you can always reach me at [email protected].