Social Awareness Skills for Work/Life Balance, Part 2: Reading Body Language

In my last post, I described how improving your social awareness will help you improve your work/life balance. I focused on the importance of really listening to others when they are talking to you.

Listening to the words that the other person is saying is important but their words are not the complete message.

Their body language completes the message that they are communicating to you.

Becoming a body language reader will help you to know the underlying emotions of the other person.

With that knowledge you can build better connection and trust with others. You will be able to see if “right now” is not a good time to talk because they are showing signs of being stressed or frustrated. You can adjust your message to them based on what their body language is revealing to you.

Depending on your relationship with them, you can offer to talk about what is on their mind or you may decide to wait until it’s a better time to talk to them.

How can you improve your body language reading skills? Researchers have discovered that we all have the innate ability to read body language. But we have to give our attention to doing so.

A deep dive into improving your body language reading skills is outside the scope of this essay.

Stay tuned for an upcoming series on the topic.

In closing, I hope that you see how using your social awareness skills, you can develop good connection, trust, and respect with others to negotiate what is going to work out (compromises) in both the workplace and in the home. And that will improve your work/life balance.

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