This interview is with Sean Johns, Founder & Body Language Trainer, BodyLytics.
As Founder and Body Language Trainer at BodyLytics, with a background in IT services and team leadership, what do you help corporate teams understand about nonverbal communication that they often overlook?
The thing corporate teams overlook most is that they watch faces and ignore almost everything below the table. People have been taught to track eye contact and crossed arms, so that’s where their attention goes. But the face is the part of the body we’ve been managing since childhood. Paul Ekman called these “display rules”: we smile at the boss’s idea because the setting expects it. The legs and feet get very little conscious control, which is why Joe Navarro, drawing on his FBI career, treats them as the most honest part of the body. A colleague who is agreeing out loud while their feet have turned toward the door has, in a small way, already left the conversation.
Teams also love single-signal rules: arms crossed means defensive, touching the nose means lying. None of it holds up. What matters is deviation from how that specific person normally behaves, and you can’t see a deviation if you never noticed their baseline. I led IT teams for more than 20 years before I trained formally in this, and looking back, the engineer who went unusually still and quiet in a stand-up was telling me far more than anyone who folded their arms.
The one that surprises managers is how much their own nonverbals set the room. If a leader asks “Any concerns?” while already closing the laptop, the team answers the laptop. Video calls make this worse because the frame crops out most of the body and magnifies what’s left. A glance at a second screen reads as boredom even when it isn’t.
So I don’t hand teams a decoder ring. I give them a habit: learn what normal looks like for the people you work with, look for clusters of change rather than one gesture, and treat what you notice as a reason to ask a better question, never as proof. Body language won’t tell you what someone is thinking. It tells you when it’s worth asking.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
What led you from a career spanning IT operations, service delivery, and technical leadership into founding BodyLytics and training others in body language?
It wasn’t a sudden career change; BodyLytics grew out of what that work kept showing me.
I’ve spent close to two decades running IT teams at brands including Citi and Activision Blizzard, across banking, gaming, and fast-moving startups. On paper, the job is systems, service levels, and delivery. In practice, the projects that went wrong rarely failed on the technology. They failed in rooms where someone agreed to a plan they didn’t believe in and nobody picked up on it, or where a team was struggling long before anyone said so out loud. The signals were usually there. Most of us had simply never been taught to see them.
At the same time, I watched more and more of our communication move onto tickets, chat, and video calls, and I felt professionals were losing the human side of it. Technical people in particular get almost no training here, because it gets filed under soft skills, as if you either have it or you don’t.
So I started studying it properly. My first qualification was a body language diploma in 2018, then NLP practitioner training here in Barcelona, and more recently certification through Joe Navarro’s Body Language Academy and the Paul Ekman Group for microexpressions. What drew me to Navarro and Ekman was that their work rests on observation and research, and it’s candid about its limits. That mattered to me, because the popular version of body language is full of myths: crossed arms always mean defensive, liars can’t hold eye contact, and so on.
BodyLytics is my attempt to teach the evidence-based version. It’s practical, built around the conversations people in sales, HR, and leadership actually have, and clear that reading people means noticing change and asking better questions, not reading minds. Coming from IT, I also wanted it taught the way you’d learn any technical skill: through practice and feedback, not personality.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
Drawing on your experience working with HR, sales, and security teams, how do you determine the body-language challenge a team workshop should address before you design it?
Before I design anything, I ask the person booking the workshop to describe one specific moment that keeps going wrong. Not a skill they want improved. “We want people to read the room better” is too vague to build a day around.
- “Our interviewers keep hiring people who interview brilliantly and then underperform”
- “Our reps don’t notice when a buyer has checked out on a video call”
Those specific examples give me something real.
From there, I want to know where those conversations actually happen. Across a desk, standing at a door, in a boardroom, on Zoom? Distance, seating, and camera framing change what can even be observed, so an HR team doing video interviews needs different practice from a security team watching people approach an entrance.
I also send participants a short questionnaire before the session, asking which body-language “rules” they already believe. This is often the most useful thing I learn. HR groups frequently arrive believing that avoiding eye contact signals dishonesty, which is unreliable and can quietly penalise neurodivergent candidates or people from cultures where direct eye contact reads as rude. Sales teams often want a technique like mirroring, and expect it to work like a switch. Security staff can default to “looks suspicious,” which is a feeling rather than an observation. Whatever myth a group is carrying becomes something the workshop has to take apart, because otherwise they’ll just bolt the new material onto the old assumptions.
The last question is what they should do differently on Monday. If I can’t name an observable change, like “interviewers note shifts from baseline before they write a verdict,” the brief isn’t finished yet.
Only then do I pick the material. I draw on the following frameworks:
- The Navarro comfort and discomfort framework
- Ekman’s work on expressions and display rules
- Proxemics
The science is the same for every team, but the conversation it gets applied to shouldn’t be.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
In an on-site corporate workshop, what is one exercise you use to help participants notice changes in comfort or discomfort without falling into the myth of ‘reading’ a single gesture?
The exercise I rely on most is a paired baseline drill. The one rule is that observers may describe but not interpret.
Participants work in pairs. For the first two minutes, one person talks about something completely neutral, like their commute or how they’d spend a free Saturday, while their partner simply watches. They should focus not on the face so much as on the hands, the feet, how they sit, how fast they speak, and where their hands go when they pause. That’s the baseline.
Then I change the topic to something mildly uncomfortable but safe. Explaining a subject they know little about works well, or describing a small work mistake they’ve made. Nothing personal or painful. The observer’s only job is to write down what changed, in plain physical language: “feet pulled back under the chair,” “touched the side of the neck twice,” “stopped using hand gestures.” Words like nervous, defensive, or lying are banned on the sheet.
Afterwards the speaker says how the second topic actually felt, and the pair compare notes.
Two things happen almost every time. First, observers are surprisingly good at spotting that something shifted. Joe Navarro’s comfort-and-discomfort framework—pacifying behaviours like neck touching or rubbing the thighs, freezing, feet orienting away—gives them the vocabulary, and they see it. Second, when I ask them to guess why it shifted, a lot of them get it wrong. Someone who went still might have been concentrating, not anxious. The same shift means different things in different people, which is exactly why a single gesture read in isolation tells you so little.
That gap between noticing and interpreting is the whole lesson. I want people leaving the room with a habit: establish what normal looks like, notice clusters of change and when they happen, then use that as a cue to ask a better question. It’s far more useful in a real meeting than any list of what crossed arms supposedly mean.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
Technical and IT teams often spend much of their day in structured meetings or on video calls; what practical body-language habit have you seen improve clarity and trust in those environments?
The simplest habit, and the one I’ve seen make the biggest difference, is keeping your hands visible and still when you ask for input.
On a typical video call, the camera frames your head and shoulders. The hands are either off screen or on the keyboard, and people can hear the typing even when they can’t see it. So when a lead asks “any questions on this?” while their eyes are drifting to a second monitor and their hands are still working, the group reads it as a formality, not a real request. Nobody speaks up, and later everyone wonders why the issue wasn’t raised in the meeting.
The fix takes a few seconds. Sit back far enough that your hands and upper torso are in frame. When you reach the point where you genuinely want input, take your hands off the keyboard, let them rest where people can see them, look at the camera rather than the faces on your screen, and then wait. Count to five in your head if you need to. The silence feels long to you. To everyone else it reads as “I’m actually listening.”
There is good reason this works. Joe Navarro talks about visible hands as one of the oldest trust signals we have: when we can’t see someone’s hands, we’re less sure of their intent. And on video, we lose so much of the body that the remaining cues get amplified. A still, open posture with nothing competing for your attention does a lot of work.
The same applies in a physical meeting room. Close the laptop lid or turn it away when the discussion moves to decisions or concerns. In technical teams in particular, where people are often reluctant to be the one who slows things down, removing that small signal of divided attention makes it noticeably easier for someone to say “I’m not sure this will work.”
It isn’t about performing openness. It’s about not sending a signal that contradicts the question you just asked.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
When training managers who lead teams through operational pressure, incident response, or organisational change, how do you help them make their nonverbal communication match the message they need to deliver?
I start by getting managers to watch themselves with the sound off.
Each manager delivers a short version of a real message — for example, announcing a restructure or opening an incident bridge — and records it on their phone. Then they play it back muted. Without the words to lean on, the mismatches are obvious: the reassuring update delivered with a tight jaw, the “we’re in control” line spoken while rubbing the back of the neck, the speed of someone who wants the conversation over. Navarro calls those neck and face touches pacifying behaviours. They’re the body calming itself, and teams pick up on them even if they couldn’t tell you why.
The most common problem I see with difficult news is the polite smile. Managers smile to soften a hard message, but it’s usually a social smile that never reaches the eyes, and during a restructure it can come across as dismissive. Ekman’s work on display rules and masking explains why: people can usually tell when an expression is being put on. I’d rather a manager look serious and steady than cheerful and unconvincing.
Incident response is different again. I led IT teams through plenty of outages over the years, and in those moments the team takes its emotional temperature from whoever is running the call. So the practice there is about slowing down on purpose: a lower, slower voice; feet planted; hands still and visible; a pause before answering the escalating question from a stakeholder. Calm spreads just as easily as panic does.
The principle I give them is simple. Before you deliver the message, decide the one thing you want people to feel when they walk out — whether that’s steady, clear on next steps, or taken seriously. Then check your body is saying the same thing. If the words say “we’ve got this” and the body says “I want to leave,” people believe the body.
None of this is about acting. It’s about removing the signals that contradict what you mean.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
Your approach emphasizes establishing a person’s baseline rather than treating one signal as proof; how can professionals apply that principle in their next client, stakeholder, or performance conversation?
Use the first few minutes of the conversation for what they’re actually good for. Most people treat small talk as something to get through before the real agenda. I’d treat it as your baseline window. While you’re chatting about the weekend or the journey in, notice how this person normally sits, how much they gesture, how fast they talk, how often they look away while thinking, and what they do with their hands. You’re not judging anything yet. You’re learning what normal looks like for them, today, in this room.
Then, when you reach the part that matters, whether that’s the price, the deadline, or the feedback in a performance review, watch for change. Did the gesturing stop? Did their feet pull back or turn toward the door? Did they lean away, or touch their neck or face when they hadn’t before? Joe Navarro’s comfort and discomfort framework is useful here, because it gives you something concrete to look for instead of a vague gut feeling.
Timing is the part people miss. A shift that happens exactly when you mention the budget means something different from one that builds slowly over forty minutes, which might just be fatigue or a cold room. Pay attention to what was said in the few seconds before the change, and look for a cluster of changes rather than one.
Then, and this is the step that matters most, don’t treat it as an answer. Treat it as a cue to ask. “I get the sense the timeline might be a concern. Is that fair?” is a much better response than quietly deciding the client is unhappy, or that your employee disagrees with the review. Sometimes you’ll be right. Sometimes they were thinking about something else entirely. Either way, you’ve opened the conversation rather than closed it with an assumption.
And make a quick note afterwards. With people you see often, like direct reports or regular clients, your sense of their baseline gets sharper each time, and that’s when this becomes useful.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
What should organisations look for when evaluating a body-language or nonverbal-communication training certificate to ensure it is grounded in sound practice rather than popular myths?
The quickest test is what the course promises. If the marketing says it will teach your people to spot liars, read minds, or “decode” anyone in seconds, walk away. Research doesn’t support it. Bond and DePaulo’s large review of deception studies found that people spot lies only slightly better than chance, around 54 percent, and trained professionals don’t do dramatically better. A course grounded in sound practice will say that openly.
Next, listen for the myths. Three come up constantly.
- The claim that communication is 93 percent nonverbal is a misreading of Albert Mehrabian’s narrow experiments on feelings and attitudes, which he has said himself shouldn’t be generalized.
- The idea that eye direction reveals lying has been tested and did not hold up.
- Rules based on single gestures—”crossed arms mean defensive,” “touching the nose means deceit”—ignore context entirely.
What you want instead is a course that can name its sources. Look for published research and recognized practitioners, such as Paul Ekman’s work on facial expression or Joe Navarro’s framework from his FBI career, and the honesty to say where that research is limited.
The core method should be baseline, clusters of behavior, context, and timing, with the output being better questions rather than verdicts.
It should also account for culture and individual differences. Eye contact norms vary widely across cultures, and neurodivergent people may show very different baselines. A program that ignores this risks teaching bias, which is a real problem if it’s used for hiring or security.
Check how learning is assessed. A certificate for attendance tells you very little. Look for practical exercises with feedback, scenario work, and some form of assessed observation. External accreditation, such as CPD registration, is a useful signal of structure; read the syllabus too.
Finally, check the trainer. Their credentials should be specific and verifiable, with issuer and date, not just “certified expert.”
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach
After completing one of your workshops or certificate-based programmes, what is one simple practice participants can use over the next 30 days to turn the training into a lasting professional skill?
Keep a three-line observation log once a day for thirty days.
Pick one conversation each day. It doesn’t need to be important; a stand-up, a client call, or a chat at the coffee machine all work. Afterwards, take two minutes and write three short lines.
The first line is the baseline: what was normal for that person at the start. “Relaxed, lots of hand movement, leaning back.”
The second is the change and when it happened: “Hands went still and feet pulled under the chair when we got to the delivery date.”
The third is what you did with it: “Asked whether the date worked for her team. It didn’t; they’re short two people.” Or, just as useful: “Didn’t ask. Should have.”
That’s it. No interpretation column, no guessing at hidden meaning.
The reason this works is that observation is a skill you build by repetition, not something you absorb in a day. Most people leave a workshop keen, notice everything for about a week, then slip back into old habits because nothing prompts them to keep looking. A small daily log gives you that prompt. It also keeps you honest. Writing down the physical description separately from what you did about it trains the habit of describing before interpreting, which is where most people go wrong.
After a couple of weeks, two things usually happen. You start noticing baselines automatically, without having to remind yourself. And when you read back through the log, you’ll see how often a change you noticed led to a useful question, and how often your first guess about what it meant would have been wrong. That second insight is worth a lot because it’s what stops people turning body language into a set of snap judgments.
By the end of the month, the log isn’t really needed anymore. The habit is.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, https://bodylytics.coach
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Only that the most useful thing organisations can take from this field is a bit of humility. Body language won’t tell you what someone is thinking; anyone who promises that is overselling. What it will do, when taught properly, is make people better observers and better at asking the question that actually needs to be asked. In hiring, sales, security, and leadership, that’s where the value is.
I’m regularly asked to analyse body language for the international press. Recent coverage includes an on-camera interview with the New York Post on the Trump and Xi Jinping state dinner, analysis for the International Business Times UK, The Sun and The U.S. Sun (including a video interview), the Mirror, the Daily Express US, the Irish Star, and OK! Magazine. I also write for the trade press, with bylined pieces in Loss Prevention Magazine and Total Retail. The full list is at https://bodylytics.coach/press.
I’m happy to help with follow-up questions, expand on any of these answers, or comment on specific scenarios. I’m based in Barcelona and work with teams in person and remotely.
Sean Johns, Non-Verbal Intelligence Expert & Founder, BodyLytics — https://bodylytics.coach