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Vladimir_M comments on Mitigating Social Awkwardness - Less Wrong
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Have you reached this conclusion by systematic study of your behavior, or is it just a vague impression that you have? If the latter, you may be extremely wrong about it. People usually have a horribly inaccurate view of what their behavior really looks like from the outside.
Besides, many crucial elements of body language are determined by movements that don't affect physical comfort much.
I don't know if I would call it "systematic". However, people often make outright wrong assumptions about my attitudes and feelings and then explain that these inaccuracies were based on my body language. How many mistakes of this kind someone makes varies from person to person. At any rate, when I read lists of body language signals, anything on the list that I ever do, I at least sometimes do for comfort reasons.
My physical comfort is affected by a lot of things that other people don't seem to be discomforted by.
Reading lists and then comparing them to what you think your behaviour is strikes me a a really bad way to get accurate results.
Video yourself. Just set the laptop down with the webcam taking in the room and record a video for yourself. Once you relax and stop worrying about the camera, observe the results. You will see things you had no idea about. Try to correct, videoing the result. Repeat.
I appreciate where you're coming from, but I'm actually often intrusively aware of my position and what factors are going into it. I adjust it frequently, and this is almost always a conscious matter; the habits that I have which sometimes fall into the background (adjusting my glasses, straightening up so I can accommodate my weird breathing needs) are all comfort-based and just common enough that I can take care of them subconsciously.
Yeah, it's a big YMMV. I used to interview people a lot and was frequently appalled to hear what my voice actually sounded like. Then people would tell me what a good phone voice I had. But I do think that in the general case, objectively recording what you're actually doing will be much more informative than not.
I've found Skype conversations rather good for this - it has my video as well as the other person's, and thus increases my awareness of a lot of my body language habits. It also means I'm engaged in a conversation, which seems to bring out significantly different body language.
Interesting. I'd never thought to deliberately seek out a list of body language signals before. :)