“This year I'm going to do it differently.” After summer, you hear those words across many teams. That's no coincidence: research into what scientists call the fresh-start effect shows that after a clearly marked new beginning - the start of a week, a month, a birthday, a holiday - people demonstrably start more goals. Gym attendance, for instance, measurably rose at the start of a new week in that research. The summer holiday works as just such a moment: a clear close to a period, followed by a new start where people are quicker to voice an intention.

According to Ashwin Taneja, body language expert and founder of Body Signals Academy, the question isn't whether people voice that intention, but whether you can see how committed they really are. “Whether an intention is genuinely carried through isn't visible in the words, but in how someone sits while they say them,” he says. That principle is called congruence: the extent to which verbal and non-verbal communication match each other.

For one employee, the gap between a stated and a carried-through intention is a personal matter. For an organisation heading into the final quarter of the year, it isn't. A team full of good intentions that fade within a few weeks costs time, money and repeated effort: new plans that stall, targets that get revised, projects that have to be kick-started all over again. A manager who spots early which intentions are solid and which were mostly voiced out of social expectation can steer more precisely before it shows up at team level.

What Congruence Is, and Why It Matters

When someone talks enthusiastically about a new plan, you'd expect to see that reflected in posture, gestures and energy. Congruent behaviour looks like:

  • sitting upright or leaning slightly forward while talking
  • active, open gestures that support the story
  • a voice with a touch more energy and variation than in an ordinary conversation

Incongruent behaviour, where words and body contradict each other, looks like the opposite:

  • a posture that stays flat and unchanged, even during the “enthusiastic” sentences
  • little to no gestures while explaining the story
  • a voice whose tone and pace doesn't shift from the rest of the conversation

“If you say ‘I'm really going to work differently this year’ with a posture that stays completely unchanged, then your words and your body are contradicting each other,” Taneja explains. “That's not proof that someone's lying, but it is a cue to dig a little deeper.”

Why You Need to Know Someone's Normal Behaviour

To recognise incongruence, you first need to know how someone behaves normally. Behavioural experts call that someone's baseline: the behaviour that's typical for that specific person.

Taneja: “Someone who's naturally calm and reserved doesn't show incongruence by reacting calmly to a new plan. Someone who's normally expressive and energetic, and now reacts noticeably flatly to their own intention, is giving off a signal. Without that comparison to someone's normal behaviour, every interpretation is just guesswork.”

How to Apply This in Practice

Based on the distinction between congruent and incongruent behaviour, Taneja offers a few concrete starting points:

  • Watch the pace of speech against the pace of movement. Enthusiastic words combined with a slow, flat posture is a mismatch worth noticing.
  • Look at how long the enthusiasm lasts. Energy that's only present during the conversation itself, and fades the moment it's over, points more towards socially desirable behaviour than a genuinely carried-through intention, according to Taneja.
  • Ask follow-up questions rather than drawing conclusions. If you spot a mismatch, don't automatically assume someone doesn't mean it. A concrete follow-up question like “What will you actually do differently tomorrow?” often reveals more than the original statement itself.
  • Compare with earlier moments. Has someone voiced a similar intention before, say after the last new year? Looking back at what their behaviour showed then can give you an extra point of comparison.

Why This Is More Than Just Body Language

The goal isn't to see through colleagues, but to know as a manager where attention is actually needed. An intention voiced congruently generally needs little extra follow-up. An intention with a clear mismatch between words and behaviour benefits from a check-in or concrete agreements - before it fades and someone else in the organisation has to pick it back up.

Looking Beyond the Words

The summer holiday creates a moment where a lot of plans and intentions get voiced out loud. Paying attention to how well words and behaviour confirm each other gives you an extra cue for deciding where follow-up is needed, before an individual intention turns into a recurring team problem.