One Minute Pause no 14

There once was a kindly researcher called Mahrabian who hit on an idea.

He wanted to study the effects of body language on verbal meaning.

He set out to answer the following question: How much meaning do people get solely from words, and how much more meaning do they get combined with body language?

So, he conducted a large body of research on the effects of a spoken message.

Here’s the results, which you may have heard: When you speak, 38% of communication is tone of voice. Only 7% is what you actually say. 55% is physiology.

Quite frankly I’m sick of hearing about these stats.

I think this research is over quoted, and flawed.

It particularly irks me that so many people in business live by the research.

What many people don’t know is that the research was conducted mainly among married couples in their homes - a consistently higher emotional environment.

Think about body language in the home versus at work:
when speaking, it’s much easier to throw a saucepan at someone, or let out a belly-laugh, when you’re at home.

In a work situation we are usually more professional and keep our emotional cards much closer to our chest (except for that miserable looking guy in accounts).

Which means that the content of what we say suddenly becomes much, much more important.

When I train people, I don’t worry too much about body language.

I think trying to develop your acting skills is best left out of the boardroom - unless you’re Robert DeNiro it ain’t going to work.

Instead I focus participants in my workshops on getting them to write well structured, persuasive and clear presentations.

When they stand up and deliver, if they are showing some body language that is distracting, and gets in the way of a clear message, then I’ll point it out (without pointing).

You probably know all the usual suspects in the body language presentation-world: hands on hips (menacing), standing cross-legged (weak), hands flying about all over the place (confused), shaking with anger (PowerPoint not working) etc.

The more extreme body gestures do need to be kept in control.

But for the most part, if we have written a great business presentation, then we should let the words do the talking.

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