pic for Albert Mehrabian Apr 2016

Albert Mehrabian’s work on the conveyance of a verbal message continues to fascinate me. As a writer and presenter, one who chooses her words carefully, it’s daunting to understand that only 7% of a verbal communication’s meaning is conveyed through just the words themselves. Your voice—its loudness, pitch, tone, inflection, and clarity—make up 38% of the message.  That leaves 55% to convey the message through our body language such as posture, stance, gestures, movement, facial expressions, energy, and mannerisms.

I demonstrate the validity of this to my students by acting out the same seven word sentence with various tones of voice, inflections, gestures, facial expressions, posture, and other non-verbal language.  “I don’t have a problem with you,” can be conveyed sincerely and gently with palms up, wide open arms as if offering an embrace, in a soothing tone of voice, while keeping sufficient physical space between the two of you.

Or you can scream that sentence in rage, your face contorted in anger, mouth snarling, with your arms raised over your head as though you’re about to cause the other person physical harm.

The same seven words can be spoken in a menacing, barely audible undertone while your hands are bunched into tight fists at your sides, and your eyes made hard and squinty while you stand much too close to the person receiving your message. This is even more frightening than the truly angry response above.

So in our verbal communications to others, what are we saying? When our preschool age daughter holds up a drawing and says, “Look what I made, Daddy!” do we get up and go to her, take the drawing, truly examine her artistry and then bend down to her eye level, smile and say, “That’s great, honey!” Or do we barely look up from the television or the cell phone in our hands and mumble, “That’s great, Honey,” and then quickly shift our attention back to our own activity.

The people we talk to receive the true message we send, and it’s not through the words. A quote commonly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson says in part, “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”  So our true message thunders so loudly that people don’t hear our actual words.  What ARE we saying, really?

To my readers:  Share a story of where a message received differed from the words that had been spoken.