It is June. They call it flaming June – it might be on its way, the rain seems to have stopped. In the meantime my garden is rampant. It is wonderful to see. The wisteria, the rhododendrons were amazing and now the peonies. Half term was not wonderful for the kids so there seem to have been expeditions to see historical sites and the zoo. It is costing parents a fortune they did not expect to spend at this time of year so they have my sympathy especially as it might be down to me purchasing air conditioning.
What am I thinking about?
Non-verbal communication. This is partly because I have just spent ten days in hospital (fantastic service from the NHS) and because of the election.
As a mentor I am hugely dependent on non-verbal signals. It is my job to see and hear what is not said and question it when the non-verbal does not agree with the spoken word. It is well known that eighty per cent of the message comes from sources other than words. It leaks the real message, or it tells you about emotions what cannot be put into words.
Let’s start with how someone looks. As far as I am concerned someone can decide to wear what they like and portray themselves as they wish. However please remember there is no point having brilliant slides if you do not look like someone your audience takes seriously. We are our best visual aids, and we project our brand.
Pre-pandemic I worked mainly face to face as it was easy to pick up what a person was thinking by looking at their hands and feet, but because of covid and its restrictions I moved to Zoom. We all know it works and in my case I realised just how much of the message I get through tone of voice. It can be difficult to read faces when people import backgrounds because the way the pixels move can be disconcerting, but the tone of voice stays the same. Once I learn the range of a person’s expressions it is a dead giveaway. I also find myself using props more as people do not feel affirmation so easily when they are not in the same room. My clients are familiar with the bell we ring when things have gone right. Otherwise grown-up people have been known to demand that it is rung to celebrate a triumph or even something smaller but that was difficult to achieve.
Of course one of the best examples of watching for non-verbal signals is professional poker players who learn their opponents “tells”. I was never a poker player but when I was a management trainee I was really good at poker dice. You may not know this game. You have five dice marked up as picture cards and you pass them to the next player declaring your poker hand – or lying about your hand. You stay in if you call out the liars correctly and bluff well yourself. Having spent up to fifteen hours a day with these guys for months I was good at knowing their tells.
So why did election coverage get me going on this topic? All the party leaders are using it (or ignoring it and then wondering why they have to do something about it). Rishi Sunak got drenched in the rain and looked pathetic in not anticipating the weather or worse like a man in an expensive suit who did not care it was ruined. Keir Starmer is less obvious, but he has taken to dark-coloured suits to look less formal and lawyer-like and wearing his glasses to seem more serious. Ed Davey knows his party is hardly in the third spot and will achieve less coverage, so what does he do – stunts! Falling off the sailboard (deliberately) and sliding down the water shoot got him onto all TV channels. The message it left with people might not have won him any votes – we will never know. All these things help us decide without a word spoken.
I also mentioned being in hospital. Hospital wards are such satisfying places for people watching: patients who have to be contended with by nurses and doctors; relatives who ae not coping well with a diagnosis or trying hard to persuade relatives to take a course of action; junior doctors who are not confident they can undertake the procedure competently. There were many funny happenings I could tell you about. One night I had two junior doctors come to take a blood sample under the supervision of sister. As she asked me whether I would mind them undertaking this procedure she said via her body language “be patient with them they have to learn” and as I said “of course” we both knew by a combination of tone of voice and body language what we had agreed to. They did manage it successfully – eventually!
The most classic example happened in the middle of the night – 4am. There were five of us on the ward. For three nights the warthog in the corner had kept us awake – with every possible sound effect from all orifices. Not much anyone could do about it: poor lady was not sick enough to go into a side room and not well enough to go home. However we were all getting fractious. At 4am on the third morning a nurse came to check us and found me reading my kindle. She looked at me and inclined her head. I nodded and smiled a wry smile looking at the warthog. She nodded back. Then she went to get the machine to do the observations (90 minutes early!). In case you don’t know this means you have to be woken up. We all managed to get to sleep for a couple of hours. Blessed nurse who responded to a non-verbal request.
So be aware that messages are leaking from you all the time. The best poker players control them. We cannot do it all the time but when it really matters consider what the message is that you need to re-enforce.
If you are interested in improving your communication then please talk to me. We can speak about your situation in detail. We can talk about your business and what you want from it and your life. I love speaking with people, off the meter, to help them explore possibilities and whether/how to take them forward. I hope you will be one of them.
In the meantime, use all the non-verbal communication to help you decide how to vote but make sure you vote.