Presentation skills trainers make a lot of fuss made about the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfact\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that only \u00e2\u20ac\u01537% of communication lies in the words\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we use. The rest is split between the way you say it and the para-linguistics (body language and all that jazz) that go with it. The figures are often cited, but less often understood\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.<\/p>\n
Ask yourself: can you play charades?<\/p>\n
The answer, for me at least, is something like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yes, but only when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had a drink\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. You might be more outgoing than me. Or less. The important point here is that no matter how good you are at it, unless the person miming is cheating and using a formal Sign Language it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not an easy<\/em><\/strong> game.<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the whole point. If we could do it straight away it wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be fun. And yet there are people involved in communications training that blindly and stubbornly claim that the words we use in communication account for only 7% of meaning and 55% of the communication takes place by using body language.<\/p>\n Oh yeah? So how come radio adverts work then? Coupled with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tonality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (that is, the way we say things rather than what we say) the assertion is that a whopping 93% of communication has nothing to do with the words we use. If that was the case, I might just have managed better on holiday in France this year!<\/p>\n Seriously, if you hear a language you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never heard before, do you really think you can understand 93% of what the speaker is saying? No? Didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think so. And yet there are people buying into this myth. To be fair it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s based upon some scientific research and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably defend themselves on those grounds: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also so widely banded about by various people so that many people regard it as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreceived wisdom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. It isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n Frankly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong. Well, actually, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not so much \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwrong\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 as wrongly applied<\/strong><\/em>. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been taken out of context and bandied about with very little real understanding. The person who did the original research, (Prof Albert Mehrabrian of UCLA) made a big thing of pointing out to people that his research was specifically<\/em><\/strong> to do with personal likes and dislikes and that it could absolutely not<\/em><\/strong> be applied in other contexts. It was laboratory work, not ready to be applied in the real world, yet. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t generalised or robust enough.<\/p>\n Prof Mehrabian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work was based upon volunteers in a laboratory saying one word only. That word was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153maybe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and he picked it specifically because of it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neutrality! Given those conditions, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not surprising that the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcvalue\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the word was only 7%. In fact it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perhaps a bit worrying that it was as high as that!<\/p>\n No one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disputing that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more to communication that the words you use. At Curved Vision<\/a> we have theatrical backgrounds and we are very much aware of the old adage that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not what you say, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the way that you say it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but I also have a thorough training and background is social science and research (PhD and all that.) so we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use the 7% stuff when I do the presentation skills training<\/a>, not because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wrong, just because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s irrelevant. Well, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153maybe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s irrelevant, but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to hear my tone of voice to know if I mean it!<\/p>\n Best\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.. Simon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Presentation skills trainers make a lot of fuss made about the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfact\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that only \u00e2\u20ac\u01537% of communication lies in the words\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we use. The rest is split between the way you say it and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}