Business

Body Language

When we want to pay close attention to someone, we listen closely to their words. However, we often don’t understand as much as we could because we don’t attend to their other form of communication. When we fail to attend to the person’s nonverbal communication—their body language, we may miss more than 70 percent of the other person’s message. While words account for the content of the message, nonverbal communication carries the message’s meaning. Meaning stems from how we say it, rather than what we say. Body language is extremely powerful because it operates at a very deep level in the brain. For example, if you have been around toddlers or young children you will easily see how they respond to body language. When you are confident and open, they will respond approach you and engage you. If you are nervous, tense or upset, they will shy away. In effect, body language is preverbal communication embedded in us from childhood, which is why it can be such a strong tool for persuasion. Confidence attracts and persuades. This chapter will show you five nonverbal communication cues to persuasiveness that were developed by Burgoon, Birk, and Pfau (1990). Once you know these cues, you can identify these nonverbal behaviors in other people. You can also use these cues to evaluate your own nonverbal behavior and improve your own confidence and persuasiveness. The five cues are as follows:

 Vocalic Pleasantness Cues  Kinesic / Proxemic Immediacy Cues  Vocalic Potency Cues  Kinesic Dominance Cues  Kinesic Arousal Cues

Vocalic Pleasantness Cues

Vocalic pleasantness cues make a positive impression. We will examine three different areas of vocalic pleasantness: fluency, voice quality and pitch variety. Fluency in speech is pleasant because of its rhythm and flow. It should be easy and smooth. It has a cadence that is easy to follow. Verbal interjections, such as “ums” and “ahs,” ruin fluency. We should try to avoid these as much as possible because when we use them it breaks the fluency. Breaks in fluency indicate a lack of confidence because it sounds like you have to stop and think up answers. Consider the newscasters on television; they seldom if ever interject an “uh” or an “ah,” so they sound quite credible. Here's a trick to improve your fluency. Every time, you're about to interject an "uh" or an "ah," take a breath in. Taking a breath in makes no noise. Your listener will interpret this as a need for breath. While you are breathing in, you can think of what to say next. Voice quality is also important. The more pleasant your voice, the more persuasive you can be. Comedians such as Joe Pesci and Gilbert Gottfried have created movie characters we do not trust by irritating us with the sound of their voices. Some salespeople and presenters work with voice coaches to train their voices to sound more pleasant. An easy way to train your voice without spending a lot of money is to learn to speak more slowly and carefully. Using a voice recorder, you can practice in the privacy of your own room and listen to yourself. Soon you will be able to identify how to speak more pleasantly. Pitch variety is the third component of vocalic pleasantness. Pitch encompasses the highs and lows of your voice. People without pitch variety in their voice speak in a monotone. While a monotone is not a grating sound, it tends to bore people. More importantly, monotone does not convey confidence because it gives the impression that the person speaking is not really vibrant and alive. You can convey persuasiveness by varying the highs and lows of your voice. Like good music, you want your voice to convey a combination of low and high notes. Kinesic / Proxemic Immediacy

Immediacy has to do with presence in front of another. Kinesic describes movement of the body. Proxemic describes how close we are physically to other people. So, kinesic immediacy relates to the movement of the body in the presence of another person. Proxemic immediacy concerns itself with how physically close we stand in the presence of another person. Kinesic immediacy cues include eye contact and gaze, and smiling and facial pleasantness. When we speak to people, we look at their face for cues. People's faces move as they speak, and they look at us. Eye contact is very important in our culture. Looking someone in the eye communicates trust and respect. In business situations, eye contact should be direct and open. An easy way to establish eye contact is to look at the person’s eyes and notice their eye color. Then look away for a moment. When you look back notice the color again. Establishing this kind of eye contact builds rapport quickly. Rapport helps build persuasiveness.

Your gaze is how you look at someone. Metaphorically speaking, our gaze is visual touch. When we look at someone, we touch them with our eyes. As we gaze at someone, we want to increase their confidence in us. Avoid looking at someone directly with a sharply focused and steady gaze. They will perceive themselves as a target and feel uncomfortable. Also avoid soft, unfocused eye contact, because you will appear dreamy and unfocused. In either case, your credibility and persuasiveness will suffer. Instead, aim for a gaze in the middle of the continuum. Your gaze should move around naturally. When you return to the person, make eye contact again. Smiling and facial pleasantness are other kinesic immediacy cues. When you look at someone, make sure to smile. Your smile lets the person know that you perceive the encounter as a pleasant one. Your smile communicates that you feel at ease with the person that you are trying to persuade. If you feel at ease, your client will also feel at ease and be more open to your communication. This does not mean that you should have a big fake smile on your face all the time. This fools no one and makes you come across as insincere. If you are dealing with a difficult situation and you don't have much to smile about, you may choose to find something in the conversation that is pleasant and smile about that. Remember that kinesic immediacy cues are based on the movement of the body. If you have no movement, you have no cue. So it's important to express yourself through your face. Proxemic immediacy cues include the orientation of your body to the other person, the distance between you, and how your body leans. When you're talking to someone in a business situation, you want to orient your torso directly at them. At the same time, you want to watch the orientation of their torso to you. One of the reasons for meeting someone is to see them face-to-face. In our culture, we perceive people who orient their torsos directly at us as interested in us. Angling our bodies, away from other people, conveys a lack of comfort with the other person or disinterest in the other person's message. The distance between people is also an indicator of how comfortable they are with you. In our culture, we generally start out with a good deal of space between us—four to 12 feet away from us, which we call social space. As we become more comfortable, we move closer together into personal space, which from two to 4 feet away from us. In a conversation, space creates a comfort zone around us. This comfort zone changes with the conversation. If you find the person moving closer to you, they like what they are hearing. If you say something that they don't like, you may see them pull back and add a bit more space. All of this sounds good if you’re standing, but many times in business were sitting across from each other at a desk or conference table. In this case, what we look for is body lean. When people like what they are hearing, they incline their bodies from the hips forward. If they don't like what they're hearing or they feel uncomfortable they will lean away. If you want to convey interest, sit toward the front of your chair without touching the back of your chair, and lean forward. If you are standing, you can also lean forward very easily by

shifting your weight to the balls of your feet. You may find as you do this that you become more alert and more interested in the other person. Vocalic Potency Cues

Vocalic potency cues are concerned with how we use our voice. Vocalic potency cues convey the emotions we feel. Vocalic potency cues include tempo variety; amplitude and loudness; tempo; and pitch (fundamental frequency). To be persuasive, we want to have a variety of tempos and our speech. Just like good music, every time we speak we want to have fast parts and slow parts. When we speak in only one speed, we run the risk of boring the listener and becoming less persuasive. Notice that when people get excited, they tend to speak more quickly. When people have to speak about something that is difficult to understand, they tend to speak more slowly and deliberately. You want to include slow, medium, and fast speech in all of your presentations. So vary your tempo to increase interest and persuasiveness. Amplitude and loudness go hand in hand to create another vocalic potency cue. Amplitude describes the intensity of a person’s voice. Loudness describes the volume of a person’s speech. Intensity and volume are not synonymous. Consider music for a moment, you can have a very intense piece of music playing at a very low volume on your iPod. It’s still intense; it’s just not very loud. Similarly you can play a very mild piece of music at a very high volume. It’s very loud, but it’s still mild. Amplitude and volume indicate interest. However, you want to vary them in your speech. Imagine being in a small room for an extended period of time with someone whose amplitude is very high. That intensity can be overwhelming! Similarly, we’ve all experienced listening to people who speak at a very low volume, they are difficult to understand and not very persuasive. Persuasive speakers vary their amplitude and volume. General tempo is the speed at which you speak. Some people tend to speak very quickly all the time, and give others the impression that they are overly excited and careless. Other people tend to speak slowly all the time. They give the impression of being plodding and not very bright. The issue with these two types of people is that they stick with only one tempo all the time. Varying the tempo, speaking slowly in some parts and then speeding up in others, increases the dynamism of your speech that people find interesting. It also increases your ability to persuade others. The fundamental frequency of your voice is also very important for vocalic potency. Voices can be either high pitched or low pitched. The important thing is that your pitch be easy to listen to and pleasant to hear. If your voice is high pitched you may want to give it a little more bass. This is what Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had to do when she entered politics. Her voice is naturally high pitched, so sometimes she sounded strident. She worked on her pitch by lowering the tone and speaking more slowly. If you compare news footage of her earlier in her career to later when she became prime minister, you can see and hear a remarkable difference. The high-pitched stridency had

been replaced with a measured gravity. Her level of persuasiveness was so improved that she was nicknamed the Iron Lady. Kinesic Dominance Cues

Kinesic dominance cues fall into two groups, facial expressiveness and illustrator gestures. Your facial expressiveness carries a lot of your meaning. We like to hear from people who use their faces to show us what they mean. Vibrant facial expression shows that you care about your topic and are interested in the other person. When you use your hands to illustrate your meaning, the movements you make are called illustrator gestures. Using facial expressiveness and illustrator gestures in your presentation helps you persuade by giving your audience other cues as to the meaning of your words. Kinesic Arousal Cues

Kinesic arousal cues are ways of showing discomfort and uneasiness. These include self- adaptors, body-adaptors, body tension, and random movements. When people are nervous or are facing an uncomfortable situation they use kinesic arousal cues to pacify themselves. For example, if you are uncomfortable you may begin to play with your hair, repeatedly touch your face, or grasp your hands. These are examples of body adaptors. You are using your body to adapt to your environment by pacifying ourselves. Object adaptors serve the same role but with an object instead of your body. Some examples of object adaptors in a business situation include pen clicking, pen spinning, or repeatedly moving objects on your desk. Body tension is another kinesic arousal cue. In an uncomfortable situation, your body reacts by going into its first stress-response mode—it freezes. You become stiff and tense. In this freeze mode, happens immediately before your impulse to flee or fight. Body tension telegraphs that a person is uncomfortable. So to be more persuasive you should be relaxed. If you find yourself tensing up during a presentation, release the tension by doing two things: first, breathe deeply to release the tension in your lungs and get oxygen in your brain. Sometimes we create this tension in ourselves by holding our breaths. Breathe deeply! Second, begin moving your body. This can be a subtle movement such as shifting your weight back and forth a few times if you’re standing or shifting your shoulders a few times if you’re sitting. If you do this and keep breathing you’ll feel the tension slowly release. Random movements are also a kinesic arousal cue. Some examples include constant swaying or fidgeting. Random movements also telegraph a lack of confidence (nervousness) that is not conducive to persuasion. If you find yourself fidgeting or swaying, you can reduce these by doing two things: First, breathe deeply to reduce the tension in your lungs and oxygenate your brain. You may be creating your own tension by holding your breath. Second, push down into your feet so your weight is evenly distributed from your heels through the balls of your feet to your toes. You can do this if you’re sitting or standing. If you’re sitting, push your behind into the seat, so you can feel the seat

supporting you. If you do this a few times and keep breathing, the random movements should subside. Improving the Persuasiveness of Your Nonverbal Communication

The information you have just read gives you many tools to help you improve you’re the persuasiveness of your body language. However, starting out can be daunting. Doing all of them at the same time would be impossible. Some of you may be wondering: where do you start? Here’s an easy way to get started boosting the persuasiveness of your nonverbal communication. Follow these three steps:

1. Increase immediacy with eye contact, gaze, and a smile. 2. Develop fluency in your speech with greater variety in pitch (high and low tones). 3. Avoid all body adaptors and object adaptors.

Take a week to practice the first step with everyone you meet. Make sure that it becomes second nature to you to make eye contact, use your gaze and smile, when you talk to people. When you are comfortable doing this, keep doing it but add step number two. Develop that speech fluency without the “ums” and “ahs.” Vary the pitch of your voice. Keep doing steps one and two together until you are doing these without thinking about it. Then add step three—removing all of the body adaptors and object adaptors—the same way you added steps one and two. Before you know it you’ll be quite comfortable and persuasive. Practice however is not enough. The key to mastery or nonverbal communication is self- observation. You must be aware of what you are doing with your body. Some people will work with a coach, but this can be expensive. An inexpensive way to do this is to practice in front of a mirror or better yet, have someone video record you. A video recording is invaluable to uncovering exactly what you are saying with your body. If you video record yourself, you will be surprised at how much information you are communicating with your body. You will also quickly see what that looks like and be able to integrate it with the feeling inside your body.

Burgoon, J. K., Birk, T., & Pfau, M. (1990). Nonverbal Behaviors, Persuasion, and Credibility. Human Communication Research, 17(1), 140-169.