Words To Describe Body Language

Non-verbal communication. Body language. Etcetera.

If you are like me, you have heard things about how important it is, how non-verbals matter more than verbals in conversations, how the majority of our communication meaning is due to the things we do rather than say, stuff like that.

OK, so what are we to do with that information, exactly?

I remember when I first heard a statistic about how 67 or 55 or 84 percent of our communication comes from body language (the stat fluctuates depending on the messenger—source cite much?) Exploring it opened my world.

Wondering if it were true I felt paralyzed, because unlike verbal communication, body language is something I was never taught. Yes, I enjoyed language of the wordish variety, but I wanted deeper understanding and mastery of the whole genre of presenting.

My life-long trek to learn how to be a better communicator began in elementary school when I wrote myself a part in some school play. By the time I graduated high school, top grades in a speech or acting class meant more to me than anything else in school. I was in all the plays I could manage and gave a shot or two at standup comedy. (By the way, if you think you are funny, try standup comedy. It makes you think you are not.)

So here are three easy non-verbal tips to try in your next presentation or speech.

1. Don't just do something, stand there. Nothing is more frustrating for an audience than watching a fake, so stop thinking and planning about what to do with your hands and just let them chill out. When you are in the moment and connecting with your messages, your body follows naturally.
2. Stand tall. Give yourself a couple little stretches for your shoulders and back before you step up front so you are reminded to stand tall. A slouching speaker is demoralizing.
3. Walkie-talkies are for Rosco P. Coltrane. When you have a key message to deliver, stand still and deliver it. Walking while talking only works when it is purposeful (ex. moving to a new spot to begin a new idea, or moving to demonstrate an action in a story). When you have a powerful point, stand in one place and deliver the line.

Body language and non-verbals are not the core of our message (see Albert Mehrabian and the myth of the 55/38/7 rule) but they do accentuate or weaken our impact. 

Move Your Body

I remember an observational game we played in an undergrad acting class back when I was at the University of Minnesota. I can still picture that class very clearly.

The teacher, Nancy Houfek (my first real interaction with an incredibly talented and dedicated acting teacher), asked the class one at a time to stand up and walk around the room. The room was a cool, modern theater-in-the-round setup, with darkly lit audience seats fully surrounding the stage, going up about fifteen rows. I remember how well-lit the stage area was, like a little bastion of security /insecurity. Whenever you were out on it by yourself, if you felt any self-consciousness, you just felt totally exposed as classmates looked in and down on you from every angle.

So in this activity - this walking thing - one at a time, we were told to just walk completely normally, don't ham or strut or anything, just do your natural walk. Nancy would let each of us keep walking in silence for maybe a minute while everyone else in the class watched. It felt like a long time to just walk around, across the stage, up and down different stair cases, not really having anything to do except walk. The internal chatter started up immediately. Am I moving my arms normally? What do I look like from the back? Do I have a silly walk?

Then, after a minute of silent walking and everyone watching you, after you started to hopefully walk naturally and not how you wished you walked, she began to ask the class questions. "What are you seeing? Is he Fast or Slow? Is he Light or Heavy? Is he Direct or Indirect?" Those same questions were repeated for each individual. The class would discuss and state opinions about the walker's rate, semblance of (not physical) weight, and directional style, all while the one in the spotlight continued to walk about for a few more minutes. After a total of perhaps four minutes, the walker could sit down and the next person would stand and the process would begin again.

The learning was awesome. I learned not just about my own movement but also about how other's movement impacted me. The questions she asked during the walks were a simplified slice of Laban Movement Analysis, specifically the Action Drives people employ when they move. It remains my most useful movement awareness tool for large group communication. I use it when jumping into a character for a second in a story I am telling, to consider how to best make an impact for a certain bit I want to say in a speech, to assess staff I train on how their movement impacts student engagement, or to consider how I am physically presenting myself when I walk through a room full of Bolivian dignitaries. Slow/Fast, Light/Heavy, Direct/Indirect. The point is that all of the categories occur in how we move all the time, whether it is by choice or reaction: when we walk, when we gesture, and in our posture.

Changing any one aspect of our movement changes the emotion conveyed, the intention conveyed, and even perceptions others have about our personality. For example, we all have our own natural movement tendencies (I typically move slowly, heavily, and indirectly. Laban labels this a "wring" movement style.) We also have choices to purposefully change our movement to create a new combination, changing how we are perceived.

Do you need to make a detailed, important point in a speech? When you speak it, move slowly to let the detail 'breathe', use a heavy weight for credibility, and be direct in gesture to give a purposefulness that correlates with the intention of your communication. Want to appear uninterruptable and busy? Move fast, heavy, and direct. Want to convey upbeat and energetic because you need to loosen up a group? Move fast, light, and indirect to convey casualness. It's all about matching the strategy to the situation, and in this case the strategy is your body.

Laban Movement is like a blueprint for the body-in-action that provides us with more choice in our communication. It is not something to build a fake mask about ourselves, but rather to open up choices when we are looking to be more dynamic or generate a certain result with others. So much is communicated through our body language - we hear these stats - but Laban gives us a reference for making meaningful choices to do something about it. I highly recommend it for anyone invested in public communication.

Finding Our Way

Writer Peter J. Boyer from the New Yorker:

Kieth Olbermann’s success, like Bill O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” Phil Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”

"Viewer cocooning" refers to homophily, a psychological concept I am interested in. I don't know if he created the nickname, but I like it.

Consider how homophily both combats and complements learning. Finding something we like can lead us to learn about other things we like. On the other hand (I have five fingers), what are the ideas and who are the people we shut out in order to create a life experience that better matches our current world view, our present understanding? The latter reminds me of a life run on auto pilot.

Speaking With Eyes

I was a theater major in college. I quickly learned that there is a stigma that accompanies this.

The biggest misconception about acting and its training is that it is about learning how to lie—that the craft is all about deception. I understand where this misconception comes from, but I have found that acting, at its heart, is about the opposite.

Realistic acting training is about heightening your awareness of self and others and learning how to express your most truthful and honest self. It is about freeing up your choices in language and movement so you can more effectively communicate anywhere along the continuum of controlled to emotive.

Basically, acting training cranks your communication ability up. It helps you to see and hear more things people do, including yourself, so that you both have more choices and can react to more input.

As an educator, this is my major appreciation for the craft and study of acting. It is not so much about acting as about performance, specifically, increasing communication performance.

The great actors are great because they can communicate so well. One thing they have is the awareness to make choices that the rest of us do not know exist. Actor Michael Caine digs into the art of communicating by focusing on two things we can do with our eyes.

To summarize a couple tips:

1. When communicating, blinking weakens you. "Increased blink frequency reflects negative mood states such as nervousness and stress." (John L. Andreassi) To avoid pinning your eyes open with clothes pins, train yourself to maintain open eyes in key moments. (I know a wonderful communication trainer, Michael Grinder, who has trained himself to keep his eyes open for more than 30 minutes at a time.) You can see the difference if you look in a mirror and speak without blinking for 20 seconds, versus the standard a half dozen blinks.
2. Only look in one eye—don't switch eyes as you make the eye contact with people. (For a large group, this could translate to make eye contact with individuals in the group for several seconds a piece as you speak, versus darting your eyes around the whole group every second or less). Maintaining steady eye contact in one spot conveys confidence to the entire group.

How valuable could it be if more education training was about communication training, and that it took cues from master communicators in all avenues?

Talent Assessment

I just spent a couple recent Saturdays with about 40 education trainer hopefuls. Witnessing talent in motion is a beautiful thing.

I've been doing these tryouts for a decade now, and there are three basic groupings of people who attend them: (1) people who are naturally talented group communicators; (2) people who have the desire but not acceptable talent; (3) people somewhere in the middle - either not as talented and/or lacking some sort of desire to really throw themselves into the requirements of being a group communicator.

These three groupings are general, and could be broken down more regarding skills, knowledge, rate of learning, creativity, humor and all kinds of areas, but it seems that there are always about 1 in 3 applicants who are naturally gifted for facilitation and presentation work. The big question that continues to arise is How do you know?

How do you know when someone is a great facilitator? What makes them great? How much is subjective and style preference? Is success quantifiable? Testable? Why do some people see a non-talented group communicator and think he is good, while others vehemently disagree?

Motivated To Excel

I just saw the movie Breach last night. It is about Robert Hanssen, the real life story of the most destructive spy against the US government who has ever lived. Chris Cooper played Hanssen. Although I have seen little of him, I always enjoyed Chris Cooper's acting. But after Breach, he is without question one of my favorite actors.

The movie was good, but what really got me hooked was watching a couple short DVD documentaries in the extras. Considering how much Hollywood fluff is out there (models > actors, bodies > minds), Cooper's devotion to his craft is inspiring.

This is what Cooper did to get ready for his role:

1. Watched the only ten-second film clip of Hanssen available to him an ungodly amount of times
2. Incessantly interviewed the real life FBI operative who knew Hanssen best
3. Read "seven or eight" books on Hanssen
4. Spent two weeks prior to the film rehearsing with his primary actor partner in the film

In my work with facilitators, presenters, and teachers, I would estimate about 15% of the people I know are as committed to their work as Cooper (he is an Oscar winner, after all). I wish I could say I knew a lot of people with these habits, but when it comes down to it, massive devotion to one's work is unique. Other things take precedence: family needs, health concerns, TV - many things both important and ridiculous.

I am on the hunt.

Judge Me

One topic that frequently arises amongst my colleagues and me is how to evaluate facilitator / public speaker talent.

I came across an article in Scientific American from a couple years ago that was about how we judge people - specifically, how we can more accurately judge them based on 'blink'-like observations. Although much of the article is based on a person's environmental choices (like how they keep their house), the study provides some fascinating pieces of information.

One point is that a person's appearance has little to no validity on intellectual abilities, but we all have mental models (filters with which we see the world) that change how we judge others based on their appearance. To truly get an accurate intellectual picture of a person, Peter Borkenau's studies show that we need to listen to someone read out loud for only three minutes to construct a rather accurate image of his or her mental capacities. (I assume this means standard academic intelligence areas such as linguistic and verbal capacities.)

I wonder how other successful companies who hire presenter and facilitator talent hire.

Master Of Her Domain

Jenny Severson is talented.

She has a genuine, intelligent quality about her that I have seen since we first met, working together at a SuperCamp program in Illinois back in 1994. Since then, she has developed into a sought after educational presenter and consultant.

Last week I had the chance to hear her present information on group and personal motivation, which was a treat-and-a-half because she is so well read and does her homework (versus typical motivational speaker syndrome).

Key points I took away both during and after thinking about her presentation:

1. Motivation is increased by surrounding oneself with people who give us an emotional jolt
2. Some people have an incorrect mentality of: 'The beatings will stop when the morale improves', that decreases motivation
   
3. Principles: level one is to know them; level two is to do them, level three is to be them
4. It can be good to feel regret over decisions made - this can motivate us to want to improve

I also took away some observations on great presenting, like the value of having a repertoire of stories and the ability to tell them in varying lengths of available time. When a person deeply understands Beginnings, Middles, and Ends of communication, they better know how to engage and end conversation markers on emotional upswings, for example. They can also generate and quickly 'grab' examples from their mind that relate and support the conversation at hand.

Also, Jenny treats her time with the audience as time within a bigger picture, not time about her. She related her dialogue and points to points made earlier by other speakers and audience members - not toss off relations, but meaningful, thoughtful ones. This is an advanced move, as beginners are naturally too focused on themselves to go outside their own head much.

When I listen to and watch a truly masterful public communicator, it focuses my thoughts, letting me think and dwell on a topic in a more organized fashion, going along for a ride with someone who brings freshness and life to it.

Thanks, Jenny.

Workaholic

I believe courageous people know how to set boundaries with their work. Their self-esteem is not so wrapped up in the number of hours they work or their job title, but rather in their balance of family, friends, personal endeavors (physical, artistic, or intellectual activities that fill up one's soul), and work. This has recently become more clear to me as I navigated some changes in my career.

Consciously leaving the office after nine hours most days is hard, because I get engaged in what I am doing. Work is a fun, complex game, and I love games. But I need to remember to spend time away. Even though I love it, the intensity has burnt me out when I don't stay aware of myself and others in my life, regulating my time and energy.

Youth Is Wasted On The Young

I recently heard that quote. I had a reaction to it. It rings as a frightening idea, stopping me for a moment from thinking about what I am gaining as I get older and causing me to consider what I am losing. There is a sense of sadness in the quote. Like that line from the movie Straight Story, when the old man says, "I guess the worst part about being old is remembering when you were young."

I am pretty sure that is the scariest part for me - accepting mortality. I am working toward things that are so meaningful to me, such great fun, making things better in my life and work, and I know I will lose it all.

I feel a need for frantic pacing. And I feel impatient when people don't have that same fire to get things going.

And I am inspired by people who have the fire. I just saw former astronaut Jim Lovell in an interview. He said people who have "the right stuff" are people who love to work by objectives and not just a 9 to 5 job. Basically, you really have to love what you do so much that it is not so painful to spend huge chunks of time working. The word "work" has different emotions attached to it for different people.

The Infinite Ascent

My love for my work toys with me. I usually wake up a couple times a week in the middle of the night with some incredible idea about group leadership or communication, scribble it down on the pad of paper by my bed, then read it the next morning only to realize that my midnight assessment of incredible is way off.

But this is not about that. This is about one concept for facilitators and speakers that has stayed true with me over the past couple years. It's called The Infinite Ascent.

Basically, this is a model used to gauge a facilitator's primary success characteristics.  The climb starts from the bottom, and it never ends (as shown by those lumpy clouds).

1. Am I willing to change? Specifically, am I willing to change my mental code of beliefs about what facilitation communication choices are best. It takes a lot of dismantling and rewiring to assemble a Primo Facilitator. If someone is not open to learning from experts or being coached by those who have more understanding and ability, then the person will not improve much.

2. How do people react to my communication (friends andstrangers)? Do people like to be around me? How much do I attract them? How often do I warm them up in conversation versus needing to be warmed up by them? How much do I get them smiling or laughing? At what rate do others get comfortable with me? What degree of positive impact do I make with people?

Resonance is the complex and layered ability of one's effectiveness to be with people - a constantly fluctuating dynamic based on who the people are and how they are feeling at the moment.

Unfortunately, I have seen group leaders have an angry emotional outburst in front of a group, get coaching on it, then dismiss the coaching because they don't understand the relevance managing one's own emotions has to being a group leader. Fortunately, resonance can be improved by learning from those who are better with it ("it" being charm, sense of humor or fun, quickness to engage, putting people at ease - basically any trait that 'works' with others), then trying what you observed for yourself.

A lot of people cry, "But I just need to be myself!" OK, but what if "yourself" is not effective? Chances are "yourself" is not an expert harpist, either. But just like learning to think and move one's body in new ways to play an instrument, learning to resonate with people in better ways is learned to the degree that one is willing to work for it (see #1).

3. Skill. Like a summit push, this is the most dangerous part of the climb. The biggest problem I see as people (rookies and veterans alike) learn about group communication is that they want to focus on 'skills' way too early and often, unconsciously ignoring the stability providing foundations of the climb - Willingness and Resonance. The funny thing about focusing on 'how my hands move', intricate linguistics ("you said 'like' seventeen times in four minutes"), where to stand, etc., is that the more you do it when you don't have a solid foundation, the worse you end up because there is not enough solid substance supporting the delicate intricacy.

Yes, facilitation skills are important. In fact, they are vital to understand in order to be a master communicator (here are some great ones, and here are some more by a great teacher). Yet they are trivial compared to one's willingness to learn and one's resonance with people. Focusing on skills without having deep willingness and wide resonance is like taking a helicopter to the summit of Everest and saying you climbed it. Um...no. You still have no idea what it takes to make the climb. Anyone can talk about hand movements and bean-count the number of times a person says "you know".  But to be great, you have to make the entire climb, and that means sweat, strain, and pain.

One final point - remember the "infinite" part of the ascent. Just because you are really good and lots of people say so does not mean that you get to start using that helicopter. Exploring and improving upon one's willingness and resonance continues for the entire climb. And making strides gets harder as the altitude gets thinner.

Kick Them When They're Up

Bo Schembechler, head coach at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1989, has a label on leading teams that I love. He calls it Kick them when they're up. It is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, when a team is performing well, find the little things to improve versus kicking back and being self-congratulatory.

It's kaizen, those constant and never-ending improvements. It reminds me of the concept of Playing To Win versus Playing Not To Lose. That and Don Henley's song, Dirty Laundry.

An Infinite Activity

I was thinking about decision making today. Not so much making the decision as the process of considering what decision to make.

It struck me that when we think in the most basic, limited way, we think in yes/no, right/left, up/down options - options in front of us that everyone can see. But when we think more openly we break the frame, venture outside the borders and consider far more unique options. For example, I could choose the obvious - drive either left or right - or I could stop the car, get out, and go get a Slurpee.

In these moments we are able to change the game. Outcomes enter flux and results may get us closer to a whole new ending than the one we originally intended. Or maybe not. As long as it is respectful to other people involved, great.

Regardless, I appreciate people who fall on the side of innovative, who seek more than the options readily available to them and inspire others to see more. It creates a new world to live in that is unexpected and infinite.