By David Willis

A number of years ago there was an advert on television promoting a credit card that suggested that using that particular card said more about you than you ever could because 93% of communication is non-verbal, or not what you say but how you say it. The advert was misquoting a piece of research from the 1960’s by Dr Albert Mehrabian. Indeed it is a piece of research often misquoted, misunderstood and misused particularly by training and development organisations like us! The original research was not into the importance of body language in every aspect communication, it was actually exploring the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages when expressing feelings and attitudes (i.e. like and dislike) The original equation was Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, this equation is not relevant. It is however relevant to say that how we feel about what someone is saying and whether we like or dislike them is dependent not just on what they are saying but also the tonality of how they say it and the non-verbal things they do or don’t do at the same time. This in itself is hugely important to the impact we make when talking to groups and how we influence individuals.  As with the TV advert the research is often oversimplified, It is absolutely not saying that the words don’t matter because they are only 7% so nobody will remember anything you say anyway… I can think of lots of audiences that I have stood up in front of who are absolute sticklers for attention to detail and you better know what you are talking about or else… It is a real shame that these statistics are so often abused because they are in fact really powerful and do hold a very important lesson. The danger is that it becomes ignored and discredited because really when we think about it, it simply does not hold to say that only 7% of communication is the words. If that is true why do I walk out of meetings and run through in my head replaying who said what to whom? Shouldn’t I really be thinking about the open stance someone adopted as I entered the room? Or what an influential choice of shirt that was?

 Dr Mehrabian’s research is important because it points to how important feelings are in communication and at the end of the day you can not fool an audience you are talking to, everything has to be authentic and the words, tonality and body language have to match and support each other. If you ignore the words because they do not matter you will come across as false because it will be seen in your body language and heard in your tonality.