What do you think of when you hear the term “non-verbal communication?”
The first things that usually come to mind are body language, facial expressions, posture, and the like. But the reality is that it’s not that simple. Communication is a complex and inclusive process, and goes far beyond a smile or frown, crossed arms and slumped shoulders.
Today’s episode is all about the true science behind non-verbal communication and why it matters in our daily lives. Specifically, I’ll go over:
- How the research surrounding non-verbal communication has advanced (8:45)
- The 5 categories of non-verbal communication and how to evaluate them (11:25)
- Specific examples of how to apply this information in your daily life (25:30)
- The #1 most important question you should be asking yourself (33:15)
Referenced Resources:
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- The Apprenticeship – Our next Apprenticeship Communication workshop is being held in beautiful Sydney, AUS, and it’s coming up FAST! On February 25-26, we are partnering up with Athlete’s Authority to help those who are ready to identify and address their blindspots, to find out where they might be the problem in any given miscommunication. Find our entire 2023 Apprenticeship schedule HERE, and sign up today to learn the latest in power dyanamics and persuasion, and how to become more socially agile.
- The Art of Coaching Digital Community
- Our Newsletter
- E207: How Perception Impacts Communication and Relationships
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TRANSCRIPTION
Brett Bartholomew 0:11
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Welcome to the Art of coaching Podcast. I’m Brett Bartholomew, and at a young age, poor communication nearly cost me my life. Now, I help others navigate the gray area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can become more adaptable leaders, regardless of their profession, age or situation. This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems. So if you’re the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership, you’re in the right place. I’m glad that you’re joining us. Let’s dive in.
Welcome back to another episode of the podcast today. I’m excited to be talking about something that, at first glance, doesn’t seem very sexy, but if you’ve been in a leadership position, or you’ve been a coach for a while, you know how critically important nonverbal communication is. Now I want to begin this by saying this is not going to be one of those episodes that just tries to tell you 95% of your communication is nonverbal. We’re also not going to get into some of the stuff that you’ve heard popularize in the past that you know this FBI agent says that, and a CIA director says this.
We’re going to get into the true science of nonverbal communication and why it matters now, hopefully this bridges off into some other episodes. So we’re going to hit some things with a glancing blow here. Other things, we’re going to go a little bit more in depth. So if there’s stuff that you want us to go deeper into the weeds on, make sure that you let us know. You can always reach out by going to artofcoaching.com/questions
Yeah, okay, now let’s lay out the stakes here. If coaches or leaders do not take the time to learn more about nonverbal communication, some of the risks are obvious. You’re gonna miss out on valuable information, and not only that, making really critical communication mistakes that can negatively impact your relationships, your credibility and your overall effectiveness, especially as we continue to merge into this cross cultural landscape that we’re all navigating. One just from a misunderstanding standpoint, if you don’t understand nonverbal cues, you’re going to misinterpret messages that are conveyed by others and respond in a way that probably isn’t appropriate or effective or just socially agile
And that’s going to set you back another big aspect of this, if you don’t take the time to learn, it is just a lack of trust. If you consistently communicate in ways that are inconsistent or that don’t align with the words or actions or values or beliefs of others, you’re going to erode that trust, and you’re going to erode your credibility as well. For example, if you say one thing but your body language conveys the opposite. Well, amongst friends, that may not be a big deal. They’re going to give you a little bit more grace. But if you’re interacting with a certain crowd, if you’re presenting to a new audience, or if you’re in another country, that can have pretty dire consequences.
When we say missed opportunities, right? This just goes into if you’re not aware of certain nonverbal cues. This is another chance where you could have built rapport. Somebody might think that you didn’t show a lot of empathy and you didn’t make an effort to meet them where they were at so that’s huge as well. I think, you know that can seem silly to talk about the stakes, but when we talk about communication, it’s already, you know, there’s so much work that needs to be done to remind people it’s not as simple as they think it’s worth revisiting these things
Now, another piece of this, when we talk about how nonverbal communication can have a significant impact on cross cultural communication and team building. Well, you already know, and it was mentioned briefly earlier, we know that many different terms that we use code, like what we refer to as code, how different cultures interpret, whether it’s body language, whether it’s just changes in tone, anything like that, those have dire consequences as well. And I think about this recently because we got brought in by an organization to work on some cross cultural misunderstandings. And some of these things break down to on the verbal side, something as simple as in certain cultures, self disclosure is more welcome a larger extent of it.
In other cultures, you’re not supposed to disclose as much. But how does that change in terms of eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, any of these other pieces? And while a full breakdown of country by country or region by region and how those things vary is beyond the scope of this podcast. It’s just really important to remember. Now, let’s get some just history out of the way first. And I want to thank Owen Hargie and many other colleagues for providing some of this research. It’s tremendously valuable. And this is stuff that I think that you know, just people don’t think of a lot. And then we’re going to break down different categories so you can better understand, you know, what is involved in non verbals.
And when you understand that, you’re able to evaluate it better. You’re able to make better use of feedback, if you’re working with your team, and you’re really able to consolidate some of this information in a meaningful way. So when we talk about the act of communicating in general, that usually conjures up images of what people say, they text, they email to each other, that’s fine, that’s that’s a lot of the delivery of messages, but communication is such an inclusive process, and a large majority of interaction time is not taken up by speech, but through that nonverbal communication, then, as such, relating interpersonally, that demands the ability for us to be able to display those nonverbal signals, right?
And when you look at the history of this fascination with the nonverbal aspects of social intercourse and interaction, can be traced back to Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in the West, and Confucius in the east. Now this comes from a 2006 article from Gordon Atel, and he continues to just go into the fact that in classical and medieval times, certain forms of specific gestures were identified because they rhetoric was such a critical skill. Then you have to remember for much of human history, the ability to be an effective orator, oftentimes could make the difference between life and death.
Massive changes in the Senate. It’s funny. You know, today, so many people look at the ability to communicate as a soft skill, and then it was a way of life, and this is how things get done. And in reality, it still is. But something that I thought was really interesting is when, Owen Hargie, who’s a lead researcher in this area, he had stated, you know, the concerted attention by social scientists to anything non verbal, believe it or not, was pretty recent, even though we knew the importance of it back then.
And he states that a lot of that research was done in the 1960s but there was a period where non verbal communication was really looked at as inconsequential, and they weren’t really interested in it from an academic standpoint. And this was really, you know, in 1954 gentleman, Aldous Huxley, he described nonverbal education as a subject which, and I quote, was for academic and ecclesiastical purposes. It was essentially non existent and could be safely ignored altogether. And he goes on and on and on. But then you look at Charles Darwin and in the expression of emotion in man and animals, this was written in 1872
And then there were some edits and changes made to it in 1955 it was after people really analyzed some of his work that they really started to pay more serious social scientific recognition and attention to these things. But development since that time in the social sciences has been immense. Hargie goes on to state that the growth of interest in non verbal communication, has led to tremendous empirical advances in the subject, and now they say, is one of the most popular forms of communication.
Okay, great, right? Like, so, what is it? How can we break it down? How can we evaluate it? We know that it’s important. We understand that cross culturally, this is huge in terms of trustworthiness, you being able to just be efficient and respectful. But how do we really score it? Well, if you come to our Apprenticeship workshop, we look at nonverbal communication across five Main Categories, okay, haptics, that is the use of touch. So if you shake somebody’s hand, right, you’ve utilized haptics if you’re trying to console somebody who is upset, and you hug them, or you put your arm around them, that is the use of haptics.
There is then kinesics. Kinesics is what we typically think of as nonverbal communication. So this could be everything from your eye movement, did you shrug your shoulders, a certain facial expression, or micro expression, and we’re going to do an episode down the road about micro expressions and facial recognition technology and where that is So that’s huge, and I’ll break these down individually in a moment. Proxemics, that’s how we use and navigate space. This is much more familiar to us now that covid has happened, we knew that we had to keep some semblance of social distancing.
However, let’s say you’re speaking in front of a room. How do you use the whole room? Are you just standing on one side? Are you making sure to give everybody in the room a little bit of individualized attention? Are you pacing adequately when I coach athletes for a living? If we were in a 10,000 square foot room, you know I needed to make sure that I spaced myself so I could see everybody in the weight room, but also so that I could navigate it so everybody felt like they had that individual attention. So that was a big piece.
Two more esthetics, yes, how you weigh how the clothes you wear and how you wear them, are nonverbal communication. I mean, listen, you can’t even look at gangs, right? Crips and Bloods. There are certain colors, and those colors that they wear signify their loyalties. And there are so many other examples of that. We know that if you went into a business, and I know this has changed somewhat due to covid as well, and people have gotten a lot more casual.
But growing up, you know, my dad was a financial advisor, there was a certain dress standard of dress that was required. There you saw people in suits or more formal attire. We know that if you go into a restaurant that has a dress code and you’re not meeting those esthetics, then you know that signifies something, either you weren’t prepared, you don’t care, or you’re not being very professional. But esthetics can also be adornments, that can also be decor in your house, you know, it’s not just what you wear, it’s how you decorate things.
So you go into somebody’s house, how they decorate shows you a good amount of like, what they value. You go visit somebody in Japan, you know, and you might see that they’re going to decorate their home a little bit differently than if you went to, you know, a family in rural Iowa and and so all these things are going to everything around you communicates values. And this is really the trick to understanding communication in general. If you just think about it in terms of people, as opposed to all the other things that people do to signify their values, you’re missing out on a great deal.
You know, you even look at somebody’s tattoos. You look at anything like that, the type of shoes they wear. People cannot help but communicate, everything they wear, everything they do, how they decorate, everything is saying something. If you were here right now, as I recorded anything you see on my bookshelf around me or in my office, that is a part of that as well. And then biometrics, yeah, how you look can be a form of non verbal communication, physical characteristics.
As a strength and conditioning coach, I was expected to look a certain way. Look the part. You know, in certain other jobs, that’s not that big of a concern. And nobody really cares what you look like in other jobs. And again, there’s many jobs. So let’s say I’m just in a dark room coding all day, all right. Well, I mean, aside from somebody being worried about my physical appearance, they’re not really worried. I’m not being judged on, am I a good coder or not? On if I’m 400 pounds, however, if I’m trying to talk to a group of athletes about how to get in shape, and it looks like I couldn’t walk around the block without getting winded, whether I like it or not, you’re judged on that.
You were you’re judged on that. And I was judged on this as a strength coach who even was in shape. A lot of my early mentors, they came from kind of a powerlifting background. Well, I don’t look like a powerlifter. I didn’t have a shaved head, anything like that. So I always judge and put in a bucket from that. And we know this in different cultures, different body sizes and body types are celebrated. So this doesn’t take, you know, this doesn’t take much imagination here.
Polynesian culture is going to think a certain type of body type is more or less beautiful than somebody in Western culture, whether your skin is tan or not means something in one culture, and it could mean something in another culture. So this, all of this, is huge. Now, when I say we evaluate these things, these are contextual. Let’s say I’m interviewing somebody over a zoom, or I’m interviewing somebody in general, all right, I can give them a score, and this is per our evaluation, which is beyond the scope of this episode on did they meet the esthetic characteristics? Did they dress professionally or not?
If I’m going to present it to a certain school or an organization or whatever, you know, my esthetics are going to be graded. Now, there’s some times where these things don’t really matter that much. Let’s look at haptics. If I’m presenting and I want to shake the hand of the host, that’s fine, but I’m certainly not going to be graded on if I touched or shook the hand of everybody in the audience. So what I want you to think about is if you were evaluating these things and using them for feedback, first, contextualize it. Okay. If I watch an athlete coach or a coach work with a group of athletes. I am going to score haptics, because there’s going to be physical cues and touch required to get that person in the right position.
Last call for our Sydney Australia Apprenticeship. Now if you can’t make Sydney on February 25 and 26th you can see other dates at artofcoaching.com/events, but this is the only time I, or anybody on my team, are going to be in Sydney, Australia, or Australia in general, in the near future. Now we have a wide range of events, but just so we’re clear, our Apprenticeship is not some rah rah workshop. Communication is a subject and is a skill that is always evolving. And everybody, no matter what field you’re in, is going to have to deal with power dynamics.
So I want to make something very clear. We these workshops are for people in any profession. It does not matter what field you’re in. We’ve had folks from more than 30 different professions, and that’s part of the benefit. You’re going to get hands on role playing. You’re going to learn how to be more socially agile, which means that you’re going to be better able to show up for people in a wide range of relationships. There are so many of us that have blind spots, both personally and professionally, this is a place where nobody’s going to call you out, nobody’s going to play gotcha, we’re all working together to teach you the latest in persuasion, power dynamics and communication.
We do in services for staffs. We worked with companies in the technology space, the medical field, in finance and in fitness. But the main thing is you have to be somebody that truly believes communication can always be improved. You have to be somebody who’s willing to be vulnerable. You have to be willing to be somebody that knows that critical thinking and creative problem solving is especially important for any field of life, any field or any walk of life.
So if you want to grow and you want to challenge yourself personally and professionally, make sure you get to our apprenticeship. Go to artofcoaching.com/events to check out upcoming dates and locations near you.
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If I watch an athlete coach or a coach who work with a group of athletes, I am going to score haptics, because there’s going to be physical cues and touch required to get that person in the right position. I am going to study kinesics. I’m going to say, hey, when that athlete challenged you on that, did you give them a look like you know, you were angry that they challenged you, that you were frustrated that they asked you a question, right?
Or were you able to kind of raise your eyes, open your eyes a little wider, make sure that you give a nonverbal signifier that you’re actually interested, you’re compassionate. There are so many different ways you can do this, and it becomes a little bit of a tricky thing to turn off once you realize it. Now, my colleague, Ali, is going to be teaching a workshop here soon. If I was watching her through a glass window and she said, Hey, give me some feedback. I would look at proxemics. Ali, did you interact? Did you move throughout the crowd? Did you keep a reasonable distance?
Did your kinesics come off as defensive or argumentative, or did you look kind and open, right? Your esthetics, where you dress professionally, you get it right. But the point is you want to evaluate these things. You want to work them into your day to day life. So if you do want a little bit of insight into our evaluation, we do it on a Likert scale, right? So we look at, you know, zero to three. And of course, there can be non applicable.
So three is that was very contextually appropriate. For example, if we were role playing at one of our workshops, and somebody says, Man, I really get frozen up if somebody gets in my face, if they get in my face and start arguing with me, I freeze Okay, well, I might assign you, let’s say one of you as listeners, you’re at our workshop, I’m going to say, hey, I need you to play that role of the aggressor. Okay, I need you to get into this person’s face. We try to make our role playing harder than real life. We want to give people those reps. So really be aggressive. Shorten the space between you.
So let’s say I see that role playing scene. Go forward, and you don’t really get in their face, right? You keep this distance. You’re like, I don’t know That’s awkward. I don’t really know them well. In accordance with that context and that role, I would give you a one you didn’t meet what we wanted you to do, from a proxemic standpoint, we wanted you to close that space. So let’s say you did it again, and you just got right in their face. I mean, it’s just inches between you.
Well, in accordance, once again, of you trying to be the aggressor, that would be a three. So I’m trying to score you on was it contextually appropriate? I’ll give you another example. If one of you was on this show with me right now, and a video came out, and let’s say I was talking, and you know, you were trying to come off as very interested. And we look at things that convey interest. Are you nodding your head? You know, what are you doing is are you giving good eye contact as much as you can, over zoom, anything like that.
Well, head nodding that eye contact, that’s all kinesics. So if you’re not doing that, and let’s say you’re looking at your phone and you’re not really paying attention, and you’re not engaged in the conversation or the dialog, well you’d get a zero. You’d get a zero for kinesics, in terms of somebody that was trying to be interested or even interesting. On the other hand, if you were engaged and you were giving those nonverbal signifiers. Great, then that’s going to be a three for kinesics. Now you might say, well, there’s a lot of subjectivity here. You’re right, okay. The reality is is everything in life is subjective.
And we talk about this at our workshops as well. Every single thing in life is subjective. There are certain people that are going to go to an absolutely horrendous restaurant, and think it is amazing because they met their significant other there, or their father took them there. And then there are some people that are going to go to a, you know, farm to table restaurant with an amazing chef, and the food’s not going to be for them. But in life, you are inherently held to that subjective standard.
What matters is, you know, you could take somebody that’s the most perfect order around not everybody is going to think they’re a skilled communicator, just like you could take somebody that’s the most knowledgeable a subject matter expert in a certain field, certain people aren’t going to be impressed. So you know, this ties hand in hand with our episode on perception. If you are somebody that thinks true objectivity exists? Well, you’re in for a rude awakening. You know, if you’re standing in front of a crowd of 400 people, no matter what, there’s no way to measure true objectivity on did you knock it out of the park with all of them?
Because they all have their own perceptions, their own biases, but there are things that you can do to be contextually attuned to the moment. Right? You can’t please everybody, but there are standards of professionalism, there are cultural norms. There is a bandwidth you need to interact with, right? That’s just a fact. There was a big article the other day about an actor, a prominent actor, and he had to get his tattoos removed. Yes, right? And they can do a little bit more of this with CGI or whatever. But he was like, I just wanted to look as natural as possible. I didn’t want to do a lot of CGI.
And they said, Hey, for this role, you can’t have those tattoos. So that would have been he walks in with those tattoos. That’s a one for esthetics. He needed to get those tattoos removed. And that was a choice that he made and anything like that, right? So we can go on and on about a lot of these examples, but the main thing is that you understand, all right, what they are and how you could evaluate them. So that if you’re looking at your day to day life, thinking, how can I apply this information? Well, that’s how you start thinking about, what are situations in my life that I need to be more attuned to some of these nonverbals.
What are situations in my life where I could be doing something wrong if I go to a certain country and I don’t know certain hand gestures or signs or anything like that, that’s a problem. There are certain countries where smiling can be seen as aggressive. There are certain countries where you’re literally not supposed to look somebody in the eye too long, because that can be deemed as aggressive. On the other hand, if you look at somebody’s feet, which are the lowest part of the body, that can be misinterpreted.
And you have to think about this, because this also just takes a part in like, you know, when you’re negotiating relationships, anytime you’re trying to convey some sense of an identity. So let’s look at some more of these things, and we’ll review it well. Remember haptics, communication through physical touch, kinesics, communication through body movement, gestures, head nods, posture, eye contact, facial expressions. Proxemics, once again, any kind of message conveyed through the perception and use of physical space, social space, interpersonal distance is somebody, and you see this in nature as well.
Animals get territorial. That is proxemics, okay, physical characteristics, or we looked at biometrics, right? What is revealed through your body, shape, size, anything like that, right? So, looking at any of these other pieces and thinking, all, right, what about other factors, such as culture, social status, gender and age, you know? How do these change things, right? Well, if you look at, and this is some of the research, it’s interesting. Let’s look at issues of social status that influences what is appropriate for, let’s say, haptics, right?
The research shows that powerful individuals, however that’s defined in your context, when interacting with subordinates, tend to indulge more in non reciprocated touch. And this is from two researchers, Burgoon and Baku. It sounds like two people from the Mandalorian in a 2003 article, and they say those displaying such behavior also attract higher ratings of power and dominance than the recipients of that contact. So think about that. There’s research that shows that just if we see a certain person engaging in haptics, we’re going to just stay with appropriate, right? A pat on the shoulder, a slap on the back, you know, whatever those people are perceived as higher social status.
And there was research that came out in this probably about 10 years ago that even talked about coaches and and teams that utilized touch more tended to have they were more successful. Now, can you look at correlation and causation cleanly? No, this is going to be how some of these things are just interpreted in a study by Hall in 1996 of actual touching at like academic meetings, there is no evidence that high status participants touch low status participants with greater frequency, and vice versa.
So as we know with the research, this is going to depend, all right, where’s the cultural context, where’s this? So when you try to evaluate on the this on your own, I cannot be more clear, and it’s the point of just repeating obsessively, define the context. Define the context. There will be times where we’re evaluating our staff and how well they did. You know, maybe I think of Becca. If you haven’t met coach Gold yet, she’s wonderful. She’s going to be doing a virtual presentation here soon, and if she says, Hey, I’d like feedback on it
Well, you know, I’m not going to grade her on haptics because virtually, there’s not going to be the use of touch there. I’m not going to be able to grade her on proxemics to the audience. That said I can greater on proxemics to the camera. I can greater on proxemics in terms of just her use of space in general. If she did use a green screen, I could look at those things. Did she move? I can certainly grade her on esthetics of where you dress appropriately. What about your zoom background? We have code of conduct at our company that you know, your zoom background has to be something professional.
It’s okay if you don’t have, you know, a bookshelf or something like that. But then, it does have to be some kind of Art of Coaching or clean filter based. Background. So I just want to give you those examples. And the whole point here is not to just get into the weeds of a bunch of BS. It’s so that the world can get better feedback. Our big vision statement, our mission statement, you know, our vision statement is to change the way the world interacts. Well, think how many of you have gotten really poor feedback in your life, or no feedback at all, or it’s just general, you know, if you’re like, Oh, your nonverbals sucked. Well, that’s a big category.
You know, which part of my nonverbals, my spacing, the use of touch, the actual kinesics or gestures, anything like that, anything like that. And these are all things that collectively aid in communication. Communication is an absolute, absolute minefield. So when you manage non verbals as a whole, whether it’s your posture, whether it’s your head nods, whether it’s any of those kinds of things, I mean, even your emotions and how they might reflect on your face, you’re going to help bridge that gap.
Another example can be for those of you that speak for a living, there was a gentleman in our workshop in LA wonderful did an amazing job, but the entire time he was like, furrowing his brow, looked really confused or skeptical, and we were talking about this, and I called him out on it in a friendly way. Just said, Hey, I noticed that you do this. He’s like, Yeah, every time I think I do that, and there are a lot of people that misinterpret it, that think I’m being critical, or anything like that. I’m not. So that’s another thing that you can do to make this directly applicable in your life today
If you video yourself, which I highly recommend you do in any context you want to think about, what are five things people could misinterpret. What are five things people could misinterpret if you’re like nothing, okay, well, what are five things that somebody could misinterpret in a different country? Think about somebody in China. Think this way would that vary in India? What about New Zealand? What about in Russia? What about here? What about there? And it’s easy to say, Well, that may never happen.
That would be a really silly way to look at it. The world is going to continue to get more and more diverse every like year after year after year. So you have to know that. You have to think about how you’re going to be perceived, how you’re going to be judged, and and all these aspects. If you don’t, you know that’s that’s going to be your issue to deal with, and you’re going to think, hey, at the end of the day, I could have done something to control it. So I want to be clear one more time, exceedingly, exceedingly, exceedingly clear.
Nonverbal communication is not just something that is a byproduct of your gestures. Is a byproduct of your eye movement, your head nods, anything like that. Nonverbal communication has to do with everything from how you dress, from how you use the space around you, from how you utilize touch anything, and if you don’t pay attention to it, you are leaving it up to the assumptions of others, and when miscommunication is already the baseline, that is a really dangerous game to play, and it can cost you results, your reputation, trust, and set you back tremendously.
So think about it. If you took anything away from this episode, let it be that all the categories of non verbals how you can score them, and then think about where you are most likely to be misunderstood because of things that you’re not recognizing. Where could you be misunderstood? Where could you be perceived as threatening? Where could you improve? And most importantly, what kind of cultures do you need to be better at adapting to?
All right, I know this one kind of got into the weeds a little bit of some subjects. If there’s anything you have questions on, remember, we want to prime you with this information. We talk about these things more in depth. In our private community, you can go to artofcoaching.com/community, it is the only place that my staff and I are live with frequency. We do a lot more in depth stuff here than we’ll ever do on social media. If you’re already in the community, get on our newsletter. artofcoaching.com/begin. Collectively. This entire ecosystem is a great way for you to grow and lastly, and pardon but it’s just the truth, you will never be world class at this stuff if you do not practice it.
So don’t let it scare you. You know, I know we talk about our workshops, we utilize role playing and evaluations. These are always in a helpful, friendly context. We are not there to play gotcha. We are there to create an environment around peers from a lot of different fields that can help you get better. And there’s no way to do that unless you practice, rehearse and refine and train for some of your most meaningful moments in real life. All right, for myself and the rest of the Art of Coaching crew, I’m Brett Bartholomew, thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.
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