This evening at Leadership Academy in San Diego, a Tony Robbins event, we learned about nonverbal communication. Studies show that in the USA, body language accounts for fully 55% of communication; that inflection accounts for something like 38%; and that the words we use account for a mere 7% !! In other countries, body language ranks even higher.
The presenter was Jan Hargrave, a body language expert who works for the FBI, consults on many court cases, assists in jury selection, and even consults with (imagine) politicians. She had some great stories about people like Bill Clinton!
So how can this stuff help with clients? We can learn to watch clients, to see what their body is telling us. It is pretty easy to see nervousness, and we can also learn to detect potential deception. But more important, we can learn to see whether a client is receptive to our presentation, and alter what we are doing to improve how they are responding to us.
If, during a presentation, a client has their arms folded across their chest, and their fingers are not showing, then they are likely to be unhappy with what we are saying, to the point that they have stopped listening. How do we change this? Hand them something! This does several things. First, it is a pattern interrupt, a well known NLP technique for changing someone's state; and second, it gets them to uncross their arms, and because we are physiological creatures, actually makes them more receptive to what we are saying. Of course, we may want to change tactics in our presentation as well, or they may revert back to rejecting us.
This is just a small snippet of what we learned today. You can imagine just how powerful it would be, to talk to someone across the negotiating table, or even listen for vocal inflections over the phone, and have a reasonable idea of what they are thinking about your proposals!
Jan is a great speaker, and she included a fun segment about how to tell if a person of the opposite sex might be showing interest. For those details, I suggest you check out her website at http://www.janhargrave.com
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