The Body Language Expert & Motivational Speaker

My friend Mike who works for an company based in Paris commented on the e-mail blog. He said that one of the issues of e-mail in an international company is the time differeance. You send off your e-mail thinking your going to get a reply in a certain amount of time, or thinking everyone will get the news from a group e-mail at the same time and things go amiss.

We talked about the problems of communicating internationally in the three day interpersonal skills workshop I am leading this week. One of the other issues that came up was the lack of small talk. If your doing everything by e-mail, and your feeling constantly rushed and overwhelmed your tendancey is not even to do a normal salutation, just a, “…I need this now.”

I suggest you consider time problems and,in at least in your Monday e-mails, spend a few lines asking people how their weekend was, what good things have been going on in their lives ect. You can small talk via e-mail and we need the cushion of interpersonal communication to smooth out the rough spots in our work-a-day lives.

Sometimes we forget that the way we send e-mail is a form of nonverbal communication. For example, if you take a long time to respond to someone’s e-mail your delay is way of sending a message about the importance of the person. I know I am guilty of taking a long time to return e-mails to friends when I am on the road speaking. Somehow, I rationalize that my friends will love me even though I take forever to respond to them. Isn’t funny how we treat those who love us the most?

We also need to be aware that E-mails were not designed to send emotional messages. The internet was designed to send information, not emotions. It is so tempting at work to blast off a message via e-mail, without dealing with that messy human contact. But, if you’re in your office and you have a message laced with intense feeling to send to someone, go talk to them!! If over 80 percent of the meaning of the message is sent through nonverbal communication your simple e-mail that has no nonverbal communication will often be misinterpreted.

Finally, we sometimes blast off an email so we can say to ourselves, “That’s taken care of.” In truth, it may not be. Because you do not see the person get your message, understand it and respond to emotionally you really do not know if it taken care of. Follow up, at least occasionally with a phone call, a stop in the hallway or an office visit to make sure the receiver, really, “got” the message.

Last night I was watching Oprah. A guest spoke about changing his nonverbal behavior after hearing the author Toni’ Morrisons ask, “What does your child see on your face when you he or she walks into the room on an Oprah episode. Steve, the guest on yesterday’s show is a father. He was inspired to change his nonverbal behavior. He made the conscious decision to put on a happy face every time his children walk into a room. “I thought, ‘Wow, I could actually be hurting their feelings and not even [know] it,’” he says. “Aha! Your kids actually see the expressions on your face.” He says. “I want them to see how proud [I am] that they’re there—how much [I] love them.”

There are two things that are important about this practice. One is that you make significant eye—contact with your loved one so that they feel, “seen” the other is that your face shows the joy you feel in seeing them enter the room. Let me talk about ‘Seeing” them in today’s blog. When I was sixteen I was, as I am now a voracious reader. I read a book by philosopher Eric Fromme on love called the “The Art of Loving.” These many many years later I still remember how Fromme defined love as feeling seen. I remember thinking it would be that the person who loves you looks at you in way they makes you feel human and divine at the same time. That you wouldn’t feel invisible. As I grew up I realized that we often feel invisible in are love relationships with family or sweeties. So today, make real eye-contact with the people you love. See them for the wondrous people that they are.

On February 08, 2006 Macleans Magazine, Canada’s version of Newsweek published a story of my photo read I did of the former prime minister sitting with the new prime minister of Canada for. A bit of the story writeen by SHANDA DEZIEL after her interveiw with me is below.
www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/
article.jsp?content=20060213_121419_121419
“Stephen is symbolically stepping on Paul,” “You can almost see the movement, see it happening. And it’s in combination with his hand position I would love to know what was said.” “In that particular foot positioning,the toe would normally go down. But it’s both up and facing slightly toward the former PM — that is very telling. And that hand motion is a power motion. It’s not done a lot, unless you’re Italian or maybe Arabian or during public speaking, where you bring your hand flat down like that. It’s done when you’re admonishing somebody and when you’re very emphatic about a point.”"there isn’t equality between the two of them. One feels much more in a position of power.” Martin, looks as if “he’s the one losing this negotiation or losing something in this interaction.” She gives the former PM a toe-to-head reading. “He’s doing a very unusual ‘locked cross’ with his feet. They’re so twisted shut, which shows a very strong need to protect himself against attack. The way he has his legs positioned is also unusual. He’s pressing them together, which is protection, and has them angled to create a wall between him and the new Prime Minister. The legs pressed together is very symbolic — that’s a man afraid of being kicked in the . . . . ”

Wood says it’s the lower part of a person’s body that is most honest, because it’s “under less conscious control.” And while she feels Martin’s doing a slightly better job of relaxing up top, there are a couple of other indications of “his need to protect and slight feelings of aggression.” Like his right hand. A relaxed person’s hand will fall much closer to the knee than Martin’s does. “The elbow and the arm are about four to six inches further back on the leg than normal,” says Wood. “His shoulder is raised up, showing tension and a need to retreat backwards.” And there’s the loose fist — “it’s more defensive than aggressive.” The same can be said of his facial expression. “If you look at his mouth position,” says Wood, “he has his bottom lip and his chin jutted out slightly — again that’s defensiveness, pouty defensiveness.” From one picture, Wood comes up with the following personality assessment of Martin: “The posture and facial expression are so vulnerable, almost like a lack of maturity — I wonder if he was very emotional when he was in power, if he had outbursts?”
She finds Harper doesn’t give off as many “body language cues,” and his face isn’t revealing — perhaps lending credence to the robot theory? But her overall impression is that he’s “attractive and confident.” He crosses his legs in a way that gives him more height, and his shoulders and face are relaxed. But she warns that the outside world may be put off by someone with so much power having such youthful features. And Wood, who gives workshops on how to improve body language, has some suggestions. “I would say that the new Prime Minister be a better listener and more empathetic. He also might be too consumed with image.” Having also studied the photo of Harper shaking hands with his son after dropping him off at school, Wood concludes: “He should be a little more aware of being more real.”

A famous author of detective fiction was speaking at a writer’s conference I attended last week. Her nonverbal behavior and the content of her speech were so unusual, that the group of friends I attended the conferance with could not stop talking about her.
She spent a great deal of the speech talking about her alcoholic ex husband, “aka. ‘The Rat’” and the horrible life she had with him.

I was fascinated by the long drawn out pauses the author gave before she was about to reveal some horrific aspect of her life. I was fascinated, because during the pause their would be a flash of pain across her face then a small smile would play there as her head tilted up and she shared the terrible incident. What where her true feelings? I think she was reliving the tremendous pain of her past, then enjoying the fact that she could share that pain, in fact I think she even enjoyed reliving the pain. Nonverbally she seemed to enjoy sharring it, not merly for us to apprieciate her marterdom for living through, it, but by somhow she simply seemed to receive pure pleasure from expressing it. She ended her speech, rather oddly, by singing the Janice Iain song about the painful adolescence of an ugly duckling, “At Seventeen”

Perhaps my deduction was not difficult to make as she would often share a success, such as the flying in her lire jet, or having over 37 novels published, just after sharing a painful story. She affected my friends differently. All of us had had experiences dealing with alcoholics, yet some of us felt moved and effected by her presentation, and others felt that she was manipulating us, by asking us to feel sorry for her and then envy her a moment later.

Why am I blogging about this? Well I think the whole process of sharing our past pain, and what the lie detector test of of nonverbal communication reveals as we do this, is interesting. And any time I am deeply affected by someone’s nonverbal behavior and find myself judging it, I ask myself what I can learn from it. So her behavior made me examine the way I share my past pains and current successes. I started to ask myself this weekend what my motivations are for sharring a story.

I am going to continure to examine my own body language as I share a past injustice, generally whine and complain, or just plain brag about a success.

Every human interaction is a chance to hold up mirror and reflect. What will the mirror show you?

On January 1st of 1982, my boyfriend was shot in a hunting accident. He lost 37 pints of blood in less than 24 hours. His survival was a medical miracle. I am very passionate about proper hunting practices and taking responsibility for actions.

As a body language expert and media and political coach I am passionate about speaking with honesty and credibility. I discussed in a previous post how delay in speaking was a nonverbal communicator let me explore the actual interview.

In a televised interview granted exclusively to Fox News Channel, four days after the shooting, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke. He was looking down and to the right before making his main statements. When people look down and the right they are accessing their kinesthetic (feeling/body sense) and they usually have more skin color. Cheney, however, was very pale and drawn. They generally have a lower, slower voice tone which Cheney maintained through the interview. They gesture down by their middle or stomach; point to their heart or put their hand over their heart. Cheney did not gesture. They breathe low and deep in the abdomen… Cheney seemed to have trouble breathing. Cheney seemed emotional, but the emotions were about his pain rather than empathetic pain for his injured friend. That is even more apparent as Cheney discusses it as one of the worst days of his life. I imagine it was the single worst day of the guy he shot, his friend Harry’s life.

As he looked down and to the right he said, “Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry”. In a Rhetorical Analysis I am immediately struck by how long it took him to get to the admission. It sounds like that children’s nursery rhyme that goes;

This is the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

Look at the limiters he used, ultimately, pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. His first and most important sentence should have been something like, “I shot Harry”. Not, “I pulled the trigger, that shot the round…that milked the cow. That lay in the house that Jack Built…”

He then says again looking down and to the right, “And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that’s the bottom line”. He starts with a condition, then says. “..but that’s the bottom line.” He shouldn’t have even discussed the conditions in that way. He could have made a statement of facts. That is, told the story in a factual way and said the conditions, but saying it this way made it sound like he thought the conditions were, in fact an excuse.

He had a beer at lunch, hunters should not drink. The risk is too high for accidents. Drinking affects your body language. Cheney said. “It was not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame anybody else.” This seems like an almost bizarre statement isolated from the factual story. And if you know hunting rules, it is always the shooter’s fault. Whittington went to retrieve a bird and then walked toward Cheney without announcing his presence. But, Cheney, if he followed hunting rules, should have noted that a hunting partner is out in the shooting target range. A State Parks and Wildlife Department report concluded: “While he was out of the hunting line, another covey was flushed and Cheney swung on a bird and fired, striking Whittington,” about 30 yards away. That’s incredibly close. “I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second saw Harry standing there. Didn’t know he was there”, Cheney said. “I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.”

In the Chicago Tribune yesterday, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania was quoted as saying, “… Cheney’s violation of the basic rule that a hunter verify the target and what is beyond it before pulling the trigger, as well as his lack of a $7 unpaid bird stamp on his Texas hunting license.”

My friend Shane was shot by a young boy who was handed a gun, and in fact held a gun for the first time on that day. The boy was given three minutes of instruction. The boy did not know how to shoot responsibly. Obviously Cheney made a lot of mistakes in his dissemination of the information about the shooting, but the true mistake, the thing that matters, is he was irresponsible in his hunting and shot his friend.

I have been traveling and resting, but now I am inspired again.

I just watched the first interview with our Vice President talking about the hunting accident. Remember the Vice President’s friend was shot in the face and chest.

In law enforcement, the longer it takes for the “suspect” to come forward to talk, the higher the probability of guilt. In Public Relations, the longer the person takes to make a public announcement of the facts of an incident, the more the public believes, truly or falsely, that the person is guilty and has done something they want or feel they need to hide. And finally, in politics the public feels that a powerful figure they voted into office is responsible to the public and should give them the facts of an incident as soon as possible. Yet, the Vice President waited four days to be interviewed on the Republican leaning Fox News, rather than make a public statement immediately.

Time is a nonverbal communicator, and in this particular case involving Dick Cheney, I believe that delay communicates fear, a lack or honor, and desire to not take full responsibility for his actions. I will blog more nonverbal and rhetorical analysis of the Fox interview about the shooting later today. For now, I’m off to coach a client in public speaking.

As the National Spokesperson in Canada for Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion I worked with Vaseline on a touch research study. I have a few of the finding from the VICCL survey.

• In total, 1502 adults were interviewed across Canada.
• These interviews were conducted between August 2nd and August 7th, 2005.
• With a sample size of 1502, results are considered accurate to within (+ or -) 2.5 % points, 19 times out of 20.

Here are a few of the findings…

The most interesting thing in this bit is that the average Canadian spends an average of 5 minutes a day touching and an average of 35 minutes in electronic communication. Hmmmm, e-mail just is not the same as a hug.

Daily Touching

• On average, people have 8.9 separate incidences of touching each day.
• People in Alberta touch the most (13.0), while those in the Maritimes and Quebec do so the least (7.8 each).
• Older people are the less frequently touched (between 45-54 - 7.4, between 55-64 - 5.3, and 65+ 4.4).
• Unmarried people are more likely to touch 2 or less times a day (38%), while married people touch 6 or more times a day (42%).

Daily Amount of Touch

• More than half of Canadians spend less than five minutes a day engaged in touch (61%). This is particularly true of those over the age of 55 (71%).
• The average amount of time touching is 7.4 minutes. This is consistent across the country.
• Men are more likely than women to spend less than a minute touching (37% vs. 24% respectively).
• Married people also spend more time touching (8.5 minutes vs. 5.6 minutes).

Daily Amount of TouchAverage Number of Minutes Spent on Touch / Daily Amount of Electronic Communication

• Two-thirds of Canadians spend more than 10 minutes a day on electronic communication, with one third spending more than one hour.
• 45% of people under 45 spend more than an hour a day on electronic communication.
• The average amount of time spent on electronic communication is 33.5 minutes.
• People in Alberta and B.C. spend the most time on electronic communication (an average of 40.7 and 37.3 minutes respectively).

If you want to hear more, I will be on “Breakfast Television” Canada’s version of the Today Show Monday morning Feb 6 around 7:00 am talking about touch and the Vaseline Science of Touch exhibit.

Well, They kept the camera so tight on President Bush’s face I did not see the gesture I was asked about. I am going to keep watching him in future speeches and comment on it when I do.

He did use one emphatic hand to chest gesture in the whole speech. When he said, “I have the power (gesture) given to me by congress to decide…(on the patriot act.) The hand to the chest symbolically showed his power and that power was centered on him, and the hitting motion signaled that he would back up that power with might. You are more likely to see that gesture in old movies were they have a stereotped russion leader emphasing that he is in charge. Hummm.

Someone for one of my workshops asked me in an email today if I had ever analyzed the gestures that George W. Bush uses when he speaks. “… Particularly, the one where he brings his hands - backs facing outward up to the sides of his chest. It is a gesture that GWB frequently uses but neither of us has ever seen any analysis of this particular gesture. ” I will be watching more of the state of union tape tonight for it. I am familiar with the gesture and he is coached to do the gesuture so I will need to see in what context he uses it to see if he is coached to use when he says particular things or just to use it when he is so moved.

I am doing speech coaching with a client all day Thursday so hope to do my blog tonight or early tommrrow morning. I’m off to get some Thai food. Yummm!