My 7% rant! (But 93% of it won’t work……)

There’s a lot of fuss made about the ‘fact’ that only “7% of communication lies in the words” we use. The rest is split between the way you say it and the para-linguistics (body language and all that jazz) that go with it. The figures are often cited, but less often understood….

Can you play charades?

The answer, for me at least, is something like “Yes, but only when I’ve had a drink”. You might be more outgoing than me. Or less. The important point here is that no matter how good you are at it, unless the person miming is cheating and using a formal Sign Language it’s not an easy game. That’s the whole point.

If we could do it straight away it wouldn’t be fun.

And yet there are people involved in communications training that blindly and stubbornly claim that the words we use in communication account for only 7% of meaning and 55% of the communication takes place by using body language.

Oh yeah? So how come radio adverts work then?

Coupled with “tonality” (that is, the way we say things rather than what we say) the assertion is that a whopping 93% of communication has nothing to do with the words we use. If that was the case, I might just have managed better on holiday in France this year! Seriously, if you hear a language you’ve never heard before, do you really think you can understand 93% of what the speaker is saying?

No? Didn’t think so.

And yet there are people buying into this myth. To be fair it’s based upon some scientific research and they’ll probably defend themselves on that grounds: it’s also so widely banded about by various people so that many people regard it as ‘received wisdom’. It isn’t.

Frankly, it’s wrong.

Well, actually, it’s not so much ‘wrong’ as wrongly applied. It’s been taken out of context and bandied about with very little real understanding. The person who did the original research, (Prof Albert Mehrabrian of UCLA) made a big thing of pointing out to people that his research was specifically to do with personal likes and dislikes and that it could absolutely not be applied in other contexts. It was laboratory work, not ready to be applied in the real world, yet. It wasn’t generalised or robust enough.

Prof Mehrabian’s work was based upon volunteers in a laboratory saying one word only. That word was “maybe” and he picked it specifically because of it’s neutrality! Given those conditions, it’s not surprising that the ‘value’ of the word was only 7%. In fact it’s perhaps a bit worrying that it was as high as that!

No one’s disputing that there’s more to communication that the words you use. At Curved Vision we have theatrical backgrounds and we are very much aware of the old adage that “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it” but I also have a thorough training and background is social science and research (PhD and all that.) so I don’t use the 7% stuff when I do the presentation skills training, not because it’s wrong, just because it’s irrelevant.

Well, “maybe” it’s irrelevant, but you’d have to hear my tone of voice to know if I mean it!
Best….. Simon

Why do the cheap stuff?

I do a variety of jobs besides voice & presentation skills training. Some of it pays more per hour than other jobs pay per day.

Working as a theatre lighting tech pays only £150 per day for a 14 hour day. Other stuff pays that per hour sometimes. So here's the question: why in God's name am I doing it when i could be doing good money stuff or just resting?

This is why. I lighted this tour. With tears in my eyes every bloody night.

Let me know if you find it as moving as I do.
Simon

Freebies! Yippee!

Hi folks.

With no catch and no ulterior motive (ahem!) ….. if you want it, just download it! A while ago I did a teleseminar on how to deal with nerves when public speaking and so on. It seemed to go quite well and I recorded it. I've saved the recording as an MP3 and both that and the slides it refers to are freely available for download for you if you're interested.

The recording is at www.tellingpeople.co.uk/teleseminar_recording.mp3 and the slides are at www.tellingpeople.co.uk/teleseminarpowerpoint.pdf

They're not edited for sale, so I'm not charging – take as you find! All I ask is that if you like them you find some way of saying so on any website you happen to have handy (preferably with a suitable link) and that if you don't like them you keep quiet…. 🙂
Fair? Helpful?

I hope so.

Cheers….. simon

PS The MP3 is a bit big, so be careful how you download.

Why do “charity workers” make such baaaaaad presentations?

In some ways, making a presentation in the third sector is just like any other presentation. In other ways it’s very different – the commercial world can get training faster and is more overt. For us ‘Presenting’ never seems to claw it’s way to the top of the training-needs pile……. but I’ve listened to far, far too many pitches, explanations and bids for funding that were over-long, badly delivered or just plain bad to be able to take any more without a fight.

So what is it about people in the Third Sector that makes them such bad presenters?

Truth to tell, I don’t know for sure but I can make a few educated guesses about why and why not.

The big ‘why not’ is important: it doesn’t have anything to do with talent: I’ve seen the very same people who make bad charity presentations make perfectly good business presentations. So it must be something to do with attitude or belief.

On our presentation skills training courses we help people deal with the fear of making presentations and point out that a bad presentation is worse than no presentation: at least if you say nothing people can only infer that you don’t believe in what you’re doing, whereas if you open your mouth and make a presentation to them you will (sometimes) provide them with the evidence! And that seems to be the key issue.We’re all afraid of looking like fools – or more importantly for charity workers, we’re actually afraid of winning because of a good presentations.There are so many, many charities, good causes, voluntary and community groups out there that, inevitably, we’re aware that we’re competing in some ways for the same cake.

If my slice is bigger, Mary or John’s slices are smaller. And because we’re the kind of people we are, there’s something very ‘nice’ at the bottom of our brains which inhibits us because of that. We don’t have that same inhibition of we’re making a business presentation, do we? After all, if my company gets the contract and yours doesn’t, it’s because we deserve the contract more than you do. We can let our competitive sides shine out. All our good causes are worthwhile and we can’t quite bring ourselves to make the implicit comparison between them by making a bigger, better, more impassioned presentation or speech…. so we make excuses:

• there’s not time to prepare;
• we can’t afford the training;
• we hide behind our fear of speaking in public…….

At yet we have to raise our game – for if we don’t, we pander to the elements in society which still (despite the evidence) want to pretend we’re inefficient or incompetent.Or in the worst case I over-heard recently “No better organised than our local church’s Sunday School.”!

Please, get out there, get the necessary training and say what you’ve got to say. Say it loud, clear and unapologetically. Say it like you mean it. Say it like you have a right to be heard. If enough of us do that, you never know, we might just end up with a slice of a bigger cake after all!

Okay… rant over – for now!

A fistful of nerves

We’re in the midst of GCSEs in our house. Of the whole family, there’s only one of us who’s sitting the exams, but we are all nervous! Some of us have more reason than others: unfortunately, nerves are infectious. I’ve heard arguments that it’s to do with pheromones of the nervous person being breathed in by the people around them and I’ve heard people say it’s just down to us interpreting the nervous person’s body-language. Whatever causes it, the effects can be potent.

If you’re one of a group of speakers when you’ve got to make a presentation, as often happens in meetings or conferences, you could find yourself suffering from other people’s nerves. So how do you fight this?

Well, it’s not easy, to be honest.

Part of the answer is easier said than done – just stay focused on what you have to do and ignore other people – but another part is quite straight-forward: stay away. If you can, sit near a window (or door) to keep yourself in a flow of fresher air. This will keep you cool as well as unaffected by pheromones. Sit down, don’t stand, which will make it easier for you to avoid the wind-up activities such as pacing, hopping from leg to leg and so on.

Then concentrate on your hands: make a point of keeping them open and “floppy” so that there’s no rigidity in the tendons there. You’ll find that keeping the extremity of your hands in this (artificially) relaxed state will help hugely to keep the rest of you relaxed.

This is partially ‘cos it works in its own right and – of course – partially ‘cos it works as a kind of mantra, keeping you from stewing in your own presentation nerves.

A simple presentation trick, for sure – but simple is best when it works (like our presentation skills training)

Speaking personally …

The beginning of things is a fine time to get things right. So it is with buildings, plans, articles and – more importantly – blogs. I'm going to be writing about communicating with people in real life, face to face situations and the like. About how to do it; how important it is; and how horrible it can be for everyone when it's not being done (or at least not done well!). …such as how I'm doing it now…..

In short, this blog is about voice & presentation skills. You don't need 'em? Then don't read 'em! (But I be you need 'em more than you think….. read a few and see 🙂 )
Shame that's a lesson not learned by the two teams in the recent BBC series of The Apprentice recently! I've never seen a greater bunch of Prima Donnas – who utterly fail to communicate with each other. Despite the mobile phones and the posturing, the 'read my lips' attitudes, the raised voices and the trying-to-shout-each-other-downs there's precious little actual communication going on…. at least the way it's been edited and broadcast.

If communication is about anything, surely it isn't just about saying something – and being heard….. Spitting instructions into a mobile phone from the back of a taxi isn't communicating. That's just about saying something so you look like you've done something when the cameras play things back to you (and you can try and justify your incompetence to yourself, retrospectively.) Communication is actually about the person on the far end of the phone receiving the words, hearing them, listening to them and taking them to heart (or head!).

That's what the contestants don't seem to have grasped yet mind numbingly obvious though it is. Postures from Project Managers standing at the front in planning meetings don't cut it – no matter how important what they're saying might be – if no one is listening.

As the old strapline for the film Alien had it In space, no one can hear you scream…. and if no one's listening, no to will hear you strop, paddy, shout or present, either!

And it's not just about silly games. Sometimes it's important and about real life. There's a Government campaign about to start up in the UK at the moment, highlighting the need to have informed consent before having sex. Otherwise it's rape. Just because she hasn't said 'No' doesn't mean she's said 'Yes'. Communication is a two way thing. Always.

…… I'm not suggesting that the contestants on The Apprentice are potential rapists, but they do need to learn to communicate, pretty bloody fast as Sir Alan would say.

Cheers…… Simon

PS: This post – and maybe a couple of others in the future – first appeared on Last Thursday, the networking site.