Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Communications

Communications between people is a strange thing sometimes. Most of the time we forget that 93% of how we communicate is through non-verbal communications.  Albert Mehrabian's a professor at UCLA quantified how we communicate as follows: words, our tone of voice, and body language respectively account for 7%, 38%, and 55% of personal communications. 

Body language is important, yet we continue to believe that we know or can infer what another person is thinking. The reality is that whatever you think someone else is thinking, they're probably not. 

Many of us think we are very good at reading body language and some of us may have that skill. Even if you are very good at reading body language, you have to realize that body language is communicating about 55% of what the person is trying to say to you. Even experts cannot be right all of the time, given those percentages.

If you want to understand what the other person is saying, or more importantly have the other person understand you, your words, tone and body language have to be in sync.

Confusion often arises because your audience is receiving signals about what you think they're thinking. Of course, they are almost always wrong, just as you are almost always wrong about what they are thinking if they and you are relying only on body language to interpret communication and thinking.

The interesting fact is that your signals about they are thinking, could change what they’re thinking.

No comments:

Post a Comment