Non Verbal cues are not important

   Last week, one of my friends at Chennai Speakers Forum Toastmasters presented her speech. I liked the confidence, the free flow of ideas, and the statistical tidbits of her speech.While she expounded on the various aspects on presenting an ‘Effective Presentation’, I was wondering about the numbers in her speech. 

           Your words 7%

               Your tone of voice 38%

               Your body language 55%

   She quoted researches confirming a popular phenomenon. Research says that for any speech or conversation or discussion, the meaning of the message is carried more by voice and body language than by the actual spoken words.

  For anyone who has been part of any communication group, this is not a news. That your body language and vocal variety is much more important than the content of your speech is an often repeated mantra. All along I had no qualms, but when presented in terms of numbers, it looked almost unbelievable, I wondered why words carried only 7% while we spend more than 70 % of the time writing those words for the speech. Is that even possible?

  How can someone explain such disparity? Though I agree that I’m much more impressed by Obama’s enthusiastic animated speech than Manmohan Singh’s dull recitation, I had difficulty in agreeing to the sheer insignificance assigned to words in a speech. The content may not be the king when it comes to a speech, but it is no worse than the soldier who faces the enemies up front with courage. 

  What was this research that gave such accurate numbers? How did they measure this? Thanks to the internet, my research was not as cumbersome as the research under question.

 Who did this research? Albert Mehrabian came up with this research in the late ‘60s, but there are few important points to note before confirming the direct implication of his research to a speech. Through a trail of search, I finally ended up at this site.

--Start of Excerpt^*--

The studies

Mehrabian and his colleagues were seeking to understand the relative impact of facial expressions and spoken words.

Study 1

In Mehrabian and Wiener, (1967), subjects listened to nine recorded words, three conveying liking (honey, dear and thanks), three conveying neutrality (maybe, really and oh) and three conveying disliking (don’t, brute and terrible).

The words were spoken with different tonalities and subjects were asked to guess the emotions behind the words as spoken. The experiment finding was that tone carried more meaning than the individual words themselves.

Study 2

In Mehrabian and Ferris (1967), subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the single word 'maybe' in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking.

The subjects were then shown photos of female faces with the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voices, the photos and both in combination.

The photos got more accurate responses than the voice, by a ratio of 3:2.

They cautiously note:

These findings regarding the relative contribution of the tonal component of a verbal message can be safely extended only to communication situations in which no additional information about the communicator-addressee relationship is available.

--End of Excerpt--

 Let us analyse his experiments with a speech in mind?

1) Mehrabian arrived at the ratio 7:38:55 through two independent experiments.
2) Mehrabian used only words, not a speech, not even a complete sentence for conducting this experiment.

  Can combing results of two complex experiments on human behavior sufficient to arrive at such a conclusion? Mehrabian’s disclaimers are proof enough to confirm that we cannot draw an accurate parallel from his research to any meaningful discussion between two human beings. If that is not enough, the research was done only using words, not complete meaningful sentences. 

   His research was probably tweaked by innovative coaches from speech training companies with honorable intentions; to stress the importance of voice and body language in speech. Or is it a clever marketing strategy to lure potential client to their company? With time more people accepted the misinterpretation of his theory? Why? Because any surprising statistic or fact tend to have high impact and better recall value. It has almost become the opening line of many presentation trainings, and as more people joined the bandwagon of 7:38:55, the misintrepreted theory has developed a credibility that will be very hard to break.  

   Of course, there is no denying the importance of voice and body language in any communication situation. They are as important as the words. But for a complete speech, a ratio of 33:33:34 makes much more sense than Mehrabian’s 7:38:55. Words cannot stand alone all the time, Mehrabian's research in itself is a perfect testimony to this fact.

  All this reminds of a Siddhuism, “Statistics are like miniskirts, they reveal more than what they hide.”After all Obama owes as much as to his catch phrase “Yes we can” to all the emotions he showed while making that historic speech. The title may be slightly misleading, but I know you wouldn't read if not for such controversial title. It is not too far away from the central idea of this article ; Non verbal cues are not as important as you thought them to be.

^*Excerpt on Mehrabian’s study: http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/body_language/mehrabian.htm

Think before you buy; you’ll thank me later

That's not my shopping bag!

  Have you ever thought about useless things filling up useful spaces in our homes? I’ve bought so many things, that I never use after painfully paying for it. I have a shoe that I’m ashamed of showing others, I have a t-shirt that only Salman Khan can carry it off, I have a water bottle that cost me more than a meal at Pasta Bar Venito. I’m sure every one of us is guilty of that splurge, the urge to spend on things that we don’t actually want. Here me out, you’ll thank me later.

  We shop when we are happy. We shop when we are depressed. Often, we end up buying a pair of shoe while our intention was to help a friend to buy a pair of sock.  That’s how I bought that shameful shoe. Shopping is fun. Fun things do not last, but they are very addictive. And fun does not mean happiness. Fun is momentary, but happiness is more lasting. If something is fun long after it happened, then it is definitely happiness. Is it fun to think about the time when you bought that shoe that you never use? No it is not; shopping does not make you happy. Shopping does not take you out of depression.  May be, put you in a deeper well of depression when you stare at your bank balance. Shopping is not an antidote for depression. You keep filling space in your house, and you keep adding guilt in your heart. It is a vicious circle, you buy things for instant joy, and then lose mind every instant over that.

   Now the innovations and improvement in technology has made it even worse. You don’t even have to step out of your room to buy a room full of nonsense. You open that slick site, click on those bright buttons, make payment, and viola you have it delivered the very next day. What do you do after the delivery? You open that package, and let that object catch cobwebs. Television, billboards, salesmen and everything around us are pitching their product every second.We are bombarded with information all around us. Aishwary Rai says ‘L’Oreal ,Because we are worth it?’  And another beautiful lady insists that, ‘It is not a car. It’s a caaar?’ A red bull promises wings. And another billboard screams “Galayx S3.Designed for humans?” What does that even mean?  Well, that means you are a goat, and a scapegoat at that. You are going to buy things you don’t want and you are going pay with money that you don’t have.

 We are all rational people, how do we end up falling for such traps. How can we put an end to this? What can we do to stop this carnage from sweeping our bank balance?  What is the one question that can change all this?  Don’t you want to know how you can stop spending money on things you don’t want? It is all about dealing with a devil called Instant gratification. Let’s call him I.G. What we need is a D.I.G , Disintegration of Instant Gratification.

 Just one question before you make that decision to swipe your card. “Can I live without this product  for now?  Is it the best my hard earned money can buy me? ” That solves it. It might seem simple, but how many of us ask such a sane question on your trip to shopping mall? Your answer to that question makes the decision for you. You may not be happy to make that hard decision. But you’ll thank me later.

  Remember there is nothing called as free lunch. There is nothing called as discounts.  You are entering a dangerous zone when you see that brightly lit red discount banner. Just like a fly, you die sooner when you fly around the light. That red banner is your light.  When you have a buying decision to make, remember the fly falling down, cramped and burned by the heat of the light. You’ll thank me later.

  Another handy strategy is to avoid carrying credit cards in your wallet. Handy because, you make yourself handicapped in front of the absurd marketing campaigns. You might think that Credit cards give you freedom, of course, that is exactly what the banks want you to think.You don’t want to pay 33% interest on late payment of thing you don’t want. Remember the number thirty three when you have to make that buying decision. You’ll thank me later.

  I’m not asking you to stop enjoying your life. I’m not asking you to stop buying what you need, I’m not asking you to stop buying what you like.  I’m asking you to start smart shopping. I'm asking you to not let the world decide what YOU want. All I’m asking is to think before you buy. Let’s vouch together to buy all the things we want, but only things what we really want. You’ll be at peace. You’ll be debt free. And you’ll thank me later.

Smart Drugs for smart people ?

   

   Around the world, it is not so uncommon to hear about athletes embroiled in drug scandals. Drug scandals sponsored by governments, drugs prescribed as a part of rehabilitation, and drugs forced on athletes by greedy coaches. It is all too common. The athlete is fined, debarred, stripped of his medals and almost isolated from the very sporting fraternity that he had grown up with. But what about us?  What about normal people taking cognitive enhancement drugs? Why is this not curbed? How many of us even know that students of high profile colleges live with a dose of cognitive enhancement drugs every day?

  Cognitive enhancements are prescriptions usually taken to treat Attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder. Drugs are not supposed to be used unless you have certain diagnosis, but Cognitive enhancements are widely used by normal people to improve their productivity. Imagine using drug to improve productivity in office, improve grades in college, and for anything that require mental alertness and sleep deprivation. The day is not far behind when such drugs would be as common as a strong cup of coffee to keep you awake on the day before the exam. Is this acceptable?

  Why have different yardsticks for different situations? If enhancing physical strength through drugs is an offense, so is enhancing mental strength through drugs.  If an athlete like Lance Armstrong^* can be punished for his alleged decisions on drugs, why not a top grader from an elite college? Should there be a drug test just before the exam?

  To give a little twist on the argument of enhancements in general, why should the idea of enhancement be seen as cheating or unnatural? Why can’t we see it as improving oneself knowing the consequences of the side effects?  What if everyone has free access to performance improving drugs? More like coffee, a stimulant, but not perceived as one because of the wide availability. As we evolve, we find more reasons and ways to run fast in this rat race of high performance and productivity. Smart drugs is just a speck of what the scientific world has in store for us. 

  After all why would smart people need smart drugs, aren't they smart already? Your thoughts on using such drugs are welcome.

 

   ^*Lance Armstrong, one of the big names whose influence went beyond cycling and Tour de France. He was a living example of inspiration, and resilience of the human species. We would never know the complete truth about the chain of events that led to his ouster, all we know is that his position in the history as an inspirational sportsman is now questionable.