Martin – thank you for getting this right. I cannot bear this urban myth. It has become communication ‘experts’ jargon. It is a testament to the fact that the integrity of communications trainers is too often wooed by commercialization. No, no more.

Mehrabian has excellent research andthe only thing we can pick up is this bit because it qualifies us down to 3 percentages. Convenient!

It does the same thing to me as the likes of the Myers Briggs Test and personality type indicators.

My teacher, Kristin Linklater; http://www.kristinlinklater.com, sensibly underpins her work with the premise that a good communicator balances thought, feeling, breath and voice, a quartet in which no one element compensates in it’s strength for the weakness of another.

If we are bound to these percentages then we would all be vocalizing, physically overbearing idiots.

Thank you, Martin. I am taking your article to my world.

This particular psychologist spent the day ‘telling us off’ whenever we adopted a blocking posture or tweaked an inappropriate eyebrow. Spending a full day sitting in a plastic chair can get pretty uncomfortable and at one point I had my arms and legs crossed – I got a double whammy telling off for that – but I got my own back.

Whenever she looked at my group the psychologist kept her glasses in ‘normal position’ on her face, but when she turned to another group she would lift her glasses up with one hand over her head, then lower them back down to her nose as she turned back to us.

I said ‘I know why you raise your glasses when you look at that group’. ‘Why?’ ‘Well, you trust us; but when you look at that group over there you raise your glasses in order to let them know you can see them for the crafty scheming scumbags they truly are’. The group I was referring to laughed – but she didn’t and she didn’t have a go at anyone else about their body language for the rest of the day.

It’s partly a case of you can see what you want to if you try hard enough.

I often tell my students and audiences they should be wary of anyone citing that “93% of the message is non-verbal” statistic. That speaker clearly has not done his due diligence — and what else could he be wrong about?

Sadly, as a communication instructor at colleges in the Chicago area, I have been assigned to teach from textbooks that use this misquoted “evidence” as fact. In my early days of communication studies, I myself presumed it was true because I had read it in a textbook.

The larger issue I think is, what can be done about it?

I appreciate the conversation.

Regards from across “the pond,”
Felicia Slattery

Thanks again for a great article, and a wonderful animation!

Simon Roskrow
MD, trainingreality

Steve