by David Adams

Take a moment to try this experiment.

Body talk tips

Communication consultant Dianna Booher suggests several things when learning the language of non-verbal communication.

•  Establish a baseline before you attach deeper meaning to body language. Determine what’s normal behavior for an individual. Do they cross their arms when they’re bored or is it simply a habit?

• Distance speaks volumes. The space you put between you and your audience can make the difference in your control, authority, and rapport. Speakers who want to stress authority put distance between themselves and others. Those who want to establish an easy, open dialogue move down among the crowd.

• Use eye contact to build rapport. Good eye contact says that you’re interested in the other person. Withholding eye contact can be interpreted as elusive behavior.

• Find a handshake that suits your intent and style. No wet noodles here. Try to find one that’s not too strong, not too weak, not too long, and not too short.

Source: Communicate With Confidence:
How to Say it Right The First Time and
Every Time, Dianna Booher, McGraw Hill, Inc.,
New York, New York, 1994.

Turn the volume off on your television. Now watch, don’t listen, to the conversation taking place. What are the emotions of the speakers? Are they angry? Happy? Confused? How familiar are they with each other? Are they strangers? Close friends? What tips you off?

You may not catch the fine details of the exchange but chances are you understand a great deal more than you realize. You follow the soundless conversation of visual cues–hand gestures, facial expression, body posture, and physical action. This little experiment helps demonstrate that communication is much more than words. It’s a complex dance of visual and vocal dialogue.

"Everyone, no matter what field they’re in, interacts with people," says Barbara Wilcox, a vice president at Cushman/Amberg Communications Inc. in Chicago. "We must be cognizant that there’s more in our conversations being interpreted by others than just our words."

Some people spend their professional careers studying the meaning and origin of non-verbal communication. What they learn through research can make you a more effective communicator on the job.

MIT researcher Justine Cassell, Ph.D. is an expert on hand language. Cassell and her contemporaries theorize that speakers employ gestures in predictable ways. In fact, they have identified four gesture groups that can be found in every culture today:

• Iconics are the air pictures that represent some aspect of the object being discussed.

• Metaphorics stand for abstract concepts. These gestures are especially diverse, most likely because metaphors vary widely from one language or culture to another.

• Deictics (pronounced dike tics) are pointing motions–they identify the location of people, places and things.

• Beats are little waves of the hand that underscore the value of the speech.

The question is, do your hand motions reinforce your verbal messages, or do they diffuse (or detract from) that message? It is one thing during a sales presentation to grope in the air for the right word or to move your hands out of nervousness. It’s another to use intentionally specific gestures to augment the words you are speaking and to lead your listener from one idea to the next.

In one of her scholarly papers, Cassell notes that gesture meanings often differ from culture to culture.

For example, the emblematic or metaphoric American "V-for-victory" gesture can be done with the palm facing or turned away from the listener. In Britain a ‘V’ gesture made with the palm turned toward the listener is considered inappropriate in polite society.

She goes on to say, "Spoken languages are constrained by the nature of grammar. Gesture, on the other hand, can play out in space what we imagine in our minds."

For example, iconic gestures usually depict the action or event being described. When new employees are brought into a job, their trainers may pantomime the task. They could describe how to do something in great detail using only verbal dialogue, however, acting it out can demonstrate the proper way to execute the task.

Beat gestures, the up and down movements of arms and hands, compliment iconic gestures and are used to accent a spoken list of items by physically moving the listener through the series. Once the arm is brought down in with a gesture and swept up again, the listener knows that something more is to follow. You probably did this the last time you sat down with someone and gave them a list of things to do.

You speak two languages every day, the kind that you hear and the kind that you see. Both are rich in vocabulary and both demonstrate your command of language and aptitude for self-expression. And both need to work in harmony with the other.

"Sometimes our non-verbal conversations disagree with our verbal ones," says Wilcox. "Gestures, smiles, and even our posture can indicate to others that we’re bored, impatient, or furious with what’s being said. People often don’t realize that they’re communicating subliminally this way. An astute observer will see the conflict in what’s being said to what’s being expressed physically and will get a great deal more out of the conversation than we may have intended."

If you tried the exercise mentioned earlier, you realized that some gestures are universal and that some are unique to the topic being discussed. Try the TV exercise sometime on the job and see if you can guess what’s being discussed.

Or better yet, watch yourself and see if your words and gestures match. To learn more about Dr. Cassell’s work, go to her web site at http://justine.www.media.mit.edu/people/justine/