Our non-verbal signals speak louder than our verbal signals.
In 1995, I started working as a young doctor. I worked in a department for head and neck surgery. Occasionally, I had to tell my patients bad news about their cancer diagnosis. In those situations, I typically focused on the phrases I was about to use. How shall I say, what I need to say?
Medical translation needed
Firstly, I made some effort to avoid medical terminology. I tried to translate the meaning into plain and even simple language. Furthermore, I tried to consider how to pace my part of the conversation. It was important to me, how I would intonate my phrases consciously, using a slow pace, speaking loud and clear.
In summary, I did my best to get my message across.
What I focussed on …
During my preparation, this was the ranking I attributed:
- Highest importance to the verbal part of the information
- The intonation of the message, the phasing of it
- The non-verbal communication
I hardly ever thought about was my body language during the conversation: how would I carry the message?
What do we know about verbal vs non-verbal messaging?
Our non-verbal signals speak louder than our verbal signals.
Dr Albert Mehrabian, a US-American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California in Los Angeles, discovered a balance between the verbal and non-verbal components during communication.
This comes down to the following:
In ambiguous communication scenarios, the ration, that a message is transported by is
- 7% words
- 38% tone
- 55% body language
The actual words we choose to use contribute only 7% to the overall message’s interpretation. The tone or the manner in which those words are conveyed accounts for 38%. The most dominant component is body language, encompassing gestures, facial expressions, and posture, making up 55% of the interpreted message (Mehrabian, 1967).
How does this affect my communication?
As a young doctor, I was nervous, but I knew that my patients would expect confidence from me. This disconnect between my inner experience and the expected attitude was quite difficult to reconcile. The effect was, that I needed to “fake” confidence more often as a young doctor, compared to now (practising medicine for more than 25 years).
I focused in my preparation on the verbal communication because I struggled to project confidence for the patient. I didn’t possess this confidence in my early training.
This is the reason for the discrepancy between what my words said, my tonality and the message of my body language; my inner uncertainty was plain to see.
As our non-verbal signals speak louder than our verbal signals, ultimately, my patients believed more in my body language more than my words.
Why is that?
Our words are deceptive, our body language is not!
We can lie more easily with what we say, more so than how we move. Therefore, my patients were right to trust my non-verbal communication more than what I said.
In essence: patients correctly trust our non-verbal communications more than our words!
Our non-verbal signals speak louder than our verbal signals.
This makes the interaction extra difficult for the younger doctor, who just not trust themselves yet.
In a nutshell:
Our non-verbal signals speak louder than our verbal signals.
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