Power Cues. Nick Morgan

the surprising insights into the importance of gesture that resulted from her work. And it will describe the first step in communications mastery: taking inventory of your own gestures to become self-aware.

      Let’s Rethink Our Communications

      It’s time to rethink how we communicate. We now have a much clearer understanding of what people are up to when they commune with one another. Thanks to significant advances in brain science, we can piece together most of what goes on when people attempt to inform, cajole, persuade, amuse, enlighten, control, tease, infuriate, impassion, or lead each other. We don’t have the whole picture with complete certainty, of course, but we now have enough to go on.

      We have enough to understand what it takes to get an accurate picture of your own communications profile, to inspire other people, to understand them better, to lead them, to persuade others, to captivate other people with charisma, and to share your vision by becoming a passionate storyteller. These are the specific mysteries of communications I’ll be focusing on in this book. Each of the seven power cues are specifically chosen to help you in these areas.

      Before starting, you need to let go of your current ideas about communications. Whether they’ve come from high school debate training, a college course in public speaking, something your mother told you, or just your common sense, most of what you think you know about communications is wrong.

      For example, one common misconception is that when giving a speech, you should “tell ’em what you’re going to say, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you said.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with repetition, but the problem is that the world has sped up since that advice first came down the communications grapevine, and we no longer have the patience to listen to something someone tells us three times.

      When was the last time you paid attention when someone went through an agenda slide? You didn’t, right? You were on your smartphone checking your email one last time. How about when a speaker says, “In conclusion, what I’ve covered today is …” You were back on the smartphone or packing up your stuff. (Of course, if you’re really Type A, you paid attention only during the opening summary or the ending summary; the rest of the time you were surreptitiously doing email.)

      The point is that that sort of bald repetition no longer works because it moves too slowly for us in our attention-deficit-disorder (ADD) world. Repetition has to be artful, disguised, or impassioned like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for it to work on our harried minds today.

      The Bad News about PowerPoint

      Another misconception that I frequently hear as a speech coach is the idea that PowerPoint helps because all people are one of the following: visual, kinesthetic, or aural learners. Neither idea buried in this generally accepted, appalling misconception is true!

      First of all, we’re all visual learners.¹ As I indicated in the introduction, we can handle up to 10 million visual bits of information per second, far more than anything else our minds can process. We’re also all kinesthetic and aural learners. We get information in those other ways, too. Just not as much. Of course, there are individual variations, but most of us are average, and that means we’re mostly visual beings. Unlike, say, cats and dogs, which have vastly more developed senses of smell. For us, it’s visual.

      Second, PowerPoint doesn’t help; it distracts. All the research on multitasking shows that we can’t do it.² We first pay attention to one thing, and then another. Moreover, the research on how our brains process visual information, as I alluded to in the introduction, indicates that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us, but rather an approximation of it that our brain matches to reality based on its memory banks.

      So what really happens when we’re confronted in a meeting or a presentation with a speaker and a set of slides is that we look at the speaker—because we’re inherently more interested in people than pictures—and when our attentions start to wander, then we look at the slides. Now, reading slides and looking at people occupy two different parts of our brain, and there’s a lot of inefficiency in switching back and forth. So when we’re looking at the speaker, we’re getting one set of cues. When we look at the slides, we get another set. When we switch, we lose a bit of either information stream.

      So the result is two incomplete sets of information. That’s tiring and indeed annoying for us, so we get cranky and tune out.

      That’s what PowerPoint (and any similar slideware or presentation program) does. With some exceptions, it adds to our information load, overwhelming it even faster, and causing us to tune out.

      Don’t do it.

      It’s All about the Handshake, Isn’t It?

      You’ve probably been told a thousand times that any good meeting with someone new begins with a firm handshake. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a firm handshake, but in fact the important part of a meeting has nothing to do with the handshake and everything to do with the attitude that you bring to the meeting.

      Before you say anything or even reach the other person, you telegraph, with a thousand subtle cues, how you’re feeling about yourself, and how you feel about the other person. Indeed, the relationship has largely already been set by the time you’re close enough to shake hands. Hand shaking just seals the deal. How you stand, how you move your arms, what your posture conveys, the expression on your face, the way you’re walking, and yes, what you’re wearing all affect the relationship more powerfully than that poor overstressed handshake.

      Finally, generalizing from all the bad communications classes you’ve taken and coaches you’ve worked with, there are no secret power gestures or ways to position your hands or face so that strong men salute, women swoon, and everyone runs to do your bidding.

      Individual gestures simply aren’t that powerful. Really. Let that one go. Lose the steepled fingers or the enigmatic smile or the T-bar move. None of those do much more than occupy your conscious mind a little too much, distracting you from what you should be thinking about.³

      So it’s time to let go of the old rules and learn what’s really going on. Let’s begin with those much misunderstood gestures.

      Two Conversations at Once

      Every communication is two conversations. The first conversation is the one you’re aware of—the spoken content. The second conversation is the one that we’re all unconscious experts on—the nonverbal one.⁴

      When the two are aligned, you can pay attention to the words, because the body language supports the content and so you can hear it. But when the two are sending out different messages, you believe the body language every time. That’s why it’s important. The body language always trumps the spoken content.

      Moreover, these two conversations always go together. They are so integral to one another that most people tend to gesture with their hands and face even when they’re talking on the phone. Think about it. No one else can see them, yet they keep gesturing regardless. Why do they do it?

      Is it just habit? No, there’s a profound reason why people gesture when they attempt to communicate, even when they can’t be seen.

      We tend to think that the second conversation is merely an accompaniment to the first. We talk, and we wave our hands in the air, as a poor substitute or stand-in for content. We believe, if we ever think about it, that the gestures are just follow-ons: something to do with our hands, or something that clarifies the meaning, emphasizes whatever’s being said, or helps keep the other person listening. Or something that follows the words, perhaps—a physical flourish to enhance our sometimes less-than-thrilling (spoken) content.

      That’s not what’s going on. In fact, gesture can convey meaning independent of words.

      Try the following experiment. Sit in a public place, say, a restaurant where the tables are close together and the conversation is lively. Sit with