Power Cues. Nick Morgan

gesture because some coach told you that makes you look intimidating, actually make it harder for you to think on your feet—leading to a less intimidating you.

      Goldin-Meadow sums it up: “Gesture isn’t just a reflection of speech.” One theory is that gesture predated speech in our evolution. We spoke with our gestures before we learned to vocalize. But whether that’s true or not, those gestures are important to our thought processes, to helping us communicate.

      Let’s Go to Harvard

      I’ve observed this phenomenon at work in a small-scale experiment I ran on some Harvard midcareer Fellows a couple of years ago. We had a group of about seventy of (very) high achievers. I wanted to see the effect of gesture on how they presented themselves to each other.

      The experiment was very simple. I asked them to introduce themselves to each other. So, one by one, the Fellows stood up and took a minute or two to speak about themselves. I gave them no guidance beyond asking them to “introduce themselves.”

      Then, after each one had finished, I took the speaker aside and asked him or her to adopt a specific gesture and then give exactly the same introduction again. I was curious to see the effect of open gestures on the thought processes and verbal patterns of people speaking in front of groups like these. The gestures I asked them to adopt varied, but mostly consisted of some form of open arms, exposing the torso to the audience.

      Most of the speakers, before I coached them the second time around, in fact clutched their hands nervously in front of their stomachs, behind their backs, or at their sides. So the effects of my instructions to them were to greatly increase their openness to the audience.

      The results were astonishing. In every case, the amount of personal information the speaker divulged greatly increased on the second try, when he or she was forced to be open through the open gestures.

      I’ll never forget one student in particular, who, on his first introduction, stated his name, in a flat, unemotional way, and then proceeded to identify his year in the program, the courses he was taking, and how much longer he had to go.

      Then I coached him to open his arms out at his sides like a preacher at an altar, what I call the “Jesus gesture,” with the palms upturned, just a little above waist high, and about twelve inches out from his sides. Try it yourself. Stand up and adopt the posture. Then imagine yourself talking to a group of seventy people, holding that gesture, for two minutes.

      The student’s second introduction was extraordinary and transformational. He said, “I’ve just come back from spending two years in Iraq, working with children. I saw atrocities committed that should never be done to anyone, let alone children, and I’ve made it my life’s work to try to improve the lot of children around the world. Please join me in working to save children from the terrible mistakes adults make in war zones and other trouble areas worldwide.” That was the gist of it; his speech was more impassioned and eloquent than that.

      The audience rose to its feet and spontaneously gave him a standing ovation. A number of people came up to him afterward and asked how they could help. When I asked those in the audience to describe the difference between the two introductions, they spoke passionately about the second introduction and how it had moved them. The first one had failed to move them at all. When I asked them if they had noticed the Jesus gesture, none had!

      Recall that I had instructed the speaker to give the same introduction. When I debriefed the speaker, he remarked that the first time he had been nervous and hadn’t said much. But the second time, he felt inspired to share his heart with the audience more directly.

      It was an extraordinary demonstration of the power of gesture and how we present ourselves to others to affect our interpersonal communications.

      Gestures Determine Thought—and How Other People Take You

      We’re “read” unconsciously by the people around us. We convey our attitudes through our nonverbal signals much more powerfully (and directly to the unconscious) than we do through our speech. So when we try to get a sense of our personal presence—how we’re showing up—we need to understand that our physical actions and presence are what convey our persons or our personality to others. It’s all the more powerful because it’s unconscious.¹¹

      As Goldin-Meadow has found, important information is communicated unconsciously through gesture even in normal conversations. Listeners tested afterward don’t know which information comes from gesture versus speech. Some studies show that if a listener copies the gesture a speaker makes, the listener is more likely to like the person and attend to what he or she said.¹² I’ll talk more about that phenomenon in chapter 2.

      Goldin-Meadow says, “Gesture is a powerful tool. It can be used for good, or it can be used for evil.” She’s found that you can implant ideas in people’s heads through gestures. They won’t be aware that you’ve done so, but later on, they’ll start to talk spontaneously about the ideas you’ve gestured about earlier. I’ll talk more about that aspect of the power of nonverbal communications in chapter 6.

      You think consciously about someone else’s signals only when they’re really strange or alarming or the person is really important to you and you’re actively wondering what his or her state of mind is. But that unconscious activity determines an extraordinary amount of the effect you have on other people, the relationships you have with them, and your influence upon them.

      As a first step, then, it’s essential to get a handle on these unconscious cues.

       Power Cue 1: How do you show up when you walk into a room?

      Body language is crucial to today’s leaders because it tells us what we think about other people. People decode emotions primarily through gesture (and tone of voice). The emotional component represents a separate, nonverbal conversation that goes on parallel to the verbal one and typically a split second before the verbal one.

      So leaders must master both conversations, but especially the second.

      That conversation will make or break you as a communicator. Again, you may be entirely unaware of it, but it may confirm you as the top dog, sabotage your authority, connect you with your mate for life, get you in a fist fight (or out of one), win you a game or lose one, blow your chances at getting a raise, get you the big sale, lose you the prize or win it—and so on and on through most of the big moments in life.

      How can you become more aware of this conversation that your body is having with the other bodies around you? Is it worth the effort? Will you become self-conscious and inauthentic if you do? Can you monitor what everyone else is “saying”? Is that helpful? Will it get you to places you won’t otherwise reach?

      Understanding the second conversation is key to leadership, because it’s not something that you can leave to chance or the unconscious. There are simply too many decisions to be made, too many inputs to weigh, too many players to manage and lead. In the twenty-first century, the pace of leadership has accelerated, the flow of information has exploded, and the sheer physical and intellectual demands on leaders have intensified. You can’t rely on common sense or instinct or winging it as you once might have done.

      The first step to mastering your personal communications, then, is to figure out what you’re saying in this second conversation. You’ll need to take inventory of how you inhabit space, how you stand, how you sit, how you move, and how you interact with others. When you’re sitting alone, do you slouch or sit straight? When you stand, are you taking up all of your space, or do you shrink into corners? When you move, do you move confidently or do you slink—or do you careen?

      What do your interactions with others look like? Do you come alive when other people are in the room with you, or do you go on the defensive?

      In the next chapter, you’ll learn ways to control those gestures. In this first step, you’re just learning about how people naturally present themselves through posture, gesture, and motion.

      As