Chapter 12: Nonverbal Communication
12.8 Using One Channel to Help the Other
It was my first full-time job: I was doing graphic design for a small advertising agency, a job that allowed a lot of talking while you were working on drawings. One of my co-workers chatted with me for a while and then needed to concentrate on what he was doing, resulting in a 20 -minute lull in our conversation. It was finally interrupted by him saying “I don’t mean to imply anything by my silence.” It was a funny moment, since I hadn’t been thinking about it , but it was also a nice acknowledgement that I could have been sitting there wondering why I had offended him or he didn’t want to talk to me anymore.
Since then, I’ve been in situations where someone yawned in front of me and quickly apologized, explaining that they didn’t sleep much the night before. In other words, sometimes nonverbal signals are ambiguous enough that words are needed to clear things up. It may seem artificial or forced sometimes, but there is nothing wrong with talking about your nonverbal behavior and helping others around you figure out what you’re trying to say or not say with your body.
On the other side of the equation, one of this chapter’s themes is that nonverbals are an important enhancement to verbal communication, a way to express things that words don’t convey well or to give the words more impact. Chapter 14 is about delivering speeches, and the success of a speech hinges largely on how the speaker uses their voice, hands, and face. In conflict situations, the difference between escalation and de-escalation can have a lot to do with tone of voice and other nonverbal behaviors, and a skilled communicator can get people to listen to messages they don’t want to hear if the nonverbals are right. If the message you want to convey is “calm down,” the way you say it and what you do with your body (such as holding someone in a calming embrace) are bound to have more effect than your words.
So there’s one final reason to study nonverbal communication: to get you thinking about the relationship between verbal and nonverbal channels, and how to recognize when one side needs help from the other. The earlier discussion of double-bind messages and gaslighting shows what can happen when that relationship is deliberately abused, but inadvertent contradictions can cause stress too. Awareness of all the channels available to you can increase the possibility that those channels are all singing in tune with each other.
BOX 12.8: What Zoom Fatigue Teaches Us About Nonverbal Communication
The challenges of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown were severe, but at least we had a big advantage over previous pandemics: the ability to have meetings over video platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and FaceTime. People who used these platforms couldn’t help noticing something about them, however: they can be exhausting. Some people thought they were the only ones having that trouble until articles started appearing that put a name to the problem: “Zoom Fatigue.” Why can a 30-minute video meeting be as tiring as an hourlong in-person meeting? The answers tell us something about the nonverbal signals we seek out in social situations, some of which the video platforms can provide, some of which they can’t. Depending on the framing of the camera, for instance, you can’t see much below a person’s shoulders. Our brains are used to seeing a person’s posture and what they are doing with their hands, and even when that information isn’t available, the brain won’t stop looking for it, like a cell phone searching for a signal in the woods . Continually searching for something that isn’t there drains phone batteries and human brains alike.
Then there’s the question of where to look. In a typical in-person meeting, when one person is speaking the others are usually looking at them out of respect, or to pick up facial expressions. This doesn’t have to be laser-focused, however, and it’s acceptable to look around at others to “read the room.” Over video platforms, reading the room means looking into lots of isolated boxes, each with their own distractions. Some people feel obligated to keep staring at the speaker to avoid being rude, which can be tiring. There’s also the quirk that you naturally look into people’s eyes when speaking to them, but since those eyes aren’t right next to the camera, it can look like they’re not looking at you even when they are.
Having your own face and background on the screen is also a potent distraction. As Christina Cauterucci put it, “In a video call, there’s too much information about the self, and not enough about the others.” Imagine being in an in-person meeting and everyone at the table has a mirror in front of them.
You may have noticed that normal speech patterns take more effort online too. There are those awkward moments when someone starts speaking and has to be told they’re muted, and the moments when no one has anything to say, or a topic wraps up, leading to pauses that seem excruciatingly longer and quieter than similar pauses in face-to-face meetings.
The point here is not to complain about the limitations of video meetings (a technology I’m extremely grateful for), but to reveal features of normal face-to-face conversation you may not have noticed before. Our experiences with video meetings show that being able to see more than a person’s head, being able to look around the room, the subtleties of smoothly riding through conversational gaps and interruptions, and the ability to look people in the eye while talking are all important features of natural conversation.
