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.