How do people FEEL when they are with you?

The late poet, author and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou once famously said:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The words we use are only a small part of our message.

This is borne out by the research. Albert Mehrabian was a pioneer researcher of body language in the 1950's. Mehrabian found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only) and 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection, and other sounds) and 55 percent nonverbal.

So, what is important is how you looked and sounded when you said it, not what you actually said.

When you speak with someone:

• Do you maintain eye contact with them or are you distracted by other things in your environment?

• Have you switched off/muted your phone or, even better, put it right away, out of sight? The other person needs to be the sole focus of your attention, not your beeping/ringing phone!

• Do you listen more than you speak? The great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, said “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

• How about your smile? Do you even smile?? A warm, genuine smile is so important! Not one of those fake, artificial smiles, but a smile where your eyes crinkle up, and you are smiling from the heart?

• Do you give the other person your UNDIVIDED attention, or are you glancing at the TV or some other flashing, shiny object while speaking to them?

We pick up on all these cues, sometimes unconsciously.

I called a business recently on the phone, with an enquiry. I had this nagging feeling that the person on the other end of the phone wasn’t fully engaged on the call. Maybe he was multi-tasking with something else?

Just like in Maya Angelou’s quote, his words and replies answered my questions perfectly, but something did not seem right, and my intuition must have picked up on that.

I think it boils down to one thing, when you speak to one person or one hundred people, you need to truly care about the other person or people and the message you are sharing with them.

In turn, your audience feels that they matter and are valuable.

© 2020 Susan Weser.  All rights reserved.