Bang!: Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World by Linda Kaplan Thaler & Robin Koval

Author:Linda Kaplan Thaler & Robin Koval
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307423511
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T14:00:00+00:00

Stop Listening

Sometimes we’re so focused on what someone says that we forget to read the other person’s nuances and gestures. As Barbara and Allan Pease put it in their book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, “in face-to-face communications, nonverbal signals account for 60 to 80 percent of the impact of the message, while vocal sounds make up 20 to 30 percent. The other 7 to 10 percent is words.” If an employer asks a staff member if she’s happy that day, and she replies “Yes,” it’s that much easier to ignore the body signals that shout out how miserable she’s feeling. Language can conceal and obfuscate as well as clarify and elaborate. Frequently, in business, language asks us to take the answers we hear at face value, when often the real communication isn’t one that has been put into words at all.

By paying attention to nonverbal cues, you can learn volumes about what a client, a CEO, or division leader is really saying. We all have the capacity and skill to do this; it’s been bred into our bones since the first caveman stopped his enemy in his tracks with a mere grimace. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, suggests that we all have the innate ability to distinguish cheats. Psychologist Jennifer Voigt Kaplan concurs with its findings: “Prehistoric humans had a better chance of survival if they could identify cheats so that they were not robbed out of food, mates, supplies, and so forth. The humans who survived possessed this quality and handed it down to their kids. So from the angle of using instincts to size people up,” she concludes, “you can make a case for why we should listen to our instincts.”

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