Nonverbal Signals
This group of signals, often referred to as body language, plays a key role in how effective your communications will be, but it must not be your sole focus. Each of the three signal areas has a role to play in how effective your communications are, and the proportion assigned to each will vary according to the circumstances of each exchange. Your nonverbal signals, or body language, provide your audience with the clues they will use to determine your attitude and feelings towards the communication. These include such things as your posture, facial expressions, and gestures.
It is well known that your facial expressions reveal your true emotion in a situation. Your eyes and lips will reflect how you feel about an exchange. Different cultures focus on different aspects of the face when assessing the emotional reaction of the person they are speaking to. These cultural differences are also noticeable in the gestures and element of touch used in an exchange. If you do not reciprocate in a way that reflects the behavior of the person you are communicating with, the emphasis or empathy you want to express may be misinterpreted.
When you are communicating you need to be conscious of the posture you adopt. This is because it informs those involved in the exchange how attentive you are and how interested you are in what is being said. An open posture generally shows you are more supportive of what is being said than a closed one. But if your posture appears too relaxed, and you maintain little eye contact, you may portray the attitude of someone uninterested in the topic.
The other aspect posture communicates during an exchange is how comfortable the other person is with the distance there is between you. Each individual’s level of personal space is unique and is a relection of their culture and character. You need to quickly pick up on such signals when communicating and if you are too close to the other person then you need to subtly move away from them until you see them relax.
If you are observing a conversation you will also be able to identify how close or personal the relationship between these individuals is from the distance they stand or sit apart. To be an effective communicator you need to be aware of these unconscious and unintentional nonverbal signals and respond accordingly in order to achieve your objective. It is important to remember that many of your own and others’ non-verbal signals are intuitive and as such are hard to control.
The more you are able to master your own emotions during communications the more effective you will be and the more aware you will be of your own nonverbal signals and how they could be interpreted. The more you actively observe those you communicate with the greater your skill will become in ensuring that your words have a ‘perfect’ correlation with your para-verbal and nonverbal signals.