To be Chewbacca, or nonverbal communication. A little practice

Lavra Fedotovich finally got tired of this difficulty, and, interrupting the speaker, he uttered only one word:
- Unpersuasive.
There was a heavy blow. The Big Round Seal has stuck in my application.
A. and B. Strugatsky. "Tale of the Three"


Good morning, Habr.

Let's talk a little more about how to learn the right communication at home (read: without special educators and trainers). The program has an almost continuous non-verbal component of communication, as well as a couple of exercises to practice it.

The question of why to communicate seems to have already disappeared, but I’ll write two lines about why the non-verbal component is needed, and what kind of animal it is. And I apologize in advance to those who understand this term very well.
Each message has two parts: the text itself and ... everything else. Having the property, unlike the text, to act directly on the listener's subconscious, leaving reliable traces in it. Everything that is placed in the subconscious, being correctly placed, firmly supports the message transmitted to the consciousness. An incorrect message transmitted on a subconscious (read: non-verbal) level can come into violent conflict with the spoken text and thereby inflict heavy damage on the mind of the audience. To illustrate — well, I don’t know — imagine that the HHTTG Robot Marvin told you how genuinely happy he was to see you.

Among all that is perceived mainly at a subconscious level, it includes: intonation, pace of speech, diction, emotional content, gestures, posture, facial expression and blah blah blah from our Carnegie Dale that the conformity of appearance with audience expectations decides . Honestly, I won’t talk about the appearance today, in my opinion, this topic has already put everyone on edge. What I’ll be talking about is about intonation, emotional content, the pace of speech, and treatment of the audience.

Micro Training # 1

Everyone, of course, remembers Comrade Chewbacca, who spoke the language of Wookiee, but at the same time, every seedy resident of the galaxy fully understood him? Because the power of his words was not in truth, but in intonation wealth. In order to clog up the desire to read seminars, which is typical for many of us, with the even sad tone of Marvin’s robot, you can try this thing:

Gibberish talk

(I’m not the practicing author of the exercise, by the way, a bow to my colleague)

We will organize a group of 3-4 people.
Instructions for action: each of you should alternately be in the role of speaker, asking questions and arguing. Choose any topic for a speech that is close to you, think over your arguments. Time to speak 1-2 minutes. Your colleagues should, depending on their role, ask you questions and reasonably contradict you. Attention, catch: all conversations should be conducted in a non-existent language. Everyone invents the language himself, who is in what much.

After everyone has tried themselves in each of the roles, do not forget to conduct a feedback session, asking each other questions about whether the conversation was successful, did you understand each other, what mood did you hear in the words of your opponents?
Estimated organizational conclusions: the ability to see for yourself, ─ intonation decides. Assumed skills: purposefully disconnecting the brain from the content of the text, work on the intonation of your messages.

Micro-training # 2: Interaction with the audience

It has long and correctly been noticed that the audience is dying quickly. How to live with it further?

Persuasion exercise followed by collective criticism

Each participant must get out in front of the group and within the same minute or two appeal to the public with an appeal to do something. Then give the group the opportunity to take apart the speaker’s persuasiveness .

The exceptional usefulness of this analysis is that your students will see all of the following on their own, and this, according to the law of any training, is learned much better than just a set of rules listed by the lecturer.

Most likely, the group will see the following nuances:

Eye contact

If I don’t look at you, you are offended. If I look at you and only at you, and point blank, ─ you are scared or flattered that I treat you so dearly. It's a shame to everyone else. Look from face to face, trying to cover the entire audience, not lingering for a long time on anyone, while trying to establish eye-to-eye contact, but at the same time avoid burning through the gaze of a hole in the listener's skull.

Interested pose

Well, everyone knows about closed / open poses, about the fact that your back will bother your listeners much faster than your lively face, about the fact that if you sway casually in a chair, the intonation almost automatically becomes indulgent, and, therefore, the effect of the thoughts expressed will be blurred.

Intonation, it is also transmitted emotion

See exercise # 1. In addition, it can be noted that if the speaker himself does not believe in what he is saying, then we, humble listeners, will react to his message with understandable distrust. Therefore, it is worth following the testament of the White Queen from "Alice" and try to believe a fable or two before breakfast. Especially if you set it out tomorrow. Otherwise, the very subconscious of the listener that perceives a fair fraction of your message will remain unawakened.

Diction and pace of speech

People notice these features in one of the first goals. So, if you correctly set everyone to the point that friendly criticism was invented in order to help colleagues, then you may finally be able to convey to everyone who holds both fists in their mouths in a responsible conversation - that this is not worth doing. Group exposure is a terrible thing. Unfortunately, - being able to draw the speaker's attention to this - is only the top of the iceberg, so if I can convince a colleague and it will be interesting, we sing separately about diction.

Here are those few things that are not visible with a too-armed eye and stick well into the head when you are given out by your group of your associates in feedback mode.

Two more things from a slightly different series, which may not come up, but which you can unobtrusively pay attention to when your group has already run out of criticism.

Response to questions

As one fairy-tale character said, ─ “Everything about yourself, but about yourself, while others, perhaps, also want to talk about themselves.” As soon as you begin to react vigorously to questions, the temperature in the room jumps immediately. Because in this way you show how significant your audience is to you. A primitive idea, ─ and in theory we all know it. Try to taxi to this idea by joint debriefing, and it will immediately shine with new colors.

Jokes of humor

It is clear that the art of correctly and timely joking is impossible to work out with any training. But in the manuals “how to”, as well as in most American TV shows, you can find the term “a joke joke”. If it’s about homework, take the time to find the right joke for the seed. This will almost certainly attract the attention of the audience to you and at the same time slightly relax all those present, and in an informal atmosphere, as a rule, it is easier to discuss any topics of a global scale.

I repeat, this story, like the previous one, is built on the real practice of working within a 1-2 hour workshop for very specific people, therefore, as it seems to me, all of the above can be safely applied to those of your employees who, by occupation, have to talking, convincing.

PS: In the following series:

• And now the slides
• Corporate party - corporate brain
• Managers are the best friends of recruiters