Creative Streak

Important Words in Communications

The problem with being a pack-rat becomes acute when you're faced with a major upheaval in your life: you now have to decide what to do with all of those papers, charts, books, what-not that you've collected over the years. Do you keep it? Re-organise it in hopes you might still need that article? Throw it out? Choose to purge yourself of paper and go entirely electronic? (I would, but Vodaphone still hasn’t fully restored my broadband service after three weeks. Their last reponse, “Well, just cancel your account if you don’t like it." Isn't that the model of exceptional customer service?)

Verbal vs Non-Verbal Communications

You may not recognise the name, but Albert Mehrabian authored some of the most famous studies in communications research. His most well-known hypothesis: When two people communicate face-to-face, how much of the meaning is communicated verbally, and how much is communicated non-verbally?

First published in 1971, his research is almost a quaint idea today, considering that a lot of organisational and personal communications uses decidedly non-face-to-face methods of social media.

Despite using Twitter, Facebook, blogs to communicate (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone), there's something in Mehrabian’s research that continues to fascinate.

 He concluded there are three parts to face-to-face communications – sometimes called the 3 V’s – and these three elements determine how much a receiver “likes” the speaker:

• Visual, or body and facial expressions, accounting for 55% of the liking
• Vocal, or tone of voice, accounting for 38% of the liking
• Verbal, or words, accounting for 7% of the liking