Every face-to-face communication is two conversations, the content and the body language.  Most of us spend a great deal of time preparing the first conversation for our important meetings, presentations, speeches, negotiations and so on.  But how much time do you spend preparing the second conversation – the non-verbal one? 

If you’re like most people, you give some thought to what you’re going to wear, and you may recall a rule or two that your mother or a mentor taught you – along the lines of stand up straight…look people in the eye…give them a firm, friendly handshake, and so on.  But that tired old retinue doesn’t even begin to address the complexity of the unconscious nonverbal exchange that people carry on once they’re in sight of one another. 

What happens is that when the two conversations are aligned, you can communicate your carefully prepared content effectively.  But as soon as there is any mis-alignment between words and actions, people believe the nonverbal every time, and your message is sunk, gone, useless, empty, null and void. 

In practice, that means that if you’re selling confidence in some form, but you start out with a little nervousness – a very human and typical situation – you won’t be believed.  Most business presentations are failures because of this simple, yet powerful truth:  the executive doing the talking has some mismatch between his or her content and emotions.  Perhaps you’re there to talk about the rosy future of the company, but internally you’re harboring a few doubts about the viability of the whole thing, especially after the initial angel investment runs out. 

Mismatch.  Most of us are not very good actors.  Our bodies will betray that diffidence, the audience will pick up on it, and the game will be lost. 

All of us have an extraordinary unconscious ability to read the body language of others, but only in some very basic ways.  We pick up on nervousness, fear, confidence, sexuality, hunger, openness and its opposite, trustworthiness and its opposite, credibility and its opposite, and so on.  These are basic readings on how safe or dangerous other people are relative to our survival and the survival of the species. 

We have mirror neurons that have one job and one job only:  to pick up on the emotional states of the people around us.  We do that in nanoseconds, long before conscious thought or speech can take place.  It’s why when your spouse comes home on some momentous day, you ask immediately, “What happened?”  You just know that he or she is bursting with news – you can see it radiating out of them.  That’s the power of the unconscious mind and mirror neurons.  

That power is limited, however, in a particularly important way for people who want to communicate through speeches, in meetings, and so on.  The unconscious mind is really only asking “what does that behavior mean for me?” 

So if you’re standing up to give a speech about the future of the company, or the success of a new product, and you’re a little nervous, the unconscious minds out there in the audience don’t make allowances for those natural jitters.  No; those minds immediately start thinking “danger!” even before you’ve opened your mouth. 

That’s why it’s so important to give some real thought to your body language before it betrays you.  You’ll be tempted to move away from the audience, or simply to move – we call it “happy feet” at Public Words – to try to discharge some of that nervous energy.  Instead, move toward them, because that builds trust.  You’ll be tempted to clutch your hands protectively in front of your stomach, because all eyes are on you, and you feel self-conscious.  Instead, keep your torso open and pointed toward the audience.  That similarly builds trust and makes the audience feel safe.  You’ll be tempted to speak in a breathy, or nasal voice (of which you’ll be completely unaware) because the adrenaline coursing through your system will be pushing you to take short, shallow breaths.  Instead, take deep, slow breaths from the belly.  The one you’re not hiding from the audience. 

Great presenters, negotiators, and leaders choreograph their speeches and meetings by planning where and how they’re going to stand, move, and sit in order to ensure that their messages and their body language tell roughly the same story.  And they do the hard work of becoming self-aware of their persona, what they look like to other people, so that they don’t send inadvertent nonverbal messages that contradict their content.  Every communication is two conversations.