I've had a number of comments on my recent posts on commencement speeches and John McCain's wandering hand. So I'd thought I'd continue the discussion here.
People have sent me some great commencement speeches, analyses of them, and links to video. It prompts a comment right from the start: being a member of the audience and reading a speech are two very different things. An audience member is part of the performance art that is a speech. Readers come after the sparks have flown; they're late to the discussion.
The reason is, of course, that delivery is just as important to speechmaking as content. The non-verbal conversation, as I've talked about before, is just as crucial to comprehension and success as the verbal. You have to get both right.
And the non-verbal conversation is what everyone was bloviating about when John McCain's hand went wandering. What did he mean? Why did he pause so long? What was up with that hand?
The crucial point here is that it's a mistake to try to read specific meanings into hand gestures, or body language in general, as if it were a secret code. We are all unconscious experts in understanding body language at the emotional level, but most of us are poor at consciously decoding non-verbal communication.
Hence, I labeled my analysis of what John meant as speculation. Only someone very close to John, and used to his gestures, would be a good analyst of what he meant. Perhaps his wife understood immediately, but the rest of us are much better off just reading the emotion he was conveying, not intellectually trying to decode something more specific. Let your gut tell you what the other person is feeling, and don't try to analyze gesture too consciously, and you'll be more accurate more of the time. McCain was flummoxed, clearly, but more than that is difficult to be precise about.
We are already expert readers of body language, as long as we let that part of the brain that's good at it do its work. It's when we try to consciously decode gesture as if it were a system of precise signals that we get into trouble.
When I don’t know someone, I take the “rules” of body language with a grain of salt.
Many times I’ve had audience members who sat, arms crossed and stone faced, through my presentation, only to come up to me afterward raving about how much they learned.
Ditto with speaking to groups of teenagers. You will never know what they’re thinking by trying to read their body language. Only that they are explicitly choosing what to say with their bodies, and it’s usually, “I’m bored out of my mind.”
Without knowing someone personally, it’s pretty hard to analyze their message, so I don’t count anyone out who appears to have “closed” body language. Sometimes it’s just more comfortable to cross your arms!