Persuasion

I’m reading a good book at the moment. ‘Persuasion – The art of influencing people’.

There are some interesting facts around the importance of body language and non-verbal communication. In the 1960’s, Dr Albert Mehrabian conducted a research study that concluded that the impact of a message could be classified as 55% visual, 38% vocal and 7% verbal. Meaning that our body language and tone of voice are infinitely more important than our actual words, in day-to-day communication.

It is interesting in this day and age, when so many of our relationships, friendships and business communications are conducted over text, email, IM, Facebook, Twitter etc how much we are losing in the message, by not focussing on the delivery. If 93% of the impact of our message is based on what you see and how it sounds, our listeners are only actually focussing 7% on what we are actually saying.

So even with all the technology available to us today, it shows that a bit of good-old fashioned ‘face-time’ can’t be beaten.


Persuasion is by James Borg and published by Pearson.