Activate your non-verbal language

Do you know that feeling when you have to initiate a meeting and know exactly what you are going to say, but halfway through your introduction you notice that you do not have everyone’s attention? Certain participants are sitting back with an absent look on their faces. Others seem to be listening but are not being affected. Despite the fact that the content of what you are presenting is good, you are not getting the reaction you expected. Something is standing in your way, so you are not establishing proper interaction with your environment.

As leaders, facilitators, and consultants, we cannot help but communicate with our bodies. We cannot set off one morning with a bag full of a good agenda, manuscripts and post-its and think: “No. Today I’m giving my body language a day off.” So, we might just as well master the act of communicating well with our bodies and the space around us.

This article provides answers to the question of how you, as a leader, facilitator, and consultant, can train your interactive skills by consciously communicating with the use of body and space.

This article provides answers to how, in the moments you are on the floor, you can create positive chemistry in the team or the group by adopting an appropriate position both in terms of your body and the space surrounding you. Communicating consciously with the use of body and space takes practice. In addition, you can make use of the Feedback Using The Mixer resource at the end of this article.

The article is part of a series of articles, which provide answers to how you can facilitate participatory processes. If you would like to learn something about how to engineer a positive training or meeting process, you can find answers in two other articles in the series: “Training” and “Facilitating”. In the article that follows, we use the term “facilitator” as an overall expression for any leader, consultant, or chairperson responsible for facilitating a process of development amongst a group of people.

Studies of personal communication reveal that, whenever there is doubt about a message, we ascribe 93% of the overall meaning of that message to body language and tone of voice. The actual words of the message take up only 7%. That means that if a facilitator kicks off a participatory session by saying ”I am really keen to hear your thoughts about the process of reorganisation” while slowly retreating in the room with arms crossed and allowing their gaze to drift off, then their overall expression will give participants the impression that what the facilitator is saying is something they have to say and not something they really want to say. They come across as lacking in credibility.

As a result, the participants will not make a genuine contribution, and the process will not achieve the desired effect. However, the reason the facilitator happened to move backwards in that situation might be quite different. Maybe the room was chilly, and the facilitator wanted to grab his/her sweater.

Maybe he/she wanted plenty of time to get to the sound system to switch on some music. But what matters in this situation is that their intention was at odds with the signal they were giving off. Their body language “cries out” and invests their words with an entirely different meaning.

Body language training: A shortcut to credibility and positive chemistry

Facilitators who make a conscious use of body and space succeed at creating interaction at two levels:

1. They succeed at creating interaction between their own bodies and their own words, and this creates credibility.

2. They succeed at creating interaction in the group, and this creates positive chemistry.

When you succeed at giving off a signal of credibility, your audience puts their trust in you as a person and in the message you are attempting to convey. As a basic rule, the greater the consistency between body and words, the greater the trust.

When there is consistency, you give off the signal that you can vouch for what you are saying. Even more importantly, you give off the signal that you own yourself 100% in terms of what you do. This evokes an impression of professionalism, professional security and competence, which means that we, as an audience, feel secure and can concentrate 100% of our energy and attention on the actual task.

Once you succeed at creating positive chemistry in groups, participants start to trust each other. If you come up with an appropriate seating arrangement and position yourself in the space in such a way that participants feel they want to make a contribution, it will help increase trust amongst the participants. When there is a high level of trust in a group, the group will perform better.

Interaction is regulated to a great extent by body language and spatial rules relating to how people interact with one another in a space. Just think how radically the mood of a group can change the moment you move to a space with a completely different seating arrangement. As a facilitator, it is crucial to know the rules of body language and space, which govern interaction. That will enable you to make conscious use of them to create the effect you desire.

Non-verbal communication training is an extremely effective way–for some a straightforward shortcut–to consciously create positive relationships characterised by trust and positive chemistry.

There is one area of theory and practice, which, since the turn of the last century, has dealt extensively with how to acquire such a thorough knowledge of the rules of interaction so that by a conscious use of body, space and words, one can portray any conceivable type of interaction: the technique of acting1 . For facilitators, the use of this knowledge is an obvious choice. However, the techniques of acting require a certain amount of translation if they are to be used meaningfully in an organisational context. Lene Kobbernagel has spent the last several years carefully selecting and translating the techniques of acting, which are appropriate to bring into play in the context of meetings, presentations and training sessions2, and has brought them all together in a tool called “The Mixer”.

Interaction is about taking up appropriate space in a relationship. If you take up too much space, you dominate the relationship, and the people you are talking to will either hold back or overassert themselves. If you take up too little space, there is a likelihood that the people you are talking to will not take you entirely seriously. The more you turn up your own volume, the more distinctive, clear and dominant you will be in the interaction. On the other hand, the more you turn down your own volume, the more space you pass on to others.

As facilitators, we need to be able to alternate between taking up a lot of space and taking up less space. For example, if you want to kick off a meeting with a strong introduction, it is a good idea to take up more space than when, at a later point in the same meeting, you have to facilitate an exchange of ideas when the criterion for success is for the participants to take up space and make a contribution. The Mixer is an overall picture, which shows you how to turn up and turn down your own volume in an interaction.

The Mixer comprises a total of six faders, each of which represents a rule, which has a substantial impact on an interaction. The six effects, which you can use to turn up and down your volume with the Mixer’s faders are: attentiveness, authority, authenticity, empowerment and inclusion.

By activating the appropriate rule, you create each effect. The six rules are divided into three categories: energy, body and space. You can work on each category in two dimensions: a physical dimension and a relational dimension.

The Mixer enables you to work on trying out one effect at a time. You can select the effect you wish to create and then practise using the particular fader, which results in that effect. For example, if you want to work on regulating your empowerment, you can work on Centring and Periphery. If you want to work on regulating your authenticity, you can work on the I and the S. You can also use the Mixer to provide body language-related feedback to colleagues and others. This makes it a useful common tool for training. The Mixer provides you with a precise, conceptual apparatus and a more acute focus when decoding your own and other people’s body language.

Read more about how the Mixer works by downloading the entire article.