How to Influence People, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 4Tool number 4: act as if

Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, is well known for his study on body language and is often quoted in NLP courses. It said that only 7 per cent of your communication is conveyed by words. This is obviously a very small number. But 38 per cent of your communication is conveyed through the tone in which you say something. That makes tone five times more powerful than the words you use.

There must be some truth in this as experience often shows us that tone is more powerful than words. You know this is true if you’ve been in a relationship. A man looks at his wife and asks with a confused look on his face, ‘Sweetheart, what is the matter? Is something the matter? Have I done something? What is wrong?’

‘Nothing! Stop asking me. Nothing is the matter!’ she screams.

I hope he doesn’t respond by saying, ‘Well, that’s good. I didn’t think there was.’

Of course something is wrong.

Actually, most of us are pretty good at picking up tone and we realise that tone is often more important than words. Most of us are good at picking up things like sarcasm, sincerity and insincerity.

Mehrabian also said that 55 per cent of our communication is conveyed by body language. And while these percentages are some of the most quoted by motivational speakers around the world, a lot of people have also tried to refute the exact numbers. Either way, moving the numbers to the side, there is no doubt that the most important and powerful form of ...