The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, Revised and Updated

2.4. DELIVERY

In any oral communication, much depends on the nonverbal aspects of performance—the tone of voice, the facial expression, and the accompanying gestures. Exactly how much do these nonverbal aspects contribute? In 1971, Professor Albert Mehrabian stunned the world of communications with his conclusion that only 7 percent of the meaning of a communication is in the content of the words that are spoken, while 93 percent of meaning comes from nonverbal communication.^[] His widely cited conclusion was, however, based on artificial laboratory studies involving the use of single, mostly ambiguous words, and Mehrabian didn't claim that his findings were applicable beyond the resolution of simple, inconsistent messages. As L. Michael Hall ...