Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 20

When two people know each other well, the words are even less important.

Why? Because when two people know each other well, gesture can take up a larger part of the communications between them. In this regard, gesture becomes a kind of shortcut that allows the two to alert one another to important shifts in the conversation or strong feelings or topics to avoid. When two lovers meet, for example, not the ones in movies who have just fallen in love, but those who have had an intimate relationship for a long time, a touch, a few murmured words, and a kiss may convey all that needs to be said about a day, a meeting, or an important issue that has been pending between them.

Love is expressed primarily through gesture. A look, an arch of the eyebrow, a touch, a kiss. You get the idea.

Many of our dialogues with others—and most of our important ones—take place nonverbally. Large portions of them are unconscious.

So gesture comes first, and it conveys most of the emotion that a communication intends. In addition to emotion, certain other basic things are conveyed. Relationships, spatial distances between people, physical motion and place in general, basic needs like food, shelter, sex, and so on—all of these are first gesture conversations, then only secondarily and later content conversations. Think of it as everything that a smart caveman and -woman would need to get along on a typical busy day defending the hearth, slaying woolly mammoths, raising the kids, and creating those cave paintings in the few minutes at the end of the day that a cave person can call his or her own.

What else is going on? Unconscious thought is faster and more efficient than conscious thought.

As a species, we’re always trying to articulate our feelings and telling people to get in touch with them, and so on, but in fact our feelings are doing quite well unconsciously. Unconscious thought is faster and more efficient, and may have saved your life on more than one occasion. It’s just that it isn’t conscious.

Here’s the next implication. Two people—or a leader and her audience—can have an unconscious communication, one that is entirely composed of gestures of various kinds, and only realize it consciously later on or not at all. The two conversations don’t even have to be connected.

When I say every communication is two conversations, both verbal and nonverbal, I mean that precisely. They don’t have to have an immediate, obvious connection. They often do, but they don’t have to. Think about the exchange between two people where one is bearing very bad news to the other. The bearer may gesture strong signals of comfort, love, and solidarity while quietly stating the shattering news in a simple, unadorned way.

There, the two conversations, though of course connected, are proceeding along two parallel tracks, and it is easier to see how the gesture is not merely an afterthought to the words. That kind of communication usually begins with the reassuring gesture or the look, which is what alerts the recipient that bad news is coming.

Or think about when two people are carrying on a flirtation under the noses of their colleagues while talking about meeting second-quarter quotas, for example. There, the two conversations are unrelated, to the great private amusement of the flirters.