Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 6

Later that eventful Christmas season when I was seventeen, I was tobogganing with a couple of friends on a cold, icy afternoon. The first run went smoothly, so with seventeen-year-old bravado, I said, “We didn’t go fast enough.” My friends suggested that perhaps I’d like to try a solo run, so I did.

I got a running start, jumped on the toboggan, and crashed headfirst into a tree on the second turn. I fractured my skull and was taken to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania. The neurosurgeons there operated on me for a subdural hematoma—a blood clot—that was putting pressure on my brain and causing intense pain.

I was in a coma for a few days and, at some point during that coma, I died briefly—for a total of about fifteen minutes. I came back to life, woke up, and asked the nurse, “Where am I?” because, despite the cliché, it was what I wanted to know first.

I think the doctor was relieved too, because my question meant that I was at least roughly intact, mentally.

As it turned out, I was alive, yes, but not everything was normal. Over the next several weeks, I noticed that something odd had happened to my mental processes. The world—or at least the people in it—had become distant and strange for me.

I couldn’t figure out affect—intent—in other people. Their words seemed hollow. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking or feeling. I knew I should be able to tell what was going on with other people, but I couldn’t. Everyone around me seemed like automatons, robots, without the affect I was used to before the accident.

Something in me had switched off, and I had no idea what. It meant that people were suddenly complete mysteries to me. It was terrifying.

So I began to study body language consciously, in a deliberate and indeed panicked attempt to figure out what people were feeling, what their intent was, what they actually meant. I focused obsessively on gesture, facial expressions, posture, the ways people revealed tension in their arms and shoulders, the way they moved closer or further away from each other, their smiles and frowns—everything, in short, that I could see that might tell me something about what they were feeling.

Then, after a couple of months of agonized and largely unsuccessful efforts to read people, efforts that were making me more and more anxious and depressed, something switched on again. The part of my brain that read other people effortlessly, more or less, switched back on as mysteriously as it had switched off.

But the whole experience awakened in me a lifelong interest in body language, gesture, and the conscious effort to understand what other people took for granted, happy to pick up emotion and intent for the most part unconsciously.

Over the years, I’ve continued to study unconscious human behavior to try to understand how people actually communicate. My work, first in a university setting with public speaking and Shakespeare students, and then with clients over the past two decades, has given me a rich set of experiences in the practical implications of focusing on body language in order to make communication more effective and persuasive for leaders and future leaders in politics, education, business, and entertainment. More recently, startling advances in brain science have made it possible to have the beginnings of a rigorously tested and grounded understanding of this essential piece of human behavior.

Out of these experiences and from these advances in science, I have developed the seven-step process to communications mastery you’ll find in this book. The integrated system is mine; the research that underpins it comes from many scientists around the world.