Don’t Wear Success on Your Sleeve. Wear it on Your Face.

by Juliana Silva & Bill McGowan

The ink that’s being devoted to analyzing President Trump’s state of mind could fill a Texas oil well.  “He’s coming unglued,” “his mood has turned foul,” “he’s pissed at damn near everyone,” screamed the headlines, even ones written on Foxnews.com. While the political pundits were attributing this perception of his heightened crankiness to political factors, namely the three M’s (Mueller, Melania and McRaven) we, as communications coaches, viewed it through a different lens, one that looks for inconsistencies in what people say and how they say it.  

A recent study at UCLA sought to determine what people remember most when they listen to a person speak. This seemed to us to be a valuable fact-finding mission, considering that effective communication is all about being memorable and persuasive. When asked what people remembered most, a shockingly paltry 7% said it was the words spoken by the presenter. 38% attributed it to how the speaker used his/her voice, and a whopping 55% said stickiness of the message was all about the speaker's facial expressiveness and body language. 

If you are someone who believes in the power of the written word, you might be initially discouraged by this study. We certainly were. But these findings should not make you put less emphasis on how you formulate the wording of your message, but rather, they should inspire you to rethink your mood, your expressiveness and your demeanor while you’re communicating.  In public speaking, most people lose sight of the need to fine tune their non-verbal communication skills.

With the President, the verbal and the non-verbal are usually in perfect alignment in how he communicates.  When they uncharacteristically fell out of sync recently at a post-midterms news conference, people noticed.  His prepared statement emphasized how the election returns were a resounding affirmation of him and his Presidency.  But there was trouble from the get-go.  He delivered his lines with about as much radiance as a five-watt lightbulb.  The words on the page might have been written to underscore a resounding victory, but they were delivered with a defeatist tone of resignation, and therefore rang hollow.  They were in stark contrast to George W. Bush’s famous 2004 post-election news conference in which he declared through a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary-look, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”   Bush looked supremely pleased with himself, which made him look like a winner.

When Trump launched into Q&A, things went downhill from there.  Instead of having the swagger and upbeat presence of a winner, his perpetual scowl made him appear even more short-fused and combative than usual.  He looked unhinged as he pointed a scolding finger at reporters and drifted away from the podium. While his words sought to highlight electoral success, his demeanor betrayed that narrative.  Simply put, he looked like someone who had gotten the tar beaten out of him.

That’s not how you go about comprehensively conveying a convincing message.

We encounter this disconnect between words and demeanor a lot in our communications training sessions.  People will say they’re “excited to be here,” but their facial expression makes it seem like they can’t wait to get off the stage.  They will say how a new company strategy will lead to great growth possibilities, but the flat pitch of their voice will make it seem like they are anything but confident.

For most of us, the problem lies in how we define public-speaking success.  We tend to place far too much emphasis on getting all the words right and never getting tongue tied.  Getting through a presentation technically clean makes us flatten out, both in terms of facial expressiveness and voice inflection.  We would much prefer that you not try to play it safe.  Put your emotional back into it.  If you demonstrate your own emotional investment in the message, no one is going to care if you have a minor stumble here and there.

To help clients incorporate more emotion into their public speaking we will ask them to identify the underlying emotion that accompanies a particular line or paragraph in a speech or presentation.  Are you supposed to seem proud here, or hopeful, or maybe incredulous?  If so, then put that word in italics and parentheses above that line in your notes or script.  It’s a simple stage direction that can insure that you don’t forget to smile or bring a sound of hope and optimism to your voice at the appropriate moment.

To convey a more convincing message, we can’t rely only on only the words we say, especially when they represent only 7% of what people remember.  To have those words truly resonate, we must place greater emphasis on our vocal and facial expressiveness, those all-important non-verbal communication skills.