Unconscious Leakage!

From our free The Pegasus NLP Newsletter

When learning NLP Rapport one of the first exercises people experiment with involves matching and then mis-matching non-verbal behaviour. And it never ceases to amaze me!

In the exercise people pair up and carry on a conversation about something of interest to them.

One of the pair, person A, person has the task of matching person B's behaviour subtly for a couple of minutes and then deliberately and very obviously mis-matching their behaviour.

So A will carefully emulate much of B's behaviour – such as their eye contact pattern, how they use their voice and their overall posture. After a while A will break eye contact and begin looking about the room, OR speak in a very different voice pattern to B, OR make some dramatic shift in posture – all the while carrying on the conversation in exactly the same way.

No Surprises

There are no surprises. Each person knows what is happening and what will happen. Yet when A mis-matches there is invariably a noticeable change in B's behaviour. Even though B knows that what A is doing is part of the exercise they generally falter in their conversation and they will often stop altogether.

What I find continually amazing, even though I have been using the exercise for about twelve years, is that B's reaction is in no way neutralised by the fact that they KNOW it is just a set up exercise! In discussing it afterwards people report that when they were first on the receiving end of the mis-matching behaviour they felt insulted by the mis-matcher, or felt shocked, or snubbed or felt as if the other person had lost interest – even though they knew it was all simply an exercise!

The Power of the Non-Verbals

Rationally they know that it's just an exercise and that the mis-matcher is not losing interest in them nor are they being deliberately insulting. But emotionally  they respond as if this is, indeed, the mis-matcher's intention!

Such is the power of non-verbal behaviour!

The much-quoted 'holy grail' of communication skills' trainings is that our non-verbal behaviour accounts for 93% of our message. This is a highly questionable 'fact' the validity of which few people choose to question and I believe  that a much lower figure would be more realistic.

However what is beyond question is that our non-verbal behaviour is very powerful indeed – because it is to this non-verbal aspect of our communication that people most immediately and most emotionally respond.

Intuitions and the Non-verbals

No-one has yet come up with a comprehensive answer to what exactly is intuition. But it certainly includes the unconscious process of picking up and processing non-verbal information.

This is happening all the time. Every shift in a person's inner emotions is transmitted to the world through their non-verbals - their body and voice.

When you feel a little apprehensive, or relaxed, or irritated, or attracted there are resulting electrical and chemical changes throughout your body. These affect blood flow and muscle tension.

Unconscious 'Leakage'

As a result of this there will be visible or hearable alterations in your eye, arm and leg movements, in the muscle tonus of your face and body, in your posture, your breathing patterns, the pulse in your neck, the colour of your skin, the size of your lips, the contraction and dilation of your pupils, and in the sound and rate of your speech.

You may think you are doing a great job at hiding your feelings but you are only hiding the gross and obvious signals. There is still an unconscious 'leakage' and this is picked up “unconsciously” by the other person. (which simply means they are registering it without being aware of doing so).

Sooner or later (it often occurs after the encounter is over) this information that they have unconsciously picked up gets through to their conscious attention as a feeling about you – as an 'intuition'. 

Why it is hard to lie!

This is why it is actually very difficult to be a good liar or con-artist. Our  non-verbals will usually let us down. Most of us have experienced the situation where you meet someone and have a satisfactory conversation with them. But afterwards you have an uneasy feeling about them.

Typically you'll say something like “I don't know… I can't quite put my finger on it… but I don't feel right about that person.”

Ignore this at your peril!

We ignore our ability to pick up non-verbal messages at our peril. Doing so is the cause of many a teenage broken heart (and quite a few twenty-, forty- and sixty year-old broken hearts, too.) You meet someone, feel strongly attracted to them, and then begin dating them. You energetically and actively ignore your intuition that they're not right for you or are not to be trusted. And, sure enough, your intuition proves right in the end. And you're left to rue the day your passion over-ran your intuition.

Non-Verbal Experts

Successful business-people tend to not only have a highly developed intuitive antenna about people but to also pay respectful attention to it. Successful sales-people and competitive sports-people, too.

But the true artists in this game have to be – mothers! With your mother lying is pointless. At least when you're face-to-face with her. You have a passing chance on the telephone because she's only got the voice to go on. But it's not easy to convincingly lie to your mother face-to-face. She has been getting to know your non-verbal since many months before you were even born!

NLP & Non-Verbal Communication

Any thorough training in NLP will ensure that you acquire a highly developed ability to recognise and respond to this very subtle form of communication. This is because it is one of the foundation skills on which so much of the NLP 'magic' depends. Applying NLP to communicate skilfully, or to develop/p really excellent relationships, or do coach someone in personal development or to use most of the well-known NLP techniques requires that you have an excellent ability to recognise non-verbal communication.

How to begin?

1. Pick one area and stick with it for a week or two – then move on to another one. I would recommend that you make the next few weeks your “Voice Tone Period”. Use this time to really hear voice tones. (This is a great place to begin since you can also practise it on the telephone.)

2. For the only the first 90 seconds in any conversation pay most attention to the tonality of the other person's voice. After 90 seconds forget about it and carry on as normal.  

3. At the end of the day summarise what you have discovered and recognised. Do this by chatting about your discoveries or write them up in a note book – or both. This is developing the skill of sharpening your senses – or, in NLP jargon, Sensory Acuity.

4. As you get better at hearing subtle shifts in tonality begin to also guess or, if appropriate, ask the person about what has changed in their mood. This is the developing the skill of Calibrating – learning to recognise what a particular shift signals about the person with whom you are conversing.

That's all you need to do. After a couple of weeks of doing this your Sensory Acuity and ability to Calibrate in this area will have improved considerably. Now move on to another area. You could begin to study the relationship between, say, breathing patterns and mood shifts.   

Words of caution and encouragement 

It is not a good idea to show off your newly developed skill as a sort of party piece or an 'I can read your mind' trick. People are quite sensitive to how you respond to their non-verbal communication. Displaying a lack of respect with regard to it may well create long-term animosity.

Conversely, recognising and responding respectfully and appropriately to non-verbal communication is one of the most effective ways of developing and maintaining rapport. Providing that you do draw a person's conscious attention to what you are doing or what you have done, your skill in this area will enhance your ability to create and to maintain enduring personal, social and professional relationships.

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