3 ways to communicate

Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at UCLA, says there are 3 distinct forms of communication that synergistically inform how we communicate.

There’s visual communication—also known as body language—such as your posture, eye contact, gestures, and facial expressions.

There’s vocal communication—known as paralinguistics—such as your pitch, tone, volume, and intonation, that make up how you say what you say.

And then there’s verbal communications—what you say when you say it.

According to Mehrabian, 55% of a persons' initial feelings for us are made by the visual stuff, 38% are made by the vocal, and only 7% comes from the verbal (although it's a full 100% when it comes to texting and writing things down).

Whether or not he’s right isn’t really the point.

The point is that when it comes to communication, it helps to focus just as much on the former few than the latter last.

And to give people a little more slack when what they say isn’t what they mean (especially if how they sound when they say it, or how they look when they say it, doesn’t add up).

They’re not often imbeciles. They’re just out of practice.