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.
What Gestures Really Mean
We haven’t always understood the importance of this second conversation. Not so long ago, scientists didn’t study the gestures with which we humans accompany speech because they were considered meaningless and obviously less interesting than so-called “emblems”—gestures with specific meanings, like the peace sign or the upraised middle finger.
So scientists studied emblems and downplayed the importance of gestures, because they didn’t consider them to be as thoughtful and important as those few gestures every culture has that are really hand signals—a kind of code.5
That approach hobbled scientific progress for most of the twentieth century, but researchers finally shook it off and came at gestures from the opposite direction: that they can have meaning, just not the same sort of coded meaning as words.
Now we understand that gestures actually precede conscious thought and can even shape and guide it.6 So important is gesture that we find it hard to communicate if we are unable to gesture.7 Try speaking for any length of time with your hands tied behind your back, either literally or figuratively. You’ll find it surprisingly difficult.
Gestures are an essential part of the communications process, because they signal directly from your unconscious to everyone’s else unconscious mind what you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, and what you’re intending toward those other people.
The first thing we want to know when we see people coming toward us is, are they friend or foe? We unconsciously evaluate their stance, their posture, where they’re putting their hands, and what they’re doing with them, in order to ascertain with astonishing speed whether we’re about to get a punch or a kiss.8
There are two essential points here. The first is that you’re always signaling, and so is everyone else, about your intentions and feelings. The second point is that most of the time you don’t pay conscious attention to all those signals—either the ones you’re putting out or the ones others are sending to you. Your unconscious mind handles all that.
Why Gesture Matters
Our minds are constructed to attribute intent to the gestures, attitudes, and postures of other people. We’ve evolved to be able to do that effortlessly, for the most part, by pushing the activity down to our unconscious minds, which are faster and more powerful than our conscious minds. So that’s a good thing.
Except when we want to understand what it is that we’re reading so effortlessly. What we’re actually doing is monitoring the thousands of minute adjustments in body language that the people around us are constantly making. They do so to express their unconscious attitudes, intents, and emotions. We do so in order to understand what they’re saying. The whole process probably preceded our ability to vocalize as a species.
To understand why this counterintuitive situation might exist, it helps to learn a little about how the brain works. It’s not what we think. Most of us have this idea that we can call the “Mr. Spock Theory of the Brain,” after the Star Trek character known for his logic and ability to keep his emotions under control. So, for example, we imagine that we get a thought, such as, “I’m thirsty,” and then we direct our bodies to act on that thirst, reaching for a glass of water. Neat, logical, and very Spockian.
But it turns out that our bodies don’t work that way. What actually happens is that we get an unconscious intent or desire—like thirst—and then our bodies start acting on that intent or desire. Only after that—entire nanoseconds later—do our conscious minds catch on to what’s happening. In effect, our conscious minds say, “I just noticed that I’m reaching for water. I must be thirsty. Yes, that’s it. I’m thirsty. Good thing I’ve got a drink of water heading my way.”9
That’s counterintuitive, and it probably makes you a little uncomfortable. But that’s the way it is. Our conscious minds are just along for the ride, like one of those birds that sits on a hippopotamus, picking off the bugs that swarm around the beast.
How Our Minds Really Work: Not So Much
We’re barely in control of our simplest, most basic needs, let alone our higher-order wishes and desires. Again, one of the purposes of this book is to give you far more control over what’s happening to you and your body as you go through your daily life.
Now, let’s be clear that most of the time unconscious control of moments, like that of thirst, is a good thing. If you were aware of everything your unconscious mind took care of, from keeping your heart beating and your body temperature relatively constant to monitoring your surroundings for incoming hazards, you’d quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer tediousness of it all. There’s a good reason why most of that stuff is run—beautifully—by your unconscious mind. It does it really, really well, so you don’t have to.
That frees up your conscious mind for more interesting things
