to take control of a room, a meeting, or a negotiation. You want to do it subtly, without everyone else becoming aware of your sudden wielding of power, because it’s far more effective that way.
So what I’m going to do is to show you how to learn to become conscious of those aspects of your unconscious behavior that are most important for confidence, intuition, charisma, and leadership. You’re going to learn to control them and then you’ll be able to bring them to conscious awareness when you want to and leave them to your unconscious mind when you’re not trying to take charge.
That’s mastery. And it begins with the conscious control of your own hitherto unconscious gestures, and the conscious reading of others’ gestures, something you have also left to your unconscious mind until now.
What the Research Says about Your Hands: They’re Smarter Than You Think
Let’s go a little deeper into the language and meaning of gesture and its use. You need to know what’s really at stake. And it will surprise you.
Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow kept noticing something strange.10 One of the prime tests psychologists use to determine how advanced a child is in her development is what is known as the “conservation test.” This test has a child pour liquid from a tall, skinny glass into a squat, fat glass. Now, because the second glass is shorter in height, very young children will tell you that there is less water once they’ve poured it into the second glass.
But once a child reaches a certain point in her development, she realizes that the liquid is conserved—that it’s the same amount. That’s conservation, and it’s an important breakthrough in everyone’s development, as a child growing up.
Goldin-Meadow noticed that when you asked children to explain their rationale for figuring out whether the liquid is conserved or not, they gestured a lot. In fact, sometimes they gestured things that they didn’t say. Kids who understood the concept might, for example, flip their hands back and forth to indicate that the two amounts of water were the same. Some of the kids who couldn’t yet verbally explain the idea would also make that flipping gesture, as if their hands knew something their brains didn’t.
This was surprising, because the dominant view about gesture until pioneers like Goldin-Meadow taught us differently was that gesture was a meaningless accompaniment to speech, which was really the important stuff.
You Don’t Say What You Mean—You Gesture It
What Goldin-Meadow was noticing was that gesture and speech were different, and things were being said by the children with their gestures that they didn’t say with their speech. As she notes, “It’s hard even to think about gestures separately from speech. We (coded) them separately. So we’d code the speech without the picture, and then we’d turn the sound off and code the gesture.” The accidental result was that Goldin-Meadow and her fellow researchers noticed that speech and gesture were not the same.
You don’t normally notice this phenomenon in ordinary communication. As Goldin-Meadow says, “That’s not how our brains process it. Our brains just glom it all together and integrate it.” So it took an expert to notice that our gestures have meaning, and meaning different from what we’re saying.
You don’t notice this phenomenon consciously, but your unconscious mind is keeping track of it. Goldin-Meadow says, “We did some brain imaging studies that show that when there’s different sets of information, we do pick up on it … We’re just beginning to look at how people process those differences. We’ve got evidence that people will respond to a mismatch differently, because we’re seeing different brain patterns for matches and mismatches” between words and gestures.
So our gestures sometimes convey different information from our words, and our unconscious minds take note of those differences and process them. If you think about it from your personal awareness of the world, it makes perfect sense. We’ve all had the experience of conversing with someone who says one thing but gestures another, and we get what they mean from the gesture.
Goldin-Meadow worked out a very elegant, simple test for this. She had subjects listen to a story that involved a stairway. The researchers made the gesture for a spiral staircase, but didn’t verbalize that idea. Yet when they tested the subjects, they got the spiral staircase idea.
In another study Goldin-Meadow conducted, children whose teachers produced “grouping” gestures while explaining an algebra problem were more likely to talk about that idea later, even though the teacher hadn’t discussed it at all. Concepts introduced via gesture are picked up by the unconscious mind and can be vocalized later even if the speakers are not aware of the concepts consciously.
But Goldin-Meadow is honing in on a further aspect of gesture and speech, one that has fascinating implications for why we gesture. As she puts it, “If you gesture, it lightens your cognitive load.” By that, she means that it takes less mental effort to speak while gesturing. She goes on, “We don’t really know why that is. We just know that it is.”
It’s a mystery, but the implications are important. You need to gesture. If you don’t, you’re making your brain work much harder. So those power gestures you’ve been taught, where you in effect limit your natural gesturing to some spider-doing-pushups-in-a-mirror gesture because some coach told you that makes you look intimidating, actually make it harder for you to think on your feet—leading to a less intimidating you.
Goldin-Meadow sums it up: “Gesture isn’t just a reflection of speech.” One theory is that gesture predated speech in our evolution. We spoke with our gestures before we learned to vocalize. But whether that’s true or not, those gestures are important to our thought processes, to helping us communicate.
Let’s Go to Harvard
I’ve observed this phenomenon at work in a small-scale experiment I ran on some Harvard midcareer Fellows a couple of years ago. We had a group of about seventy of (very) high achievers. I wanted to see the effect of gesture on how they presented themselves to each other.
The experiment was very simple. I asked them to introduce themselves to each other. So, one by one, the Fellows stood up and took a minute or two to speak about themselves. I gave them no guidance beyond asking them to “introduce themselves.”
Then, after each one had finished, I took the speaker aside and asked him or her to adopt a specific gesture and then give exactly the same introduction again. I was curious to see the effect of open gestures on the thought processes and verbal patterns of people speaking in front of groups like these. The gestures I asked them to adopt varied, but mostly consisted of some form of open arms, exposing the torso to the audience.
Most of the speakers, before I coached them the second time around, in fact clutched their hands nervously in front of their stomachs, behind their backs, or at their sides. So the effects of my instructions to them were to greatly increase their openness to the audience.
The results were astonishing. In every case, the amount of personal information the speaker divulged greatly increased on the second try, when he or she was forced to be open through the open gestures.
I’ll never forget one student in particular, who, on his first introduction, stated his name, in a flat, unemotional way, and then proceeded to identify his year in the program, the courses he was taking, and how much longer he had to go.
Then I coached him to open his arms out at his sides like a preacher at an altar, what I call the
