 Sometimes being an effective communicator can feel a lot like being a juggler, right? There are a lot of different things we're paying attention to. We're trying to be an effective listener and use language properly, but one of the major aspects we need to consider is nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is a massive part of communication overall. We know that in terms of outgoing communication about 35% on that is verbal, meaning the language that we choose. But 65% of our outgoing communication is nonverbal, and so as communicators ourselves, whether they're sending messages or whether we're trying to interpret the communication of others and find meaning there. Nonverbal communication plays a big role. Things like eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, your tone of voice, even your clothing. These are all nonverbal channels as we'll discuss. So nonverbal communication is an important aspect of our communication skills overall. So then we're going to take a look at the nature of nonverbal communication, some of the foundational principles of nonverbal communication. So let's start with the fact that all behavior has communicative value, or as research or Paul Waslowic put it, you cannot not communicate. Everything you do or don't do, say or don't say, has communicative value and communicates something, including all of our nonverbal behaviors. So all of that behavior, whether we intend for it to or not, has communicative value. It has meaning and people will interpret that, even if it's not the same meaning that we have for it, people will interpret that. So we need to be aware of that. Nonverbal communication is primarily relational. We use it to express how we feel about a message, how we feel about another person. We don't use it so much to express content while we can. It's just not as common. So for example, if I wanted to say, if I was trying to express the two most significant generals in the American Civil War, were Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, if I want to communicate that to you, I'm not going to do that nonverbally. That's hard to do nonverbally. I'm going to express maybe how I feel about those generals or how I feel about the Civil War. But I'm going to have to use verbal communication to express the content. But nonverbal communication is primarily relational to use for other things rather than expressing content. Nonverbal communication is ambiguous. It can have a variety of different meanings and interpretations. So we need to be aware of that, that most nonverbal communication is ambiguous and open to interpretation. If I said, okay, what is this person expressing with these different facial expressions? I mean, some of them have fairly straightforward meaning or interpretation, this straightforward smiling or frowning. Those are fairly clear, but a lot of them could be interpreted in a variety of ways. We could all look at this and come up with different meanings for what that particular facial expression might be trying to express in that moment. So nonverbal communication is ambiguous in that way. Nonverbal communication does occur in mediated messages, meaning when we're texting, we're emailing, we're using social media, even though we're lacking those channels, those are channel lean communication. We have found ways to include nonverbal communication in those mediated messages. We use all caps, for example, to kind of simulate yelling or shouting or whatever, but we primarily do this through the development, I've done this through the development of emojis or emoticons, right? So this is the very basic one, the simple one, you have the colon and the closed parenthesis that we used to use for a smiley face. And so we incorporated that to indicate the reason sarcasm. And then we evolved into some more different kinds of faces and instead of using the actual icons on the symbols on the computer, they came up with these graphics, now we have all kinds of stuff like this. You can see that, you know, so we have all kinds of ways that we can express ourselves nonverbally. My favorite is the ice cream one. I really enjoy that one. But we use that to communicate emotion and relational aspects through mediated messages. Nonverbal communication is also very much influenced by culture and gender, just kind of an overview of these things for cultural influences. We look at things like emblems and the use of personal distance and the differences there that we use in different cultures and view those as far as nonverbal communication. The meaning of eye contact and different facial expressions, just the way we greet each other, you know, in the United States it's common to shake hands, but in other cultures it may be common to bow or to maybe even, you know, little air kisses on the cheek or something like that. So all of these things are influenced by culture. All these nonverbal behaviors are very much influenced by culture and relative to that particular culture. The same is true for gender. We socialize different nonverbal behaviors and meanings for different genders, right? We consider some, you know, these masculine behaviors and others that are feminine behaviors. And so we kind of associate those with the various genders, including things like emotion and eye contact, personal space. All of these things will be impacted by those gender influences. So in general, we can see that nonverbal communication has a lot to do with overall communication and an impact there. And there are a lot of things that we need to consider, just as foundational principles in the nature of nonverbal communication. If you have questions about anything related to nonverbal communication, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will begin to have new consideration for the impact and the understanding that nonverbal communication, that role that it plays in the overall communication process.