Communication is more than words. This is a true statement. There are many claims about communication that are not true. Our job as communicators is to separate the two and take the high road of quality and effectiveness at all times.

So let’s put aside a very popular and enduring myth right now.

Have you ever heard or read the statistics that 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice, and 55% is non-verbal physiology? A statistic attributed to Albert Mehrabian.

This and similar statements have been passed off as fact for many years, often without much critical thinking being applied by the purveyors of this “fact.” Let’s think about this statement logically. It says that if you or I go on stage to speak to an audience in a language that is completely foreign to them, 93% of our message will reach and be perfectly understood by our audience. All we would have to do is sound good and look good and we would have a 93% success rate. Really? I invite you to give it a try and then tell me how it goes.

This is now correctly known as the Mehrabian Myth. Albert Mehrabian conducted the excellent and scholarly studies of it in 1971, and since then, unfortunately, the results have been misunderstood by many thousands of communication “experts” and authors, as well as speakers, educators, and trainers. Albert Mehrabian himself tried in vain to stem the tide of out-of-context use of his results.

This is what the Mehrabian studies actually showed:

In two experiments, Mehrabian had an associate experimenter read single words to an audience of college students, single words such as gross, sweet, terrible, and maybe, first, 9 words in three different tones of voice only, and second, , just one word in three tones of voice with different facial expressions as well. He then asked the audience “How did you know what the speaker really meant?” Where did the audience get the clues they used to determine the real intent behind the words spoken? The words weren’t important at all, but the perceived intent of the speaker certainly was. In response to this question, audience members reported understanding the intent behind the speaker’s words from visual cues 55% of the time and from tone of voice cues 38% of the time. Only 7% of the time did the audience fully trust the actual words used to decipher the speaker’s intent. These are statistical averages based on the entire study, of course.

Mehrabian’s work focused on what he called “silent messages,” which is how people actually communicate their emotions and attitudes. His big idea at the time was that when words and non-verbal messages didn’t match up, people always believed the non-verbal part of the message. How many times have you heard someone say “I’m fine” and you knew just from their body language that they were far from it?

So we get most of our clues about the emotional intent behind people’s words from non-verbal sources. We are tuned to look for an emotional match of words, tone, and body language.

Usually we try to communicate with more than just single words. Many of us use sentences and paragraphs; some of us even create entire speeches. Keep in mind that our words form the content of our message. For our communication to be totally successful, our message and emotional intention must be correctly communicated and received by the recipient of the message. Communicating in this way is known as congruence or congruent communication.

So communication really is more than just words. But your words and content are vitally important and you should treat them as such. Combining your words and content with consistent non-verbal communication skills will make you a masterful and effective communicator.

I wish you the clearest of intentions.