3 Vs Disease, or, poor ol’ Albert Mehrabian

Anyone ever try to tell you what you actually say only supplies 7% of your credibility? Please tell me somewhere inside your skull someone jumped up and yelled “bullsh*t” when you heard that.

Mehrabian broke communications down into what we popularly call “3 Vs”: Verbal, Vocal & Visual. His research assigned 7% importance to the verbal (what you say), 38% to the Vocal (tone, or how you say it) and 55% to the Visual (facial expression, body language).

The research pertains ONLY to communication of emotions (feelings and attitudes) and situations where you are projecting “mixed messages” (face of misery, words of glee). In his words:

Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

I still talk about the 3Vs, explained properly, for two reasons:

• It’s valuable to break communication into the Verbal, Vocal & Visual to show why communication breaks down when limited to just two (telephone) or less (email) of these 3 contributing factors. Even if the recipient won’t know it, you can use the missing one/s to help a little. Try standing up and smiling on your next important call to see what I mean.
• You often need to use emotional credibility for certain aspects of your presentation to work. If you are blase about the project and you shouldn’t be, you have a problem.