You will be surprised at how hard it is to follow the conversation. You will hear broken phrases, agreement to something you haven’t caught, simultaneous talking, abrupt changes of topic you weren’t expecting (but, for some reason, the speakers were), and apparently incoherent exchanges of information. If it’s an average, reasonably equal exchange, you will be astonished at how fragmentary and elusive the communication is.
Why is that? Because we communicate first with the gesture for some things, and only second with the word. Because the “second conversation” is really the first. For certain kinds of communications, indeed most of the ones we really care about, we communicate first with the gesture and second with the word.
What does that mean? It means that when people communicate topics of great importance to them, they gesture what they intend a split second before the word comes out.
Why should we care about that? Because it turns the commonsense way we think about word and gesture upside down, and because those interesting implications flow from that inversion of common sense.
Gesture comes first.
You can confirm this for yourself if you go back to that restaurant, this time keeping your eyes firmly trained on those two people in conversation and listening very closely. Focus especially on gestures that accompany the noun phrases.
How did you get there?
I took an airplane.
Let’s say that’s one of the exchanges you hear and see. Watch the gesture associated with the word airplane. Depending on the information being conveyed, the gesture will start before the entire sentence or just before the word airplane itself.
If there’s strong attitude, such as, something like, Of course I took an airplane; it’s three thousand miles away over water. How else would I get there, you idiot? then the gesture may convey all the emotional freight in the communiqué—all the Of course it’s three thousand miles away over water how else would I get there you idiot part.
The person might shrug and turn her palms upward, while raising her eyebrows and looking hard at the interlocutor. She might shake her head and offer a half-smile. Those facial and hand gestures would get across all the emotional meaning she wished to convey to her friend. Maybe not in precisely those words, but close enough for both parties to get the message.
It’s the nature of most of our communications that they unroll like this one; we use surprisingly few words and convey the emotional colors and tones of the conversation mostly through gesture.
The Language of Love
When two people know each other well, the words are even less important.
Why? Because when two people know each other well, gesture can take up a larger part of the communications between them. In this regard, gesture becomes a kind of shortcut that allows the two to alert one another to important shifts in the conversation or strong feelings or topics to avoid. When two lovers meet, for example, not the ones in movies who have just fallen in love, but those who have had an intimate relationship for a long time, a touch, a few murmured words, and a kiss may convey all that needs to be said about a day, a meeting, or an important issue that has been pending between them.
Love 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.