Which is more important: what you say or how you say it? Explain your answer.

It is all in how you say it.

Before I went back to school to get my Kinesiology degree I spent years in sales, both in person, over the phone, and online sales. Everything boils down to building rapport. If I can talk to you for 5-10 minutes, get you to trust me, empathize with you, be on your side, I can get you to buy anything. On the flipside I have found in some of my classes that I can infuriate teachers by agreeing with them in a contrary manner and they wind up disagreeing with what they just said in order to argue with me. If you tweak your body language and tone enough, you can even get people to think you said something completely opposite of what you actually did say.

 

I agree it's how you say it, however what you say and in what order can be important too. I worked in a call centre and could calm anyone down (even a poor father who had received a faulty PC on Christmas eve). It was important to listen and genuinely try to empathise not sympathise. I also tended to word things slightly differently than colleagues. Some of my colleagues would just jump straight in with the bad news in an uncaring way, then the typical customer response was to ask for a manager and refuse to listen or accept anything my colleague had to say. On the other hand if you start out with empathy you get the customer on side and they tend to accept that you will do your best for them and accept your resolution.

 

I think the way you say it has tremendous weight. A simple "Thank you!" from my wife means totally different things depending on how she say it.

For me, a language teacher at my high school taught us about Transactional Analyses - which had a great impact on how I interact with others, and gives me a way to peel away the confusing layers of communication to reveal the real meaning. This infuriates my wife, as I don't respond to her "anger-buildup" when we fight, but instead turns it into an adult discussion (she's missing the "release" of a good "fight").

 

How you say it. 90% of communication is non-verbal to start with.

As an illustration, a true story from my youth. I grew up in a small, white English Canadian town. The local senior baseball team brought in an "import" to play for them from the US, a black guy named Butch. Butch loved it here and settled down here for a few years. One time at a practice, some of the players were teasing him and using some rather abusive language. My father asked Butch why he put up with it.

Butch replied what they said didn't bother him, because they didn't mean anything demeaning about it. He said in the US, when they called him black, they meant he was a nigger. Here, when they called him black they meant his skin was dark.

It isn't what you say, it's what you mean, and that is carried by how you say it.

 

How you say it.

I've had more trouble than you can shake a stick at because of my tone of voice. I think eye contact is crucial to adequately understand another. The other might write something incomprehensible that you'd understand instantly if you could see its eyes. The import of what I think I'm saying often gets lost in the translation another must necessarily do in order to try to hear what I'm trying to say. I'm all for the written word & highly admire clear prose.

 

What you say.

Fun story - there's a whole group of people out there, myself among them, for whom 'how you say it' does not exist. Tone, inflection, meter, pace, pitch and body language are all completely unintelligible to me in conversation. I understand them well enough if I pay deliberate attention to them, but then I'll probably lose the thread of what you're saying. Sarcasm is totally lost on me; you know how Sheldon, from the show Big Bang Theory, is? Just like that.

The thing that I find somewhat ironic about it is that I've been told I can be absolutely brutal with my sarcasm, although I would never characterize it that way. If I were going to cut someone down I'd do it very deliberately.

 

I'll agree that in advertising, how you say it is important, but the product/service/idea behind the sell needs to have substance. Yes, you can sell the steak by selling the sizzle but the steak, when purchased, needs to live up to the sizzle. The fact that it usually doesn't, turns me off to pitches of any sort. I now assume all advertising is false advertising, at some level. 9 times out of 10 it is designed to manipulate the consumer into buying the product rather than honestly promoting a good product. Buyer beware. I rarely, if ever buy a product based on a sales pitch or media ad.

I often wonder how many other people totally disregard advertising claims. Considering the amount of advertising and marketing dollars spent every year, I'm guessing not many. I'm certain that the market research done reveals that consumers are swayed by the hype in great numbers.

On a personal level, I am usually very careful with what and how I say things. I generally don't want to hurt someone's feelings by inadvertently spitting out the bold-faced truth. It doesn't always work, especially in places like this. I recently found out that I'd highly offended someone on another internet site with what I'd considered a very clear expression of a position - one they took an entirely different meaning from.

I can be petty and sarcastic but I usually reserve it for those who deserve it.

 

Yeah, I'd definitely pay my first class tickets to sit on the 'how you say it' band wagon.

I learned a pretty bad habbit from my family of being painfully blunt and honest at times. After some of the trouble thats caused I've learned to be a lot more eloquent and selective with words.

I also work in client services. The very nature of my job involves dealing with delicate clients who are already pissed off on the one side and support engineers with delicate egos on the other. I'm good at my job and have most of my clients on board because of the very careful way I say things. My first rule is to treat them like human beings and show them I'm a human being, clients love it, because for once they're dealing with a service desk where you deal with a human being.

 

you can't have one without the other. what's more important to you breathing, the air or your lungs?

 

"Where's the beef?" is what I'm trying to think , when I hear the sizzle. I'm constantly annoyed by my boss, who never seems to get to the "real" point. He's aiming at "psychotrapping" me to accept the fact, that he is uncapable of arranging the shifts equally and in due time, so that those with more empathy would allow him to change the schedules whenever necessary. Later he conveniently forgets, he made any promises, but he trusts I keep mine.

It's better, when he sends me a brief text message of suggested shifts. I can briefly accept them or not, but we don't have to go through "misunderstanding" each other face to face.

Since I'm only substituting, when needed, he needs me hanging around and available. It's not important for me to hear, what he thinks of my work, his words don't mean much, because the only honest feedback is the promise of a next period of working days. I just need to know them in advance early enough, so I can arrange things with family.

 

I get a bit confused when percentages are rhymed off about how we communicate. Communication--as evidenced here-- is very complex. To throw a label on the percentage of how 'we do it' does not take into account the very individual way we transmit, process and receive information. Each of us has our own 'filter' which we have honed since we began to discern the many ways we communicate. Effective communication varies depending upon with whom you are communicating.

 

The 90% non-verbal is thrown out often by psychologists and psycho-linguists, and is really meant to say that most of the information in an exchange is carried by non-verbal means (intonation, pitch, speed, verbal cues, etc.). I never finished my psychology degree largely over one incident that totally shook me. It involved interviewing a classmate and reporting the results. The intent was identify what was "really" being said, and especially what was NOT being said. Women in general are much better than men at this, being socialised and probably biologically programmed to notice the non-verbal, unspoken parts of the conversation. Turned out I was exceptionally good at it (at least in this case) and scared the living shit out of the classmate I interviewed. Her shocked expression at my revealing to the class the sensitive, personal underpinnings of her feelings about an innocuous topic was something I definitely did not like. So I became an accountant.

 

Thank you for sharing that piece of your life, greywolf. I enjoyed reading your assessment--you became an accountant?!

I did the psych degree thing and beyond. People are fascinating in what they say, think they are saying, do not say (between the lines).
Now I'll share with you. I too have a very high degree of what you have. I'll call it intuitiveness. It makes for a very difficult fit in a couple's relationship because let's face it, no one wants their partner to be able to 'read their mind' all the time.

I sometimes use the phrase 'I'm confused,' when I'm looking for clarification and in this case when I've tired of hearing the same old percentage flung around and hope to hear something new or more precise.

No offence, anyone. I'm a tad prickly today.

 

psychology - didnt have any appeal to me after I read about experiments with monkeys. Put a mother monkey in a cage with her newborn and heat the floor, then study how long mon spends hopping from one burning foot to the other until they put down their baby and stand on it. Think it was something about parent child bond in monkeys - whats the fucking point I thought.
On telesales - they used to call me 0898 (sex phone numbers) after I not only flogged a beauty makeover and photo session to a transvestite, but then proceeded to fight for his equal rights when the company didnt realy want him as a customer because of his gender. When its animal cruelty stuff, I find I tend to get more info over the phone. One occassion chap thought I was his receptionist as I introduced myself by my first name and told him I wanted to talk to him about the starved of food and water horses that were on land he was renting out. When he realised his mistake, it was too late for him to backpedal, and so he gave me information that otherwise he wouldnt have and probably shouldnt have.

 

Getting slightly off-topic... but I was working towards a masters in experimental psychology in a primarily applied/clinical school. I took a number of courses that I probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Fangirl: I know the 90% figure can be sort of a red flag that can make a person (especially one like me) say "show me the research that proves it's 90%". I tend only to quote it as an illustrative figure that most communication is non-verbal... how you say things is more important.

Cyn: I had a classmate whose primary goal in psych was to learn how to "read" people so he could tell what was going on in their everyday thoughts and actions. I didn't really have much use for him because he was looking to manipulate people. But I don't know that I'm really all that good at it, it just seemed in that situation I did exceptionally well.

CC: But even then, trying to get anything that would physically harm an animal past the ethics committee would have been pretty tough. You would have had to show some serious exigencies or major potential benefit.

 

Cant remember exact details - it was in our copy of Psychology, Gross - or the other way around. The tales of how researchers proved men are dumb for a pretty girl were quite funny - but - hey, remember the dog with the extra head transplanted - practical use? Maybe for those who have been frozen after death - or just their heads. Pavlovs dogs - yeuk.

 

I tend to be in the 'how you say things' is much more important community.
But what you say: word choice and use of certain phrases, for instance, is obviously also very important.

I would never work at a job that required me to manipulate people in order to get them to buy something, but I have definitely found in my current job that how I present an idea to a client can make or break their acceptance of my suggestions - because the key to influencing people is giving them the perception that you are authoritative, trustworthy, reliable, etc...and that you care about what they care about. You can't accomplish that with just any assemblage of words.

 

Humm. For some reason I thought of my friend . She is 'a lady of a certain age' - a small child during the war. She will park her car near the air pump at the garage, and she will ask a man if he can explain it to her, because her husband usualy does that - and they end up doing her tyres for her. She said she is doing them a favour, because they think, silly woman as they drive away, (hence they deserve it) but she has made them feel usefull, so she is actually doing them a favour. Says they drive away feeling better about themselves. Its the smile that works most, and the good manners - they offer, she doesnt ask. In that instance, I think its the way that she asks for assistance as well as the words. Old men fall over themselves for her - attracted by the smell of home baking. Maybe different bait for different fish?