A friend was in the hospital awaiting surgery. It was a serious procedure and she was riddled with anxiety. I had come along to help her advocate for herself and offer moral support.
The doctor entered the room to give her a pre-surgery briefing. He leaned with his back against a counter by the side of her bed as he described what she would be going through, his hands behind him, resting on the counter.
From this position, he was facing her at a 90 degree angle as she lay on her back on the hospital bed. If he were not in the room, she would have been staring up at the ceiling.
Watching, two things stood out to me. First, in order to pay attention to him, she had to turn her head to the side at an awkward and uncomfortable angle. Second, the physical difficulty of turning her head like that was causing her a degree of stress. And who needs excess stress just before a surgery?
I found myself wondering why the doctor couldn’t see this, and why he didn’t adjust his position. And it’s not like the necessary adjustment was complicated. All he had to do was stand at the foot of the bed and address her from there. Then she wouldn’t have to crane her neck to make eye contact with him.
When the doctor left the room, she turned to me and said, “Did I pick the right doctor?”
That question stuck with me. It wasn’t anything the doctor had said that caused her to question him. It was the experience of the interaction itself. Whatever he intended to communicate, something about his behavior had left her feeling less confident in him than she had before he entered the room.
This wasn’t the first time I had seen a doctor talking to a patient like this. It had happened to me several years before when I was being prepped for heart surgery. As in this case, the doctor leaned against a counter and addressed me from the side, forcing me to strain my neck in order to listen.
Two incidents are not a pattern. But the similarity was striking enough that I felt compelled to draw some inferences from them.
Why, in both cases, did the doctor lean up against a cabinet? And why, in both cases did the doctor fail to see the patient’s discomfort and make the simple adjustment of moving to the foot of the bed?
I have a hypothesis that I’ll share soon. It’s one of many possible alternatives. It’s based on a lifelong study of nonverbal communication, but it might be wrong.
The Signal He Didn’t Know He Was Sending
And that’s the real point.
Most people are pretty good at sensing nonverbal cues and adjusting to them, even if they’re not consciously aware of doing so. But that is not the same as understanding them accurately.
Without realizing it, we are constantly attempting to decode other people’s nonverbal cues and translate them into meaning. But the meaning we interpret is not always the meaning the other person intends to send. Often the person we’re reading isn’t really intending to send a message at all. But we’re still imputing meaning to their behavior regardless of their intent. My friend certainly did.
I can’t be absolutely certain what that doctor was feeling, but I have an educated guess about what I was seeing. When human beings experience a rush of anxiety, they look for ways to calm themselves down. One common way is a form of pacifying behavior called “anchoring.” They hold onto some immovable nearby object, steadying themselves and taking comfort from that sense of stability.
If you think about it, you’ve probably seen this before. You probably even can remember a time or two when you’ve done it yourself. Perhaps you’ve leaned over and placed your hand on a desk. Maybe you’ve placed your hand on the back of a chair. Maybe you’ve leaned against a wall. There are many reasons you might do any of these things, but getting an unconscious sense of stability and comfort is one of the more common ones.
I believe that’s what I was seeing. Maybe it was something as simple as the knowledge that he was about to perform a serious procedure. But I suspect there was something else going on as well. He was standing in front of an anxious patient, and we have a tendency to respond emotionally to the people around us.
Failure to read others’ body language very often comes when we are busy focusing on ourselves rather than the person with whom we’re communicating. In other words, it happens when we are too busy trying to fulfill our own needs to even think about the needs of the other.
I think it’s probable that these doctors didn’t see the discomfort of their patients because they were trying to alleviate their own discomfort. But I think there was something else happening at the same time, and this is where the interaction becomes especially interesting.
How Nonverbal Signals Create a Feedback Loop
The doctor’s seeming discomfort didn’t stay with the doctor. His behavior became part of my friend’s experience of him. She interpreted what she was seeing as insecurity, which made her more anxious. And that increased anxiety would inevitably begin to show in her own behavior.
If her anxiety was contributing to his own discomfort, he responded to it by engaging in a pacifying behavior. She saw that behavior and interpreted it as a lack of confidence, which made her more anxious. Now she was sending even stronger signals of anxiety back to him.
This is one of the things that makes nonverbal communication so powerful, and also so important. It isn’t simply a matter of one person sending signals and another person receiving them. We respond to each other’s signals, and then we respond to the responses we get back. An interaction can begin to spiral even when neither person fully understands what the other person is feeling.
What This Means for Leaders
I’ve seen this same dynamic play out in business many times. A leader walks into the room worried about how the team is going to receive some difficult news. Maybe he crosses his arms. Maybe his movements become more rigid. Maybe his voice changes. The team doesn’t know what is happening inside his head. They only have the signals in front of them, and they begin attempting to interpret those signals.
Suppose they interpret those signals as a lack of confidence. They become more guarded, and the leader sees their reaction. Now he starts to worry that he is losing them. His discomfort increases, which changes his behavior even more. The team sees those additional signals and becomes still more concerned. Before long, everyone in the room is reacting to everyone else, and nobody had to interpret anybody correctly for it to happen.
When it comes to communication, our intent can be very important. But it’s not as important as what the person we’re communicating with takes away. The question isn’t “what are we saying with our body language.” It’s always “how are we being interpreted.” Whether people are reading us correctly or not, they are still responding to the signals they receive.
A leader can feel completely confident, yet still communicate uncertainty through posture, movement, or voice. A salesperson can care deeply about a customer, yet come across as distracted or impatient. A doctor can be absolutely certain of a successful procedure, yet behave in a way that makes an already nervous patient feel even less secure.
That’s one reason I spend so much time talking about pacifying behaviors in my programs. They can give us useful information about our own emotional state, but they can also affect the emotional state of the people around us. Our discomfort affects our behavior, other people interpret that behavior and respond to it, and then we interpret their response and respond again.
Sometimes interrupting that loop requires a surprisingly small adjustment. Instead of focusing exclusively on what we are feeling or what we are trying to communicate, we can pay attention to the effect our behavior is having on the other person. In the case of that doctor, he could have simply stepped away from the counter and walked to the foot of the bed.
Would that have changed what the doctor was feeling? I have no idea. Would it have changed what my friend thought he was feeling? Almost certainly. And in that moment, that distinction mattered, because she wasn’t responding to whatever was actually going on inside his head. She was responding to the signals she saw.
And those signals were so powerful that when he walked out of the room, she turned to me and asked, “Did I pick the right doctor?”
Bring These Ideas Into the Room
In Signals for Success, Christopher Carter shows leaders and teams how to read the room, project confidence, build trust, and recognize the nonverbal signals shaping their interactions.
