By Penny Righthand, CLU, ChFC

I am a firm believer in nonverbal communication. When someone I call does not call me back, I know that means he does not want to talk to me. Of course, I don’t always pay attention to that piece of information. If I did, I very likely wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.

But I do pay a lot of attention, consciously, to the clues my clients send my way during meetings. It’s probably a hangover from the days I worked with criminally insane inmates at the county hospital. It was very important to read their nonverbal clues and ask them what was up, since they were responding to voices I would never hear. These voices were telling them to do things I didn’t want to hear about, but needed to know.

Reading the nonverbal cues of our prospects and clients tells us more than we may want to admit.

Selective listening
We all know that reading the nonverbal cues of our prospects and clients tells us more than we may want to admit. But it can save us a lot of aggravation. Trouble is, sometimes we have an agenda that gets in the way of noticing or paying attention. So we don’t ask then and there, when we have the chance. We hear what we want to hear.

I was trying to think of a way to help a new agent in my office learn to identify these cues. They are not fun to acknowledge, sometimes. But it can be very expensive to ignore them. A prospect once told this agent that he would call her back next week and arrange to drop off “the check.” It was a big one. The agent bought a new, pricey car to celebrate, before he “never called her back.” Somewhere in their conversation was a clue that the call and the check would never arrive. But she heard what she wanted to hear, not what she actually heard.

Clearly, we have been badly trained in communications. Perhaps it has something to do with the new-ish permissive child-rearing techniques. We don’t want to say “No!” to our children. Maybe if we don’t say it to them, they won’t say it to us, we think. So, they never get a clear message that “No” means no, and that no one usually dies from saying it. In fact, it is very kind to communicate clearly what you want and don’t want, what you like and dislike, what is dangerous and what is not.

Those terrible twos
When those same babies turn two and start saying “No!” despite our earlier efforts, we try desperately to rid them of this terrible word. We call it “negative.” We ignore it. Aha! We have seen our own parents ignore the word no!

We conclude that it’s not a very important word. So we grow up learning to ignore it. “We’ll just pretend no one said that to us,” we think. And we proceed with our original intent.

Imagine if we did that with traffic signals. We’d head 70 miles an hour toward our destination, ignore the yellow flashing light, the yield sign, the dead end sign, and go right over the cliff.

Of course in our client interactions we don’t do this intentionally, but haven’t you hurried right past those signs? I have.

No language barrier
I was recently on a plane with a lot of non-English speaking people. Something struck me. Though I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, I could tell if they were engaged in their conversation. I could tell if they were angry or happy or if they were interested in each other. I could hear some “attitude” in their tone of voice, see it in their physical bearing. I could see if their legs or arms were crossed (if they weren’t carrying luggage) or if their fingers or feet were tapping impatiently.

It occurred to me that in a client situation, I don’t need to know what their nonverbal communication indicates; I only need to identify it and ask them: “What do you think about that? How does that feel to you?”

It’s a flashing yellow light, a yield sign. I don’t have to stop; I just have to ask directions, and then go on.

Penny Righthand, CLU, ChFC, lives in the San Francisco area. You can contact her by mail at 70 Washington St., Suite 220, Oakland, CA 94607, or by email at prighthand@ft.newyorklife.com.

This Month

Cover Story

Expert to Expert

Making the Transition

ViewPoint

Top     LEGAL NOTICES     Contact Webmaster    

Change/Renew NAIFA Membership     Get Advisor Today: Join NAIFA

© Advisor Today 2003. All Rights Reserved.