The 7% Rule

Albert Mehrabian author of Silent Messages discusses his research on non-verbal communication.  The 7% Rule is touted by many communication coaches as a way to elicit pain to their prospects and clients and to validate 

In summary, he attributes to 55 percent body language and another 38 percent to the tone and music of their voice. They assigned only 7 percent of their credibility assessment to the salesperson’s actual words. Over the years, this limited experiment evolved to a belief that movement and voice coaches would be more valuable to teaching successful communication than speechwriters. In fact, in 2007 Allen Weiner published So Smart But … discussing how to put this principle to work in organizations.