Nonverbal communication can be more powerful—and even more influential—than what we say with words, and can have a tremendous impact on our success as hearing health care professionals.
Experts in interpersonal communication have estimated that nonverbal communication constitutes approximately 70 percent of what is involved in communication. In other words, only about 30 percent of communication involves the actual words that we use. Placing the impact of nonverbal communication at 93 percent has been deemed a little high, however, so a safer level is thought to be around 80 percent—which is still quite an impressive figure. This means that only 20 percent of the impact of our communication is from the words that we use.