However, the discussion about the importance of "body language" has experienced a renaissance with the advent of online coaching. Many coaches have completed their training at institutes that teach the importance of body language and - worse still - its "correct" interpretation by the coach.

The three myths

Let me go through some of the "myths" around body language that are still circulating in the coaching sphere:

1. interpreting body language is very useful for a*n coach

I don't believe that. And why?

a) The coach is not there to "interpret" the client.
b) The coach cannot know if he or she is "right" with the interpretation without asking the client.

2. body language contributes 70 percent of the meaning

The figure quoted varies between 70 and 93 percent and is based on a study "Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels" by Albert Mehrabian (Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S. R. (1967). Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31(3), 248). The study is understood to mean that people do not really pay attention to what the other person says, but rather to their body language. They trust this more than what is said.

However, Mehrabian's study was taken out of context: In the study, 62 women were asked to listen to a spoken word, specifically the word: "maybe". The speakers of the word were asked to convey either liking, neutrality or dislike. At the same time, the women were shown a picture of a person who supposedly spoke the word. They were then asked to interpret whether the person was expressing liking, neutrality or dislike. In this situation, the women trusted the picture more than the tone of voice.

So, no - you can't measure the percentage of meaning that body language has. Meaning is always created by two people together: What we do together in communication affects the whole person.

3. eye movements tell us what someone is thinking about

NLP and other approaches claim that eye movements tell us what a person is thinking about and even whether they are lying or not. If a right-handed person looks upwards to the right, they are constructing something; if they look upwards to the left, they are remembering something, so the claim goes. However, the claim could not be proven by experiments (Wiseman, R.; Watt, C.; ten Brinke, L.; Porter, S.; Couper, S. L.; Rankin, C.: The eyes don't have it: lie detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. PLoS One. 2012;7(7)).

If you want to find out whether someone is lying, you need to know the person and how they normally behave. If something is wrong, it may be useful to ask the person about it.

Open conversation more important than body language

The three myths mentioned above about the importance of interpreting body language, the primacy of body language when "sending" messages and the importance of eye movements as an expression of thoughts have been haunting the coaching scene for years and are also repeatedly taken out of the box in leadership development. This makes them neither more correct nor more useful. Sometimes I get the impression that people want to gain security and "knowledge" in this way.

But instead of seeking security in illusory knowledge, coaches and managers could learn to cooperate together with their clients and employees - in a slightly different way for each person. To do this, you have to talk to each other, give open feedback, have a good error culture and be a little generous with yourself and others. ,

The author

© Kirsten Dierolf

Kirsten Dierolf is an MCC with the International Coach Federation ICF and works in the areas of leadership coaching, executive coaching, team coaching and mentor coaching. In addition to managers, executives, entrepreneurs and teams, her target groups include coaches who want to develop their skills and coaches who want to obtain ICF certification.