In this session, we have the opportunity to really focus on the body and the voice and look at what we are doing. It is not as easy as it looks, and it is not that the skills are difficult, but we have habitual patterns.

Our key skill is breathing, and it is my experience that nearly all of us under stress are breathing high. This is not correct. In fact, when we breathe high and move the chest, the tension here pushes the larynx up, and so the voice will go higher to try to get away from that tension.

Research has shown that the voice of leadership has three qualities: One, it is low in pitch; two, it is loud; and three, it is slow. As a woman, my voice is an octave higher than a man’s, so I can’t go down and make it a man’s voice. If you are a woman, you can’t go low, slow and loud, but you can make sure that you don’t let the voice go higher than it already is.

I do not believe that in our business environment we need to breathe in to relax. I have had great success working with people by breathing out. Put your hand on your stomach. To breathe out, the stomach goes in. The diaphragm is the key.

Let’s move on from our voice to actually listening. One of the funny things about the virtual environment is that silence is not golden. People love to hear that you are constantly going, “Right. Mm-hmm (affirmative),” or there is some kind of movement. There are three things you need to move: your head nodding forward, your eyes blinking and your smile. Nod, blink and smile like an idiot.

Think about what you do. Think about whether your eyes sit. Think about whether your mouth closes. Think about whether your head jams. I promise you one of these things will happen, and you need to have a little mantra, which is why I turned it into something to remember: Nod, blink and smile like an idiot.

One technique that people need to know about is how to interrupt others. I see it like a ball game. If we could imagine that air is a literal thing, a ball that we catch, then when someone else is speaking, they are carrying the ball. However, if you want to get your voice heard, you have to catch the ball. There’s no point standing at a distance going, “Can I speak?” You must go once you get the ball, or you will be interrupted again.

Now, we mentioned that the eyes are blinking. What else do we do with the eyes? I find that when I ask people all about eyes, they go, “You look away until you don’t feel comfortable” or “You don’t look away.” Everybody has a different rule. What are you supposed to do? Well, in the end it’s cultural, but it all starts in the same place.

We all start with a certain movement. Why? Because the eyes reflect the way the brain is thinking. For 80 percent of us, when we are thinking of something visual, we are picturing something in our mind. Most of us tend to look up. Some people will close their eyes. Some people will go out of focus. But most of us look up for visual thinking.

Not only do we look up, sideways and down, but we look to different sides for different types of information. Most people will look to their right-hand side for created or constructed information. And they’ll look to their left-hand side for remembered information. It may vary for you, but you will look to different sides for different types of information.

Working with people from different cultures, we have different techniques for the different audiences that we’re working with. With our Western culture, we look straight ahead, but we have got to work out how we don’t look like a psychopath. We know that we need to blink. But blinking too quickly says that my mind has gone elsewhere.

We can’t just keep looking straight ahead. We need to have some eye escapes. There are two eye escapes. The first eye escape is that you can get away with just about any behavior if you ask permission. So, we use a phrase like, “Let me think about that.” That triggers to the person you are speaking to that you are going into your thinking mode.

The second eye escape is to look at a thing. It may be your knuckle. It may be a pair of glasses. It may be a pen. Why do I get away with that? Because you can see what I’m looking at. I’m not losing your trust by going into my thinking area. You can see it.

This is discipline. This is practice. Controlling your eyes looking straight ahead is actually something you can pick up very quickly.

Now, using your own eyes, how do you guide the eyes of others? Well, one little trick that I think is really worth knowing is how you guide people’s eyes to that thing that you are looking at. And often that’s a PowerPoint. If I wanted to direct your eyes to my PowerPoint, I might say, “Let’s have a look at the PowerPoint.” Now that means, “Look at me.” When I’m ready for you to look at the PowerPoint, I might reach out to your eyes and guide them to the PowerPoint. Now, look at this, the front of my hand. This is trust. The hand is flat, never a clenched fist. I go straight with your eyes to here, and then I offer you the information back. [visual]

Note that I only speak when I’m in this direction; I don’t speak while I’m talking to the PowerPoint. [visual] You must come back to the people with whom you are engaging. It’s about managing your eyes. And it’s about managing the eyes of the people around you. Hands are a critical part of that.

Now let’s think about where the eyes go. If I wanted to guide your eyes to imagining something, I’d take your hands up like this. [visual] I’d take your eyes up by taking my hands up with the flats of my palms. My palms are open. So, I might say, “Let’s imagine what this could look like for you in five years. Let’s imagine that I could use one hand. If it’s a big dream, I’ll use a big hand. If it’s a little dream, I’ll use a little hand.” And when it comes to feelings, I guide the eyes down like this. How does this feel for you?

This is called congruent gesturing. We know the eyes go up for visual, sideways for auditory and down for kinesthetic. So, we mirror that with our hands. We talk about the future. We talk about the past. We talk about the present. There are good things, and there are bad things. Maybe there are good and bad in the past, and there are good and bad in the future. How are you communicating and guiding the eyes and the thinking of the people with whom you are working?

What if I were to do incongruent gesturing? Many people will just flip their hands like this repetitively. [visual]

So, what have we got? We have our breath being low. That’s your starting point. We have the voice of caring that gets air out and the voice of trust that continues to flow. We have our eyes looking straight ahead. We are nodding, blinking and smiling like an idiot. And it is really important that we are guiding the thinking of others by using our hands.

Honestly, I believe that the body and voice are the missing ingredients of leadership. We need to think more intensely about them and what we do because this will help us have all the success that we need.

Dr. Louise Mahler is a foremost expert in body language, voice and emotion. She has a Ph.D. in business, and degrees in organizational psychology and music. Her skills as a master practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming pull together her academic study and years of professional performance on the European opera stage to put her in a league of her own. In the process of completing her Ph.D., Mahler observed a missing ingredient in corporate leadership around the unsung wisdom of the mind-body-voice connection she calls vocal intelligence, a major component of the Mahler Method.