It’s a great day to discover the missing ingredient of leadership. When it comes to face-to-face communication, the thing that communicates the most is the body. There are various statistics on this, but every single one of them will show you that the body is over 50 percent of the communication when we are talking to each other. And the second most important thing that is really critical for us is our voice.

Let’s look at some of the skills of our body and our voice and see if we can improve them, raise them to attention and help other people improve in what they do. Our first exercise is about both body and voice, and it’s how we breathe. So, take a deep breath in. Did you find that you lifted your upper body? Put your hand on your stomach, and breathe in again. Do you find that your hand goes in? Well, that’s the wrong way. The way that breath works is that when the lungs fill with oxygen, the diaphragm actually goes up and down.

And when we breathe in, the diaphragm goes down. We see the expansion of breath in the stomach, so when you breathe in, the stomach goes out. We need to think about the stressful environment that we are in. Under stress, the diaphragm does not move at all. It goes hard. We need, in business, to know more techniques about relaxing and breathing. When we are presenting, when we are on a webinar, when we are talking to other people, there is very little relaxing. We need to energize our body in the right place, and we do that by making sure that the diaphragm goes in the right direction.

Try this: Put your hand on your stomach. Don’t breathe in; breathe out. Your stomach should go in. That’s the way breath works, and we need to make it work every time. So, with your hand on your stomach now, breathe out. Now, vibrate your vocal folds, and say, “Hi.” The stomach goes in. That is how sound is made.

We are focusing on the breath out, and this is really important because so often I hear about focusing on the breath in. The word “inspire” actually comes from the Latin verb “spirare,” which means “to breathe.” And to inspire is not about you taking air into yourself. It is about you giving air out so that you can inspire others. That is what we need to do.

So, we’ve got our breath down. What have we got left?

What is our placement on the screen? I’d like to do the arm test. Take your arms, looking at your screen, and put them out to the sides. That is a really great way to measure whether you are actually right in the middle. If one arm’s longer than the other, you are not in the middle.

We need somebody in the picture, and we need a little bit of space at the top of your head. We have to be straight on with the camera right there. This virtual world is not going away, so we need to get it right.

The next thing is your positioning. It’s important that you are sitting up straight. People put their body to the side, or they put their head to the side, or they have their mouth on one side. All of this has messages of contempt in the camera. Sit up straight to have your most professional look.

I look at the screen and think, One of you is speaking. I can’t tell which one. So, what are we going to do in this space right here to bring it to life? There are three things that we need to do, and it’s all about loosening the various components. The first component we loosen is the neck. The neck actually needs to be flexible. When we get defensive, it’s like we’re backed up against a wall. And we jam the neck because we are trying to protect a very delicate part of our body.

Here’s the hinge, right here. [visual] Put your fingers there, and nod your head. Nodding sounds easy. It’s not. Actually, many people nod backward, which is always seen as arrogance, so we nod forward. That does not mean the whole body forward. That does not mean the head forward. It means the hinge here, nodding vertically down. Nodding quickly says yes. Nodding slowly does not say yes. It says, “I’m flexible of neck, flexible of mind.”

The second thing that moves are the eyelids. Research has shown that eyelids move 15 times a minute. That’s approximately a blink every four seconds. So now, with the head nodding slowly, we blink two, three, four. And if you are in the camera, in your virtual environment, you are listening, and you are showing that you are listening, flexible of mind, free and open.

The third thing is actually to loosen the jaw. It is a discipline under stress and under every circumstance to keep that mouth open. We know that there are 19 different types of smiles, but the one we want is called the Duchenne smile.

The Duchenne smile has two components. One is that the mouth goes sideways. The second component of the Duchenne smile is the orbicularis oculi. The muscles around the eyes need to contract as well, and that will give you the smile that we love. These muscles are under conscious and unconscious control. So, unconsciously, if something makes you laugh or smile, you’ll do it properly. We need, as professionals, to be able to do this on demand under stress.

Now, what size smile? There are different types of widths of smile, and one of them is called the American smile. The American smile is the one where the mouth is open at least two fingers.

There is a range of smiles from no smile at all to the American smile. I don’t want no smile. I want a bit of a smile, and a bit of a smile at its most basic looks like this: The lips are separate. They are just divided because it guarantees that the jaw is loose. To get this right, press your tongue to the top of your palate, and you will find that the lips slightly separate. That’s what I call your base smile.

So, you are bringing your best self to the engagement, and you are bringing in the missing ingredient of leadership, which is how you manage your body. How else can we communicate? Let me tell you the missing ingredient in the body are the hands.

We can still use the hands in the virtual environment. We do have the ability to use our hands within the screen. Not out here but back here where we are around our head and there is tons of space to engage with people. [visual] Now, we use gestures for several reasons. One is actually to communicate with people. Two is that it frees our own body.

So, we have our hands out here. [visual] They need to be congruent. Gestures are a way to remember information because if you can place information in space, you can remember it more clearly. We are keeping the hands within the diameter of the screen that we have, but we are using them.

We are in a difficult situation with COVID, but over the next couple of months and next couple of years, we will work that out. It will be different from the past, and we need to recognize that, but we will work with the skills that we need and incorporate them into our body so that over the next couple of months and into the future, you bring your very best.

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.