The age-old adage, “actions speak louder than words,” has become very relevant in communication in today’s society. With the growing amount of service oriented jobs, hard skills are not enough in today’s economic climate (Lazarus, 2013). In order to succeed, workers need both hard and soft skills. Hard skills are skills such as accounting or finance skills, whereas soft skills include verbal and nonverbal communication. A study by Albert Mehrabian, currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, is most famous for the rule of 7%-38%-55%. Mehrabian finds in any communication scenario 7% of information received is through the words spoken, 38% is through the tone of voice, and 55% is though bodily movements (depicted in Figure 1). According to this study, 93% of what is communicated is done through nonverbal communication (Mehrabian, 1981).
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