Motion drives emotion: Why body language is vital for successful communication

Most people have heard the phrase “Smile while you dial,” referring to the link between your body language and how you sound on the phone. Even when you can’t be seen, your body language is crucial to how your voice sounds, and when your camera is turned off on a Zoom call, it’s even more important.

With “Zoom fatigue” and the ever-present need to keep people engaged, body language may be even more important now than ever before. When face to face with people, you can feed off the energy from others. Without that on virtual calls, your brain just doesn’t get the same sensory stimulus. Seeing how our communication affects people is what motivates us to communicate as passionately as possible.

This is as important in business as it is in our personal lives. We want the people to whom we’re talking to know that we care and are engaged in the conversation. We don’t want to discourage friends or lose customers because of a lack of emotion in our voices.

The growing trend for people to turn off their cameras on virtual calls makes it even more challenging to be an engaging virtual communicator. Your best ally in this situation is your body language. You can use motion to drive the emotion in your voice.