Then when I was in fourth grade, my teacher taught us how to
write poetry, and I finally had a way of putting what I saw and heard on paper
in a way that didn't make people uncomfortable. Once I learned English, I could
remember the lyrics of every song I heard after hearing it once, a childhood characteristic
of many musicians. I realized my watching world could be safely expressed in poetry
and song. Every day from fourth grade until my sophomore year of College, I
watched people and wrote about the secret invisible world I saw in poetry and
songs. I filled large journals at night and carried small notebooks everywhere
I went. I would write while in my sleeping bag at sleepovers, while I dripped
dry at pool parties, or stood against the wall at dances. I wrote on the back
of church bulletins in the choir loft and sat on the church bus on our youth
group trips. I wrote during class, on long car trips, and while lying with my friends
on brightly colored beach towels on sunny Florida beaches. I grew up watching
and writing, painting the invisible world in words, so what I saw that seemed
invisible to others could be seen and understood. I wrote about the glow around
happy people, how love lifted your body, meanness made people sharp angular,
and sharp-edged, and loss made people look squeezed out and empty.
When I was 15, my sister Jan gave me her old guitar, and I
played until I grew calluses on the tips of my fingers, then I played harder.
Finally, I took what I saw and sang about it. Sitting on my princess
four-poster bed (ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalog), I wrote songs and sang
for hours every day.
During the week, I took drama classes and joined the little
theater. My ability to mimic others' body language and take on others' emotions
grew. And in between, I read. I devoured three or four books a week. The authors
wrote about the lift of an eyebrow and the turn of a head. They must see what I
saw, too, I realized. I wondered why poets, songwriters, and authors were the
only ones who seemed to be able to talk about it. I read so many books that junior
high and high school librarians insisted I become a school library assistant.
They all said I had read more books than any other student. I was skinny and
stringy-haired. I had braces and large brown-framed glasses. I was an odd, journal-toting,
homely little nerd. Because I knew I was a nerd and there was no chance of ever
being cool, I embraced my nerdiness.
I stood out in the preppy sea of girls wearing blue skirts,
white sailor blouses, and Etienne Aigner belts. I wore bright-colored,
hand-made dresses and purposely wore unmatching socks. I didn't smoke in the
bathroom, drink at parties, or kiss on dates. I didn't date at all. Instead, I
read, and wrote songs and poetry. I was very happy expressing my wild invisible
world and was drawn to fun, creative friends, and day after day, I watched.
When I went to College, my journals
and notebooks filled a box.
In College, I majored in poetry, was president of the music
dorm, and became a little sister to the music fraternity. My destiny was certain.
I would move to
I stopped writing. Now I felt lost, too. In my sophomore
year, I was looking at the college course catalog and saw an interesting course
listed in the speech department. "Oral Interpretation of Poetry."
Famous poetry. Other people's poetry. The class was terrific. You gave a speech
every week about a poem. The teacher said, "Patti, you are meant to be a
speaker, so I signed you up to be my assistant next semester, change your major."
I changed my major to interpersonal and organizational communication and was
lucky enough to take a nonverbal communication class. As the teacher talked on
the first day of class, I had a life-changing
I worked as a substance abuse counselor that summer because
I thought counseling would be a great way to help others. It was awful. My
fellow counselors were admirable, but the clients struggled to recover. My
mentor said all of her clients from when she first started as a counselor were
cycling back. She was so discouraged she quit. I got all her clients. I listened
to the words of my clients as they talked about how they only had two cases of
beer or six bottles of wine over the weekend and how their spouses didn't see
that beer and wine weren't alcohol. Their words discounted their pain, but I
could see it. I could feel it. Their pain soaked into me. Their addiction ate
me up as it ate them up. Even though it was a challenging experience, I am
grateful I had the opportunity to work as a counselor because it made me
realize I wanted to help people prevent that kind of pain. I asked Dr. Clevenger,
the Dean of the College of Communication if
I could create a Nonverbal Communication major. He worked with me
through independent study so I could find and take all the classes in our College
and other departments related to the field. He had me search through the catalogs
of Universities across the country to see if anyone offered the major, and we
discovered that, at the time, it didn't exist anywhere else. We were both
excited that we could create it at Florida State, and he allowed me to create
it.
As I worked toward my undergraduate and, eventually, my
master's degree and later in my doctoral coursework in Interpersonal Communication,
with an emphasis on Nonverbal Communication, I took courses and researched.
In my master's degree program, I studied with Larry Barker,
the country's leading guru on nonverbal communication. He was also the author
of a book on listening. He had a big shelf in his office of books he had
authored or co-authored. I was very nervous the night before my first
presentation in his class. I remembered what my boyfriend, a top-selling door-to-door
book salesman in the summer, told me. "You're nervous because you rehearse
your failure, and what you rehearse, you will play out." So I sat in my
office and rehearsed my success. In my mind's eye, I wowed Dr. Barker.
The next day, after my lecture, Dr. Barker said, "You
were meant to be a speaker." He got me a gig lecturing to the Alabama
Speakers Association. And professors there said, "You were meant to be a
speaker." The same sentence grew in power. Why those exact words?
I taught College over the years and got incredible joy being
with my students week after week and seeing their curiosity and excitement
grow. I felt a genuine obligation to nurture them. What a gift those eleven
years of college teaching were. I got to be wild and crazy in the classroom. My
college students' short attention spans required that I do things differently.
I ran all over the lecture hall and played music thematically tied to my daily
lectures. I brought props, played games, blew bubbles, and performed live
theater. Each class was a chance to make magic with the students.
Each semester in my nonverbal communication class, I had
everyone dress wildly odd for the day, punk, hipster, biker. They had to go all
out and dress crazy for a day. That meant my one hundred and fifty students
dressed up and went out to the rest of the campus and the town and noticed how
people responded, and take notes, and were ready to talk about it in class. My
class, with over a hundred students each semester, took over Tallahassee, and Then
they came to class dressed in unconventional outfits and discussed it. One semester,
one of my students, who usually wore punk all the time, chose to wear a suit
and tie that day. He took out all his studs and safety pins, wore a friend's
loafers instead of army boots, and dyed his hair from purple to brown. He said
it was weird to see how people treated him. He said that he had become
antagonistic and cynical because, day after day, people treated him horribly.
Now, after going "conservative," he realized that he was creating a
hostile world for himself, a place where he could be mad and where he had an
excuse to be angry.
Incidents like this inspired me. I was researching
everything from sexual harassment and touch in the workplace to mirroring and
what makes us liked.
People in the community found out about my college class and
asked me to come to speak to their businesses. So then, I started doing
training for different branches of law enforcement. If you have ever spoken in
front of a tough audience, imagine speaking to a room full of men wearing
world-weary expressions and guns.
Dean Clevenger, who helped me create my major as an undergrad,
and another Professor, Dr. Ungerieght, head of the Media program, asked me to
join a consulting company they were starting. They were two of the finest
humans I have ever known. They modeled integrity and treated me with great
respect. Then they quickly encouraged me also to start my own so that I could
grow my credibility. So I established my own speaking business, Communication
Dynamics. Sometimes early in my career, I was discouraged. People did not
believe "body language" was a real science. I spent the first eight
years of my career convincing my audiences of its validity so they would begin
to explore how nonverbal communication could be useful in their lives. I was
not always respected in the universities where I taught or by corporations
where I spoke. I was the "touchy-feely body language lady." But I
kept doing research, writing, speaking, and, of course, watching.
