I recently delivered a Telephone Techniques course and as part of that I used the 'Communicating Without Body Language' module. I must admit that I was slightly apprehensive about asking learners to discuss a controversial subject but I tried 'should cannabis be legalised' anyway! The discussions and activities following this resulted in some excellent learning points and really set the scene for moving on to the use of tone of voice. I would definitely recommend this activity.

Since the workshop involved telesales I felt it was important to talk about the impact of Body Language when we communicate and to illustrate how it is still important when selling over the phone. More importantly to encourage the participants to think how this can be done effectively when visual cues are obviously absent.

This is a simple module that can be run quite quickly and illustrates the key points of body language very effectively.

The participants enjoyed the activity and the subsequent discussion quickly identified the key elements of body language that are missing when communicating over the phone. It was then very easy to facilitate a discussion around what things could be done to enhance the communication skills and we identified a number of practical tips that people could put into action quite quickly.