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A few years ago, I had a procedure done in a doctor’s office in which a small camera at the end of a tube was inserted into my body for the purpose of observing the inside of my bladder (you can imagine through which aperture.)  I have never been so terrified in my life.  I was trembling and could not stop .  I was out of my mind with anxiety.

A nurse stood next to me where I lay and held my hand.  She patted my head.  She rubbed my chest.  I held her hand with my two hands and put my cheek on her hand so she wouldn’t pull away, holding it for dear life.

“You’re gong to be fine,” she kept saying.  “Shh…” she said, stroking my forehead.  She spoke to me in such a way that she recognized my fear without embarrassing me..

When it was over, she got me up off the table, and walked me naked across the floor.  She sat me down on a chair where I continued to shake.  She got me a paper cup of water and held it up to my lips and tipped the cup gently so I could drink.  She handed me my clothes, but I couldn’t put them on.  My body was rigid with anxiety.  She dressed me, helped me stand and balanced me with concentrated watchfulness.

I never knew her name, but to this day I can see her face and hear her voice.  To me she was an angel of mercy, and I’m sure she is still out there like an angel, ministering with unflinching tenderness to wimps like me.

As a student of human communication, and the president of a small New Jersey consulting firm, I am interested in the behaviors that create trust, because much of leadership, salesmanship, and interpersonal influence depend on the communicator creating trust with her listeners.    While year after year nurses are rated as the most trusted of all professions, the pharmaceutical industry is about as trusted a Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Government

Lance Armstrong is alive today thanks to pharma. Magic Johnson is alive today thanks to pharma. My neighbors Donna, and Lucy are alive today thanks to pharma. Bob and Liddy Dole are enjoying themselves, thanks to pharma. For these people, and millions of others, the pharmaceutical industry has been a savior. Its remarkable rise to power during the last half of the 20th Century is paralleled only by the meteoric rise of the personal computer and the internet.  A staggering number of people alive today owe their lives to the medicines developed and distributed by pharma.  The industry not only saves lives:  It improves the quality of life for many chronically ill people, provides millions of high paying jobs, and leads the way to new discoveries that will benefit future generations.  Pharma is a savior—day after day.

But then why is pharma named in survey after survey as one of the least trusted industries in the country?  And what can the industry do to regain the trust it has lost?

Please read Charlie Green’s blog posting at www.trustedadvisor.com about this issue.  I have also copied it into a blog posting here on my site.

Charlie suggests that recovery starts with radical honesty and self-reflection.  What do you think?

Traveling to a foreign country, we will have trouble communicating with the locals if we don’t speak their language.  We may also have trouble reading their facial expressions.

Hillary Elfenbein of the University of California at Berkeley has done a study looking at local “facial dialects.”  As a management consultant, she used to notice that her colleagues were having a hard time with signals coming from people from different backgrounds–signals as basic as whether it was their turn to speak in a meeting.

In a recent paper in Emotion, she put her “facial dialect” theory to the test by comparing French speakers in Quebec to those from the African nation of Gabon.  Reflexive responses such as fear and disgust showed the least regional variation, while serenity, contempt, sadness, happiness, shame, and anger showed the most.

And in tests of recognition–on average, in-group members have about a 10 percent accuracy advantage–the expressions with the greatest cross-cultural differences proved the hardest for outsiders to interpret.

Now the U.S. Department of Defense has picked up on her work, and seeks ways to train soldiers to read expressions and gestures specific to Middle Eastern cultures.

Says Elfenbein, “This is something that can really help as our society becomes increasingly diverse.”

It can also help those of us who work in large, diverse business settings.  And when presenting, we must also be mindful of our facial dialect.

I have rarely seen a presenter in the business world whose facial dialect needs to be reined in.  Most of us need to be more expressive.  After all, there are people in the back row who want to see on your face what the information means to you.