#008 Master Your Vibe - Nonverbal Communication for Parents

Welcome back to Henry’s Cabin — where we explore the love of family that drives us, the stories that guide us, and the life experience that forms us.

In this episode, we dive into one of the most overlooked but powerful tools in parenting: your vibe. Science tells us over 90% of our communication is nonverbal — so what are you saying without saying a word?

From the bedtime stories that calm your child’s nervous system to the silent messages you send when you walk through the door after work, your energy matters. It shapes how your kids feel about themselves — and they’re always listening, even when you’re not speaking.

I’ll share how to become aware of what you’re broadcasting, how to reset your vibe before walking through the door, and practical ways to tune your nonverbal communication so you build trust, connection, and calm — not stress — in your family.

Listen now, hit play, and take five minutes this week to master your vibe.

If you have questions, ideas, or want to share your own experience theriverghost@henrycoen.com

• Show Transcript

  Welcome to Henry's Cabin. This is where we talk about the love of family that drives us, the stories that guide us, and the life experience that forms us. So, let's play in the ukulele again because my previous bumper music, what do you call it, intro music, sounded like a horror movie in a swamp, according to my daughter. I explained that last week, switched the ukulele, because it was right here hanging on the wall. If you don't like it and you want to let me know about it, or if you just want to let me know any questions, show ideas, anything you have to say, email me. TheRiverGhost@henrycoen.com. That's Henry spelled H-E-N-R-Y Cohen, C-O-E-N.com. And also, if you want to go there and sign up for the newsletter, I'll send them out once in a while, you can find out about the middle grade series coming out. I'm currently in the query phase. But first, to tell you what this is all about, this is Henry's Cabin, the podcast. It's where we talk about the love of family that drives us, the stories that guide us, and the life experience that forms us. So it is. It's growth-oriented. It's directed toward parents, but I think anyone will take a lot from it. That's just the experience that I draw on a lot for some of the stories and examples and things like that. So, welcome. I mentioned I was in the query phase. So, yeah, I finished the past four years. I've been forming a three-book series for middle grade, which is that the ages actually expand a good bit past that. But my thinking was a book that would be really good. I just read Charlotte's Web to one of my kids that was transitioning from, you know, the huge books with pictures to a real chapter book, you know, a novel. And I noticed that the chapters in Charlotte's Web were the perfect bedtime story length. So that was my, one of the things I was thinking about, because I'm a big, I really love bedtime stories, I think. You know, kids go crazy at night, a lot of them. Their nervous systems are all jacked up, they get really vulnerable. They're downloading and processing all the information from the day. And sometimes emotions go all over the place, they just, they don't have that frontal lobe quite developed yet. And they're not really acting out, they're just, they don't know how to, process it. They just don't have the tools yet. So it's a great time to, I would feel their little nervous systems chill and go into, get grounded during bedtime stories. So I think it's a, I know a lot of people focus on the literacy aspect of it. That's great. That's, it's good to know how to read and read well. And that's a, that's a cool side effect. But I think the main reason to lay and read a bedtime story with your kids is for that daily connection. So that's coming up. So that's why one might want to sign up the newsletter so you know right away when the first book comes out. I'm going to try traditionally published just because the school system really tells parents what books are good to read and a lot of parents go there for suggestions. But that's not what I'm talking about on this show right now. The thing I want to get into is nonverbal communication. Okay. And, and, and all the way in. So 90, I'm going to misquote this. I should, you'd think I'd look at my notes right before this. 93% of communication is nonverbal. And from there, you can further break it down. Some of it is tonality. Some of it is body language. Um, That's why people try with texting to put emojis in and dress it up a little bit. Still, you miss. Even with emojis, you could take the thing as a couple sentences, probably three different ways. Maybe you know the person really well. You probably figure what they mean. But even then, sometimes people put emojis with everything. You know, and like, well, what do they really feel, though? Yeah, I know that it's like the emojis are just such a habit. You know, laughy face, cry face. Even that starts to lose its meaning. When we are reading people's tone, when we're reading their spirit, their vibe, we know it's real. Because you can't fake that. And some of us, you know, growing up in different environments, really got attuned to that. You know, some people can hit the door of their house as kids and know if it's going to be good or bad in there. and become quite skilled at reading between the lines, at understanding and reading a room, and knowing where people are at with them. They get quite attuned to it. It can seem almost psychic, but it's just... Maybe it is a little bit, but I think it is... We're so good at reading that because that's a part of the human experience. You know, language is part of communication, but it's not... It's certainly not the lion's share of it. It is actually a tiny part of it. So how am I communicating non-verbally and how do I up that game? Because especially if you are a new parent, and maybe you're a new parent for the third, fourth time, but still you can get overwhelmed. It can be very tiring. You may not be sleeping well. Maybe work's picking up a lot. Everything kind of fires at once, and it's easy to leak that stress. Kids being self-centered, of course, are going to take all of that personal. All that anger, all that frustration is just about me. And they don't tell you every time they take it personally. Sometimes, and I'm guilty of this as well, it can be very easy to think like, well, if they take something the wrong way or if they take it personally or if they think something bad about themselves based on a look I gave or my tone of voice or just the feeling I was omitting without even attempting to or trying to is going to be absorbed and taken about them and they're not going to broadcast that every time they may or may not share that and a lot of times they don't especially if it's habitual if this is not big news that you're acting like this or vibing like this you probably never hear about it and never know that's happening unless you ask and sometimes you really got to press because they can even feel that what you're trying to do is get them to fix your guilt and they might be like, I don't want any part of this. Everything's fine. Just do your thing. So, how do we fix this? Our nonverbal communication lives. If you've ever looked at Freud or any of this, he said there's three levels of consciousness. Well, the conscious, obviously. That's stuff you're thinking about right now. Pre-conscious and unconscious. And pre-conscious, you can access pretty readily. If I were to ask you, what did you eat for breakfast yesterday? Let's assume you're one that eats breakfast and eats different things for breakfast. Because if you didn't eat breakfast, it would just be an automatic answer. I don't eat breakfast. But let's say you ate all kinds of different things for breakfast every day. And I ask you, what did you eat for breakfast yesterday? What did you eat the day before? You can access that information. It'll take you a second, maybe. You have to think about it. Because it was not on the forefront of your mind. It's not the conscious. It's in the pre-conscious. You have to pull it up. You know, what was your first dog's name? You pull that up. You weren't thinking about it before I asked. That's pre-conscious. Unconscious is secrets of the soul. This is the deep, deep stuff that they're trying to access in psychotherapy where you lay on the couch and allow these things to bubble up through free association and things like that. So where does our nonverbal communication come from? A lot of it from the pre-conscious and unconscious. So how are you supposed to deal with that? What do you do? It takes some resetting, and I think it takes some visualization, too, to help program the pre-conscious as much as we can so that some of that seeps in the unconscious. And what we're broadcasting emotionally, spiritually, vibe-wise is targeted, is what we want to do. So I'm going to give some specific ways to do that. There was a movie, The Secret, that came out, I don't know, forever ago. And I think it gave the concept of visualization a bit of a bad... It was explained more so like visualize getting rich and you'll get rich. That's how a lot of people took it anyway. There's so much more to it than that. And if you look, if you've ever watched the Olympics, you'll see the athletes in the stands are getting ready with headphones on, their eyes closed, their robes on, and they are visualizing. And a lot of Olympic coaches walked them through that, if not all of them. I saw a thing the other day where the fighter pilots, the Blue Angels, were doing an air show. And they were going through the routine. They had headphones on. They all had their eyes closed. They're sitting around at a desk going through the routine, moving their hands, doing the motions, visualizing the whole thing because it's a known thing that this helps. It helps imprint that. So what do I want to do? I want to imprint on my pre-conscious mind the types of things I want to transmit to the people around me. And not just kids, but any people around me. So I may have to take a shift before walking in the door. So I'm a dad. I work during the day. And when I come home, I look at it. And this is really good. If you're like a new dad, you know, you're expecting one on the way for the first time. or you have a baby and new dads can have some weird expectations like my mom's gonna nurse and here's the nutrition they need to eat like get way too much in their business it's like you relax chill out first off uh and thinking other illusions such as i'm going to come home from work and just chill for a while because that's what i deserve having worked all day like every family's different that's not how I operated uh I looked at it as the second shift you know um now I not automatically I wasn't like I didn't pick that one up right away for a while I was like you know my wife would be like hand me a baby like I need a break I'm like okay great I'm excited to be able to help and then it after a while it's like well when do I get a break you know and it took a while to figure out that she never really sleeps. It's a series of very light naps, you know, in two-hour increments at best during that time period. So I get a break at work, honestly, because if you've ever spent a long stretch of time with a lot of kids, yeah, it's exhausting in a different way. So sorting that out, I went, all right, I got my attitude right. I'm like, I'm going into second shift. I'm going to get fired up on this. So what I would do to get my head right, because it was really hard when I would come home, especially when I was driving in traffic, and it was a bit of a half hour to 45 minutes to get home, and it was a stressful drive, it was hard to switch gears. So that irritation would leak, especially on her. So I started pulling over in a parking lot a few minutes from my house and took five minutes to get my head right because it's hard to switch that when i'm in the driveway it's like i'm on so there's no chance to take a breath and center and program that pre-conscious visualize what i want to look like and intentionally set the dial on my vibe. And I don't know how else to explain it. It's like I'm broadcasting. I'm a radio station and I'm broadcasting something all the time. And I need to pause and become aware of what that is. Because especially people close to me are going to sense that and take it personal. Doesn't matter if that's right or wrong. Doesn't matter if I tell them not to. And it's not their problem if they take it about them. If I'm interacting with them, if I'm in close quarters with them, it's about them. It just is. It affects them. It doesn't matter how much I tell them, well, get over it. It's not about you. It is. I'm around them. And I would feel the same way. And that's an unrealistic expectation to put on the entire world to just take what I'm putting out there, to just take what I'm putting out there how I expect them to and tell them to. It's my problem. So it took five minutes. And I would put headphones in. And I had this app. I still have it. I still use it regularly. It's like brain waves. It plays some type of vibration that's supposed to help you do something with your brain. I don't know. I didn't read it. I know I can set a timer on it for five minutes and listen to the ocean and focus on something. Really focus. Let me give a disclaimer. Pulling over for five minutes and scrolling reels is not meditation. okay that's actually going to drain your energy i really need to focus on specifically what i want which is i want to be of service in this moment right now i want to show up and relieve stress not add stress okay so during that five minutes of idea if you have a hard time with it here's a here's something that may help it's really quick and if you don't have a parking lot to pull over to if you don't have time for that, you're in a hurry, you can do this on the walk from your vehicle to the door. Three breaths, and as you let each breath out, you let go of anything messing with you from the past. That could be as recent as a minute ago to years ago. Anything that you are fearful about or is bothering you from the past, those three breaths are to find it on the inhale and let it go on the exhale. Three breaths to let go of any fear of the future or anxiety of the future, okay? Find it on the inhale, what's messing with you. And an easy way to do that is if you are angry about something, there's a fear behind that. Just be honest. You just ask the question, what's the fear? And it'll pop right up. Let it go on the exhale. And then three breaths to settle in to the present moment, 100%. By the time you hit that door, you're in the moment. And your vibe is completely different. Even if you do a breath, just on the inhale, dear God. And then when you breathe out, take all my fear. If that's all you have time for, just do that. It is a reset. And with practice, it gets more powerful. Like anything you put your focus in, it does get stronger and you can shift your vibe more powerfully and readily. And intentionally set your nonverbal communication. So that what ends up happening is actually the things that were irritating you go away. Because you start to see the result of being of service in that way and alleviating stress for other people. And their response, their nonverbal communication to you, sets up a feedback loop. In the same way that a negative feedback loop of nonverbal communication can be set up, if you walk in the house all irritable and messed up. And some days it is really difficult because it's crisis after crisis. And crisis, I mean, like, this has to be paid. This phone call must be taken for work. I mean, that's how we pay for all this anyway. I've got to deal with it. Now they're choking on something, and I've got to deal with that right now. So this phone calls it. So now this gets... There's just... I'm not even days like that. There are stretches of time like that that roll on for months. And there is the justification of I must tend to all of these things. I have to take care of these things. That's true, but you actually lessen the work and the problems you create and the fires you have to put out by practicing this. So long-term, if your goal is, I've got to take care of this stuff, this will help you to take care of that stuff more efficiently because you're going to function more efficiently. And you're going to have more of your strength and your energy rather than burning it on all that fear and anger and be able to quell a lot of that. So back to the feedback loop. I mentioned that, and I think you can probably put it together from what I said, but I think it's worth focusing on for a minute that what I'm putting out non-verbally, people pick up and reflect back. So if I'm irritable, what I'm perceiving when someone reflects that back to me is I am actually justified in feeling irritable because look at how they treat me. Follow that? Now, what I've done is I have put my stuff on someone. They get hurt. I feel that hurt, and I misinterpret it. And I take it as reason to feel the way I did it. So now I'm even more angry, irritated, sad, whatever it is, which burns up energy. Okay, so it is efficient. It's just a little bit of visualization. Now, at night when there's time, I know this is not going to be real popular, but it is very powerful. It is so easy to shut your head off. Well, I take that back. You're not actually shutting your head off, but to get on social media or get on the internet, on your phone, and feel like, think you're shutting your head down. When actually the sources of information you're looking at are pulling your head in all kinds of different directions, and it's very fatiguing. And it's like you're exercising ADD. You're not exercising focus at all or relaxation or meditation. So it's fine in those moments where you would normally go for that. It's taking a breath first and visualizing what you want. And the type of vibe you want to put out. What do you want to say? Would you say the stuff that you're feeling verbally to people and say it's about them? Is there any way to justify that? If there's not, then reorganize it. It's time to change it for you. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. And fairness is not a thing. That could happen between spouses. Everybody wants everything to be fair. And it's hard to measure that because it's so different. everyone's putting in their 100%. And it's hard to see from another's perspective what that looks like or what that really is. But that's where trust comes in. You just got to trust. I know they're giving it as much as I am. And they're doing it in the way that fits their skill set. And I'm never going to see what all that is until they go out of town or something. And then you go, oh, wow, I really got some perspective there. So it's kind of a heavy one. But I believe in it very strongly, and I think it is an exercise that if you were to implement this, if you were to put five minutes a day for a week and build that habit, people are going to say things to you that may surprise you. Like, whoa, like, really, everybody noticed. And it may make you feel kind of weird. It's like, wow, I was leaking that much irritation on people. I had no idea. And you don't realize it until you change it and people go, wow, you're doing something different. It's like, yeah, that's good. So that's my challenge to you. Put some effort into your vibe. Do some vibe work this week and see what you come up with. Please let me know how it goes. If this is helpful to you, if you think it's ridiculous, if you have better ideas, hit me up. The River Ghost at HenryCohen.com. Also, if you wander over to HenryCohen.com, please sign up for the newsletter because I'm really fired up on querying right now. Which means I'm looking for an agent. I'm agent shopping. So I'm putting my letter out there to different agents and seeing if I can connect with someone who shares a vision. Who has the same vision about middle grade fantasy that I do. which is to have it be really funny, adventurous, clean, and have life lessons woven very gently throughout that don't take away from the adventure of the story. So that's coming up. But until whenever I do another one of these again, start to view your time at home after work as your second shift and put the appropriate effort in to prepare your nonverbal communication.