Improve your communication now by learning perceptive modalities | The Communication Blog

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Improve your communication now by learning perceptive modalities

By Nick Ashcroft


Everyone knows we access reality using 5 senses: sight, hearing, touch, sense of smell, taste. What most of the people ignore, is that everyone of us has a dominant mode. What that means, is that we all have an unconscious preference hailing from our first years of life that determines which of those senses we use most.

That doesn't mean we use that sense above others to live, that would be incorrect as humans will always be depending more on sight than on other senses, for evident reasons. Sight is and will always be the sense that furnishes more informations on external reality. So this preference is not about the sense that we use more, rather that's about the way each of us prefers to organize his inner perception. That has to do a lot with memory. What kind of memory do you have? That is what modes are about. If you're visual, you describe your inner world using images, if you're auditory, you describe it with inner dialogue, and when you're kinesthetic you're doing so by feelings.

And how is this related to improving my communication? If you want to be an effective communicator, you should recognize and adapt to the preferred perceptive modality of the person you are talking to. This way you can talk more significant to her.

Now figure out this: you are talking with somebody who tends to express himself adopting a visual-related language. Probably he's very good in depicting images in his head, and he also has a really good visual memory. This kind of people are much more liable to react to a visual input rather than to an other kind of input. This means that if you can use phrases that contains images rather than sensations or sounds in order to express your ideas, you will make them effectively understand your message.

Basically, when you speak with someone else, you should try to get to know on which sense he mainly relies to organize his inner perception. This allows you to express in a far more powerful and significant way to him. For instance you are talking with a visual person, and you choose to adopt a visual vocabulary, you get better results.

An auditory person will select more sound-likely expressions: "That's music for my ears", "I feel in harmony with myself", "We're on the same tune right now"

An auditory person will prefer something like: "This sounds pretty good", "There's a good synthony between them". As you can see, those are phrases related to hearing. The concept is that this kind of phrases evoke something sound-related. Think to the word syntony, that's a musical concept.

How to take advantage of knowing this? Try to make use of that type of expressions, for example, you may say "this appears to be bad" to be able to respond to a visual person, "this sounds bad" to reply to an auditory, "this feels so bad" to reply to a kinesthetic. A great trick here is to start from the verbs and then build the rest of the phrase around it. Be litteral, just figure out what your idioms means in a litteral way. This is how you can determine whether an idioms is visual/audithory/kinhestetic-related. Everything depends on the contest as well.

That just can't be easy, because it's not something that you can understand by reading a book. You got to practice that with people. We are all different: everybody has his own way of interpreting and figuring out sentences. I think that perceptive modalities are a mean to understand people rather than a way to label them. Think of your goal as understanding the more you can about people you interact with and you'll be on your way to communicate

Now that's all, remember: in order to begin, listen carefully for mode-revealing expressions when you talk with people in your daily life. Careful listen is always the base to a good communication.




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