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.
What do you mean?
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.
Ok, but first: how is possible to understand the mode of the person I am talking to? And second: what would a "visual" vocabulary be? In order to establish the mode of your interlocutor, you have to be extremely careful about words, phrases and images he chooses. If a person is visual, she will choose expressions and idioms which reveal a visual tendency, like: "I see the point", "this seems to be good", "my point of view is","that's clear enough". As you can see, those are phrases related to sight. The concept is that this kind of phrases evoke something sight-related.
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
That was just a brief and easy (i hope so) explanation of what perceptive modes are and how to understand them. Possibly you can find a lot of material on the issue, I will write down more articles on how to recognize modes in other ways (for instance observing postures, gestures, and lot of other stuff) on my main website (you can find the link at the bottom of the article). Personally I use to catch that on the fly, just by observing gestures and personality because I have been practicing this stuff for a lot :) I think that doing that observing posture and personality is by far the smartest way when you are more experienced; but in order to begin, listening carefully for mode-revealing expressions is good. It helps you realize those concepts and be more attentive in listening, which is awesome as we asually are so distracted. Active listening is always the key to a good communication.
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.
What do you mean?
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.
Ok, but first: how is possible to understand the mode of the person I am talking to? And second: what would a "visual" vocabulary be? In order to establish the mode of your interlocutor, you have to be extremely careful about words, phrases and images he chooses. If a person is visual, she will choose expressions and idioms which reveal a visual tendency, like: "I see the point", "this seems to be good", "my point of view is","that's clear enough". As you can see, those are phrases related to sight. The concept is that this kind of phrases evoke something sight-related.
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
That was just a brief and easy (i hope so) explanation of what perceptive modes are and how to understand them. Possibly you can find a lot of material on the issue, I will write down more articles on how to recognize modes in other ways (for instance observing postures, gestures, and lot of other stuff) on my main website (you can find the link at the bottom of the article). Personally I use to catch that on the fly, just by observing gestures and personality because I have been practicing this stuff for a lot :) I think that doing that observing posture and personality is by far the smartest way when you are more experienced; but in order to begin, listening carefully for mode-revealing expressions is good. It helps you realize those concepts and be more attentive in listening, which is awesome as we asually are so distracted. Active listening is always the key to a good communication.
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