Sight, hearing, touch. Which sense do you subconsciously prefer?

By Nick Ashcroft


All of us know that there exist 5 senses to access reality: sight, hearing, touch, olfaction, taste. But lot of people still ignore that we tend to use primarily one in order to process our personal experience.

Even if sight is the most important sense for common living, each person subjectively got one preferred modality to organize his inner world. Thought some people describe their inner world using mostly images, some other rely on inner dialogue or feelings. This doesn't mean they don't make any use of the other two senses, but they employ the other two senses to a lesser extent.

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.

Ok, but exactly how can you know his inner mode? To determine that, listen to him talking. The words he chooses will reveal this precious information. If someone is visual, he'll choose expressions and idioms which reveal a visual inclination, (idioms in particular): "That's so clear", "This appears to be true", "I see the point of the matter", "I see I bright future for you".

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.

Phrases like: "This sounds pretty good", "There's a good synthony", happen to be often choosen by people who redilect the sense of hearness.

A kinesthetic instead, will probably make good use of such expressions: "That's a pretty solid argument", "I catched your idea", "Slip out of my life!"

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.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment