In the ongoing debate about education, you may have heard some of the discussion about learning styles.  I don’t actually agree with most of the discussion around this area.  The prevailing attitude puts people in boxes, rather than opening up new options and making them resources and I think that’s a criminal thing to do to anyone – especially a child!

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) respects people’s preferences – and acknowledges that if we want to build rapport with others, we need to go over to where they are, not expect them to come to us.  Communication styles are very similar to learning styles – we all have a preferred way of filtering the world – through visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic modes (and both our preferred learning style and our preferred communication style are usually linked).  If we can quickly discover a person’s preferred style of communication, and use language that reflects it we can quickly build rapport with almost anyone.

The best communicators in the world – the people whose words everyone listens to, even if they disagree with their ideas – have very flexible communication styles.  If you are speaking to a group, using language that resonates with a variety of communication models is ideal, if you are just speaking to a single person you will find it much easier to build your relationship if you identify their preferred mode of language, and use it with them.

Their pose will quickly change from resistant to responsive.  When we teach this in workshops and our students go out and practice identifying and using the appropriate model we usually get an excited phone call within a day or two from people who say, “I can’t believe what a change this has made!  I talked with X, who is usually quite stiff and resistant, and closed the deal we’ve been negotiating for 3 months.