Introduction
How do you connect with your potential partner or patron? Do you show them your product? Do you tell them about it? Or do you prefer to let them actually experience using it? Or all three?
Understanding and identifying communication styles, allows you to know the best approach for each audience, each circumstance. You’ll discover optimal avenues for communication with any given group or individual at each presentation.
Have you ever explained a concept to someone who quickly and easily understood all, only to find that the same explanations and information failed to ‘connect’ with a different person or audience?
With an understanding of communication styles, you will know the best approach for getting your message across to the listener, and what steps to take if you are not connecting as desired. You can learn to modify your communication to effectively ‘speak’ to anyone.
What, Why & How
In the last 50 years numerous categories or types of communication have been developed. These typologies serve to help us in understanding the diversity of human thought and behavior. This understanding, in turn, enables us to communicate far more effectively.
All of us perceive the world through our individual five senses. However, research has shown that we each have preferred modalities (sensory channels, or pathways), which we utilize more frequently, and with more success. These preferences deeply affect our ability to understand, learn and communicate. For example: According to NLP, there are three communication styles or modalities known as visual, auditory and kinesthetic, (tactile) or according the Felder & Soloman typology, there are four; global, sequential, intuitive, reflexive.
When we interact with others, we wish to express our thoughts in such a way that the listener can clearly understand our meaning. They are more likely to grasp our message if we use, for example, a picture for the visual, or the opportunity to speak for the auditory, or physical movement for the kinesthetic. Conversely, we – as listeners, – are more likely to understand others when we know what our preferred modality is. When we communicate only in our preferred modality – which may be different from that of our listener – the interaction is not aligned, and the communication is thereby hampered, ineffective, or breaks down completely.
The goal is to provide balanced, flexible and effective communication by identifying, and adapting to individual preferences and group tendencies. When we communicate only in our preferred modality – which may be different from that of our listener – the interaction is not aligned, and the communication is thereby hampered, ineffective, or breaks down completely.
Who benefits
This skill is fundamentally important for every person, and most especially if you are a professional where communication is an important part of your work.
Duration of the training
Generally speaking the AOC Training will be 1 – 2 days in length. This schedule is dependent upon previous knowledge and the current goals of the participants.
Additionally a single, three hour workshop is possible, and would serve as an introduction to the topics listed below.
You learn
In this AOC Seminar You Learn
- 3 Sensory Communication Modalities: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic
- Felder & Soloman Learning Styles: Global, Sequential, Intuitive, Reflective, and how they affect communication
- Your own preferred communication modality and ways to expand and adapt it
- How to identify and adapt to your listeners preferred communication style and guide them to better understanding
- More flexibility and new perspectives; perceiving the world through different modalities
- Skills to quickly absorb and assimilate new information
- More successful communication in individual and group settings.
