The Art of Being A Brilliant Communicator

In the third part of our article, we examine the art of Sensory Acuity. This is the ability to read the unconscious micro-signals that we all give off whenever we communicate.

With a little practice we can easily become adept at reading people and noticing the signs of miscommunication, misunderstanding, or confusion.

Mistake 3: Not seeing what is right in front of your nose

Learn to read the giveaway signals that people leak

We constantly give off literally hundreds of signals which show exactly what is going on in our mind and body: confident, calm, uncomfortable etc. We call this unconscious leakage! The television programme ‘Lie to Me’ uses the work of Paul Ekman in this area. Your ability to read the signals has a lot to do with how much attention you pay and what you focus on. If we are handling difficult or technical subjects, much of our attention ends up inside: thinking, imagining, and deciding what we have to say. Little attention is left on the other person or people and we will often miss valuable signals; they could be showing that they do not understand, that they are confused, or that they need you to stop so that they can ask a question. It gets even worse when we are enthusiastic about a topic and want to communicate a large amount of knowledge, as this often blinds us to what is happening right in front of us.

This could end up causing confusion, misunderstanding, mistrust and annoyance. The NLP Diploma Programme teaches you how to read these signals, what to do to maintain rapport and have the other person understand what you want them to.

Principle

Our conscious attention is limited. Research by George A. Miller in 1957 shows we are only able to consciously process between five and nine bits of information and often even four is difficult. On the other hand our unconscious mind is capable of processing many millions of bits of information and feeds forward only the few we are interested in to the conscious mind. This is done through the reticular activating system and is based on our individual view of the world – everyone is different.

“I just didn’t notice”

Turning this around is easier than it sounds and during the programme we will engage you in a sequence of exercises where you will learn to train your mind to take a series of snapshots of what is happening in front of you. This is a lot like where you played spot the difference as a child. The intention is to create a habit so your mind will automatically take snapshots in the background, comparing one to the other and alerting you when something changes. We are effectively deploying a small part of our mind to monitor activity in order to make sure that we can get our message across without creating negative effects.

Learn to read people so accurately you amaze yourself

You will be amazed just how quickly you can learn to accurately read these signs. Once you grasp the essentials of reading the signals, and it doesn’t take long, you will have at your disposal one of the most potent tools for brilliant communication. This is an asset all great communicators share which makes them flexible and able to build rapport fast.

download-5-mistakes-report

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Google+ profileMy YouTube channel

Roger Terry

Director of Training and Coaching at Evolution Training Ltd
Roger Terry is one of the world’s leading experts on applying NLP to drive excellence both professionally and personally. Roger leads seminars and consults with companies all over the world, including in the UK, USA, Europe and Middle East. He is the author of several books, including The Hidden Art of Interviewing, NLP and Qualitative Research, NLP for Teachers and The NLP Toolkit.