The Value Of Your Words Is In The Result You Receive

  Written by Lloyd Dobson on Mar 10, 2010 10:40 am

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There is no 'reality' out there...out there; there is only the internal representation we make in our mind. We each make our own 'maps' of reality and that's why when different people observe an event each one will represent it and describe it differently. We shape our representations of the world by gathering information externally through sound, or touch, or feeling, or taste, or smell that comes to us through our five senses, and we then process that input internally to represent a 'map' of the external experience.
 
We do this by processing the information through our pre-set mental filters. These filters comprise our perceptions; our beliefs and values, our memories and habits. So the eventual map, the internal representation we make, is an edited version of what really happened.
 
In neuro-linguistic terms the five senses are called representational systems or modalities. And each individual has his or her own method or preference, to gather, and process and represent information. For example one person might describe a situation in visual terms. They may say: 'I see how that is' or 'things are looking bright'. Another could use sound terms like: 'That's loud and clear' or 'that rings a bell'. And someone else could use a feeling term such as: 'that idea is as smooth as silk' or 'I feel like life is squeezing me in'...These are known as predicates.
 
Most of our difficulties in communication are usually due to people using different predicates in their conversation and so if you express yourself by using auditory words to a visual person, in other words use a representational system different to that used by the listener; they will unconsciously have to translate it internally to their own system. That is they will translate your auditory words to their visual format.
 
The five senses can be further divided into descriptions of what they can do. This greatly increases the degree of accuracy with which each person represents information. Therefore; sight can be bright, or dim, a different size, a different shape, seen sharply, or be fuzzy, black and white or coloured, be far away, or near. Sound can be loud or quiet, have a different pitch, or tempo, or tone.
 
Each person is unique in the way they represent their experience. It's therefore important to focus all your attention on the other person while communicating. So that you can detect the predicates in others and modify your language to suit those predicates and therefore make the communication more effective.
 
Individuals seem to communicate using consistent language structures, which over time can be recognized through repeating patterns. You will notice that people with similar language patterns quickly develop a deep rapport. It's possible to change yourself, and to be manipulated by others into changing the structure of your internal patterns. When you do, you change what an experience means. By changing the way you represent something, you change the effect and the results you receive. The meaning and the effectiveness of your communication lies in the response you receive, not in what you say. So it is not what you say but how you say it that matters.
 
"How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but by how well we are understood." - Andrew S. Grove

To Your Success,

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