I had a conversation with my daughter last week about what type of learner she is. It made me think about the impact that learning style has on effective communication.
She has recently started football training with an adult team. The drills are more complicated than she has been used to with her youth team. She absolutely loves the sessions, but she told me that it’s made her realise that she is a visual learner. When the coach explains an activity she isn’t always sure how it works. But once she sees her team-mates doing it, then she gets it.
I’ve always thought she was probably visual, so when she was young I would try to use visual language. Things like:
- “Will you look at the time?” (when I wanted her to hurry up because we had to leave for school)
- “Let’s see what’s happening here” (when there was an issue such as a coat buttoned up wrong)
This didn’t mean she automatically did what I needed her to do, but it definitely seemed that she ‘heard’ me more successfully than if I simply said something like “hurry up”!
Now she’s older, she surrounds herself with a lot of images. She loves photography books. Her bedroom walls are covered with posters and snaps of friends and family. When she was revising for her GCSEs she used a lot of mindmaps.
(Side note: Although I’m not as visual as she is, I love a good mindmap myself. And I respond well to bright colours, often adding colours to my notes from meetings or writing in coloured pens in the first place.)
Communication preferences
There are many models of learning styles and I don’t suggest that I am an expert in any of them. When I was doing my NLP practitioner training, nearly 20 years ago, I was introduced to the concept of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK) ways of processing information. These relate to the things that we see, the things that we hear and the things that we feel.
Communication is fundamentally about making sense of information (in this case information is a whole combination of facts, feelings, thoughts etc), so the VAK model can be really useful for communicators to think about.
While most of us will usually use a combination of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic processing, we will each have a preference. Which means we will naturally connect with one type of information or communication more than another. This is all (mostly) subconscious.
So what does this mean for our workplace communications?
It’s another example of the importance of gaining audience insight and understanding, then using it to inform the way we engage with them. When we recognise that our target audiences have different communication preferences, we can start to find ways to address those preferences within our content.
If your communication is with a single person, you’ll need to find ways to connect with them and their individual preference.
If you’re involved with communicating with larger groups, things are less straightforward! But what you can do is make sure that your content covers all 3 bases, so that it lands well across difference preferred communication styles.
- Make sure that your content looks right – focus on visual language, words like see, picture, overview and/or phrases like it appears to me and beyond a shadow of a doubt. Add in images, graphs and charts that help to communicate your messages.
- Make sure your content sounds right – tune in to words like hear, discuss, loud, tune in and/or phrases such as clear as a bell or to tell you the truth. Provide spoken versions or use channels like podcasts and voice messages so people can listen to your messages.
- Make sure your content feels right – drop in words like concrete, feels, grasp and/or phrases such as boils down to and pull some strings. Put on events or showcases where people can experience your messages.
When you combine these approaches in your comms, there will be something for everyone.
If you’d like help making sure your communications are as effective as possible, get in touch for a chat about how we can work together.
Until next time
Sarah