By Carolyn Crawford
Today we move on from the core communication skills for influencing and start to think about how we may need to tailor those tools for people with different thinking preferences to our own.
Those of you who’ve done training with us know that we love the Neethling Brain Instrument as a way of identifying our left and right brain preferences as well as our cerebral or limbic preferences. More information about the NBI can be found both at the Whole Brain Thinking website: http://www.wholebrainthinking.com.au/faq.htm and the F2F 4-part blog:
So in this blog we’ll revisit the four quadrants – some of the characteristics of each type of thinker. In the next we’ll explore how to adjust our ‘Asking, Appreciating and Adovocating’ for people with different thinking preferences.
L1 (left brain cerebral) – BLUE
Rational, logical, critical, clear-thinking
Realistic and unemotional
Sensible, probing, questioning, direct
Focuses on bottom-line
Makes decisions based on observation not intuition
Do it ‘their way’ and enforces decisions.
L2 (left brain limbic) – GREEN
Organises, arranges, plans and prepares
Evaluates all angles
Checks the facts methodically
Seeks detail and practicality
Prefers tried and tested
More risk averse
Can be critical or fault-finding
R1 (right brain cerebral) – YELLOW
Big picture, conceptual, visualising, futuristic, strategic
Ideas, alternatives, opportunities, change, innovation and risk
Solves problems and makes decisions intuitively
Speculates, explores, questions, provokes, challenges the status quo
Can lose interest, not follow through Informal and unstructured.
R2 (right brain limbic) – RED
Encouraging, appreciative, tolerant, passionate
Sympathetic, caring, understanding, kind
Focus on values People-intuitive, socially considerate
Enthusiastic, eager to share ideas, brings new insights
Suggestions often emotional
Negative emotions may limit acceptance of new ideas.
Enjoy identifying some of the traits of your family, friends and colleagues and we'll be back to discuss what this all means for your communication in the final blog of this series.