Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic?

Kip,
It’s an interesting idea, however it may be pertinent to understand how Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic became popular in marketing.

Roots in Psychology
Well, I guess savvy humanists have been using it for generations, but originally it went back to a cranky old psychiatrist called Milton H. Erickson, who was an acute observer of human behaviour. He was both tone deaf and colour-blind, so he had to figure out why people behaved as they did by thinking about it in a methodical way.

Family therapist Virginia Satir also noted that people seemed to communicate in different styles within families.

Satir Categories
She came up with four types:

Placating – communication based on feelingsBlaming – communication based on visual understandingDistracting – communication based on hearingSuper-reasonable – communication based upon thinking logically about matters.

NLP Shenanegins
NLP gurus Bandler and Grinder popularised the Satir model and brought it into their domain, which includes marketing.

I confess to swallowing this whole for a decade, but it doesn’t stack up because when you really know people you will find that people use different styles in different contexts.

A Coffee Break
Hell, even I do this on-line. Here I’m being super-reasonable but over in the forums late at night I horse around, (distracting).

One day Grinder told me in a coffee break during a training back in 1989 that adopting the Satir Model was one of the biggest mistakes on traditional NLP. He referred back to Erickson who believed in calibration, which means adjusting behaviours to the person with whom you’re communicating.

Spooky Knowledge At A Distance
And then there was Arnie Mindell who came into my life through a synchronicity. A synchronicity is a co-incidence pregnant with personal meaning in which the medium is also the message. Maybe I’ll write about that here one day?

Anyway: Mindell noted that people aren’t simply visualises, hearers, feely-touchers, or detached thinkers. Instead these are channels through which people understand their experience.

Eight Things To Balance
There are eight such channels in his Process Oriented Psychology:
Visualisation – understanding upon what you seeAudition – understanding based upon what you hear, (paralinguistic elements of sound and speech).Verbal: (linguistic elements of speech).Kinaesthesia – understanding based upon physical movementTactile – understanding based upon bodily feeling, hot cold, pressure etc.Proprioceptive, internal feelings, pain etc.)Relationship, (expression through another person, projective identification etc.)Synchronistic, (meaningful coincidences).

Transformation and Maturity
These aren’t water-tight compartments. In practice at least two element will be in flow. The first being a person’s conscious understanding and communication style, the second an emerging pattern – submerged, often feared, but which must eventually surface and be transformed from a feared style to an acceptable one.

Marketing Psychology
This kind of leads us back into your observation that because we know someone’s age and marital status we don’t really know them. That’s true – but we do know the buying habits within certain markets, and so may cater for a range of preferences and styles, without necessarily solely appealing to a single communication style.

It does help, though, to understand a little of the theory behind human psychology, and most of all to be a impeccable observer of human behaviour.

Best,

Stephen

Yes, you!

I’m not in anyone’s camp Kip, but I respect John Grinder perhaps most amongst the pioneers of NLP.

I thought the video you referred to Simon was good, up to a point. The problem with it is that Virginia Satir, whom the founders of NLP were said to have modelled, never claimed there were only three categories in her model there were four, the last one being rational thinking skills.

The second piece of disinformation is the implied idea that anyone with any real knowledge of NLP claimed that communicators must use only one style to impart information. Indeed if you Google 4 Tuple you will find a reference that shows this never to have been so. I’m not claiming that the 4 Tuple is an accurate model, merely that the assertion that NLP claims anything as banal as this presenter is telling us.

Quite frankly I’ve very little time for cognitive psychologists because to my knowledge when comparing the efficacy of various kinds of therapy CBT therapists have pulled out of controlled studies when the results don’t stack up in their favour. The result is that two, or more, totally unrelated modes of treatment are compared without any data from the CBT therapy. When however the results do work for CBT the study goes ahead. The result is a bias of much research in terms of CBT and cognitive psychology. As you know academic life is not as impartial or devoid of politics as many assume.

The most damning part of the video was the final conclusion in which the presenter said: ‘There is no need for teachers to vary their presentations in favour of pupils learning styles’. Oh yeah? So now our kids are expected to receive identical homogenised packages with no cognizance of the quality of the teacher pupil relationships, is that what he means? If that’s the case why don’t we simply replace all teachers with computer labs and feed every child the same information in identical ways?

Like you I have reservations about NLP models, (see my previous comment), but for some reason this slick presenter reminded me too much of John Malkovich in one of his sinister performances.

Thanks Simon ~ I’m not against academic research, in fact I won a prize for a scientific presentation from the International Association For Group Psychotherapy a few years back.