Chapter 6: Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication 97
When people’s thoughts and words are highly logical, conceptual, and devoid
of sensory language, NLP calls this style digital processing. Documents from
insurance companies are typical of digital language, as in the following
example: ‘The obligation to provide this information continues up to the time
that there is a completed contract of insurance. Failure to do so entitles the
Underwriters, if they so wish, to avoid the contract of insurance from incep-
tion and so enables them to repudiate liability.’Bringing on the translators
Two people can sometimes struggle to communicate, despite sharing similar
viewpoints, because they speak with different language styles. One may use
an auditory style, for example, and another a visual or kinaesthetic style. To
be an effective communicator, you need to be able to do two things: know
your own preferred style or modality and also practise using other ones.Have you ever heard a dispute that goes something like the following one
between a manager and a team member in the office? To demonstrate the dif-
ferent language styles, we show the predicates (the sensory-specific words
and expressions) in italics:Rich or digital?
In any walk of life, people develop their own
shorthand style of language with co-workers,
friends, and family. Listen to a group of doctors,
teenagers, or builders; they have their own
way of getting the message across quickly and
efficiently.
Speaking from personal experience, we can
safely generalise that many business people,
and especially those who work in the IT indus-
try, stay highly tuned into their own digital style
of language. Surrounded by logical technology
they forget how to put any sensory-specific
language into their communication (until they
discover NLP, of course!).
Communication issues arise for any group of
people when they step outside their peer group.
All too often, corporate-speak sends people to
sleep. Just contrast the average script of a
Death by Powerpoint presentation in corpora-
tions across the globe with the inspired ‘I Have
a Dream’ speech of Martin Luther King, and you
soon see why so many executives power nap in
front of their laptops in the afternoons.The solution lies in passion. When people live
their passion and want to share it with the
world, they naturally engage all their senses and
this reality is reflected in the words they speak.
If you analyse the speeches of Barack Obama
or Winston Churchill, or the narration from a
TV series by world-renowned naturalist David
Attenborough, you notice the richness and use
of sensory-specific words in their speech.