138 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
✓ A person who has a tendency to operate from a global perspective
responds to words such as ‘overview’, ‘the big picture’, ‘in a nutshell’,
‘generally’, and ‘essentially’.
✓ A person at the detail end of the spectrum listens better to someone
using words such as ‘plan’, ‘precisely’, ‘schedule, ‘specifically’, ‘first’,
‘second’, ‘third’ (and so on), ‘next’, and ‘before’.
Recognising Sameness, Sameness with Difference, and Difference
If, when you learn or experience something new, you try and match the
information to what you already know, you have a preference for sameness.
Or, you may be someone who first notices the similarities in situations and
becomes aware of the differences, in which case you have a sameness with
difference preference.
If, however, you look at what’s different from what you already know, you
prefer sorting by difference.
As a sameness person, you have a head start as regards rapport (which we
describe in Chapter 7), because rapport is all about matching someone else’s
physiology and thinking – probably something you do automatically. You
tend to delete a lot of incoming information if you can’t spot the similarities
to previous situations. You may have difficulty in learning something new
unless you can find patterns with which you’re familiar. For example, learn-
ing a new language is easier when you can find similarities with a language
you already know; Dutch may be easier for an English speaker than, perhaps,
Korean. You don’t like change, or even feel threatened by it, and find that
adapting to changes in your work and home life is difficult. As a general rule,
you dislike initiating major changes, preferring to avoid major change and
procrastinate about making changes in your life when a situation gets really
difficult. This means that you probably move house or change jobs very
infrequently.
As a sameness with difference person, you first look for similarities in a
situation and then tend to spot the differences. You like the evolutionary
approach to change, preferring infrequent major changes and you may resist
sudden change. In order to gain greater rapport with these people, try to
emphasise things that are the same, followed by what’s different, for exam-
ple, ‘The work is fairly similar to what you’ve done, however you’re going to
be involved with implementing new solutions.’
