RAPPORT & PERCEPTUAL PREFERENCES

In order to establish rapport rapidly, we need to communicate with other people in their world, and in their preferred manner. In order to achieve this we need to better understand our own world, and our own preferred method for communication.

The Five Senses

The portal for receiving information is our body, as opposed to our mind or our psyche. We get information about our world around us from our five senses:

Seeing eyes (Visual)

Hearing ears (Auditory)

Feeling touch & movement (Kinaesthetic)

Smelling nose (Olfactory)

Tasting mouth (Gustatory)

Taste and smell are relatively undeveloped by most humans for getting information about anything other than food. For most of what we do in life, sight, sound and touch are the three senses that matter.

Some theorists refer to this field as our “Learning Modalities” – Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic. Psychologists often call it “Sensory Perception” - we use the term “Perceptual Preferences” to describe these three main senses (or learning styles): Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic (VAK for short).

Perceptual Preferences

Research suggests that people vary in their Perceptual Preferences as follows:

• Visual 60%
• Auditory 30%
• Kinaesthetic 10%

These percentages are not precise because most of us use all three styles, even if we have a strong preference for one of them. However, they are a guide to the variances you are likely to experience. As you will see, Kinaesthetic is often the lowest preference in any group.