In the last posting, “Preferred Learning and Communication Styles – Part 1” I did a recap of how your internal filters work after having received data from the five senses.

Before you actually do the Survey yourself, it is wise to start getting familiar with the different attributes of each of the Representational or Learning and Communication Styles.

The following are generic characteristics of a Visual person.

Here is the 6.58 minute AUDIO if it fits better in your lifestyel

A Visual person, whose eyes will mostly look up when responding to a question, will often

• stand or sit with head and/or body erect

• breathe from the top of their lungs

• sit forward in their chair

• tend to be organized, neat, well-groomed, orderly

• memorize by seeing pictures

• be less distracted by noise

• have trouble remembering verbal instruction as their mind tends to wander

• be interested in how things look

• place importance on appearances

• be able to represent an enormous amount of data simultaneously and instantly

• simultaneously picture different options and make comparisons between them

• speak quickly

Let me elaborate on some of these points.

If you are a visual person you will find that you often have a posture of ‘authority’, that is you will stand up straight with a head held high.

When you are sitting you will sit towards the front of the chair also with your back erect and leaning slightly forward.

Your breathing will tend to come from the top of your lungs, as shorter, shallower breaths.

As a rule, you tend to be well-organized, have tidy workspaces, and are neatly dressed.

You do not need to have designed clothing, but your clothing does match.

As a general rule, you memorize by seeing pictures.  This and may not be obvious to you, but it happens covertly.

I am a visual person, but I am not conscious of the fact that I am seeing pictures unless I make a deliberate effort to.

There are times when I am aware of that, but generally speaking, I feel I have challenges with seeing things in pictures.

The next point is that as a visual person you are less distracted by noise.

I find this point very individual.  Till a few years ago, I was very distracted by noise, but now I find that I can block it out, possibly because I have made a deliberate effort to do this.  We live in a noisy world.

This next point about having trouble remembering verbal instruction is significant.

People will give endless instructions to a visual person, and then complain when that visual person does not action each one of the instructions.

Visual people’s minds are very quick, and at times inattentive.

When they hear a series of instructions, they are already processing the first couple of instruction, which means anything that comes after that, they haven’t actually heard.

Now there is an upside and a downside side to this.

The upside is that a visual person will already have started the process of getting a task done.

This means they often have little patience with auditory and kinesthetic people who wait for all the instructions, and who are therefore, in the visual person’s point of view, slow on the uptake.

The visual person has pretty much got the issue under control.

The downside is that because the visual person hasn’t heard all the instructions, s/he may be going off on a completely wrong tangent, so that all the work that the visual person has been doing has to be started anew.

The best thing is to write instructions down for a visual person, so that they have a checklist.

Just never try to give a visual person a whole lot of directional instructions such as:

• go straight ahead
• turn left at the next roundabout
• then right,
• go through the next set of traffic lights
• then you need to do a slight U-turn because it becomes a one-way street
• but immediately turn left and
• then right again.

You would have lost me half way through.

Even if I would try to repeat the instructions, I couldn’t.  I would have to write them down.

If you want to give a visual person multiple instructions, shoot them an email, preferably in bullet points or numbered.

A visual person will always have pleasant looking surroundings, the look and ambience is very important to them.

And finally, a visual person can deal with a tremendous amount of data and information all at one time.

Again this can make them impatient, when others of a different learning and communication style cannot do so.

Visual people also tend to speak quickly, which means they have to deliberately modulate their voice and speak slower to keep the other styles attention.

No style is better than another.  Each has its strengths and its challenges.

It comes down to respecting each person for the contribution that they make, with their strengths, which the other styles do not have.

Next time we’ll look at the auditory person.

In the meantime, as you now have the strategy to look out for the characteristics of a visual person, that is looking up, when responding to questions, check out also if they give evidence of any of the above points.