Thoughts or Feelings?

I think there maybe two sorts of people in this world, those who are guided by their thoughts and those who are mainly lead by their feelings. If you wanted to be sexist, then I suspect that more men fall into the first group and more women into the second one. Both are obviously useful, both have their own advantages, both are appropriate in particular situations. Neither tends to be right in every instance and of course we all have both faculties. The thing is, we have a tendency to lean rather heavily on our favourite modality and not switch smoothly when it would help us to do so.

Imagine a scene where a wife is talking to her husband about a missed anniversary card. She may well be saying something about how hurt she feels and how forgetting something so important means (to her) that he can’t really care about her. He replies with a variety of logical reasons why this isn’t the case. Ignore the details but it is very hard to really communicate to someone who is referencing the other modality, unless you use your empathetic abilities to move into the same space as them. It is rather like and Englishman talking to a Frenchman; one of them needs to switch language.

If you find that you are having problems getting through to someone, perhaps you might want to check where they are coming from. Their language gives you the clue are they saying “I think” or “I feel”, what kind of adjectives and adverbs are they using?

“Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.” David Borenstein

Tags: Communication, empathy, feelings, modalities, rapport, thoughts

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 15:04 and is filed under Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.