Transcription
When it comes to communication, being a good storyteller, it comes down to whether or not you can speak to the person that you are in front of and understanding what kind of person that is.
There's a few ways that I identify. I segregate people into six groups, and that's through what do they need from other people. So, what kind of things do I need socially? And these are significance, acceptance, approval, intelligence, pity, and strength or power.
And in every conversation, if you ask somebody about themselves, they're going to come across and reveal one of those things to you. So, if I know that you are a significance-driven person, and I'm selling you on how smart of an idea this is, and how intelligent you are for making this choice, I'm communicating the way opposite in what you need to hear.
So, the moment that I hear you talk about yourself, your accomplishments, what you like in life, what happened for you this week, what's a great memory that you have, every conversation, you're going to hear this stuff starting to get revealed pretty quickly. You start talking to somebody and they said, "Yeah, I'm actually the CEO at that company. I've got 490 people that work for me and probably going to be making an exit sometime next year." So, you hear that there's significance, right?
Then you listen for approval. And this is when you hear people say, "Well, I got to go up on stage tomorrow, but I suck at public speaking. I'm gonna, I'm gonna really bomb at it. I'm just really nervous." Trying to get you to say, "No, no, you don't suck. You're great. You did great last time. You're gonna rock this. You got this."
Then you have the acceptance people. They'll always use the terms like we, us, our, just team. So, acceptance people are all about like, "I'm a member of some kind of group." And that'll come across in their communication. So you ask a significance person about a vacation and they say, "Yeah, I went down to Miami. It was fantastic. I had a great time and I just got back last night." You ask an acceptance person, they'll say, "We went down there. All of us went to this thing and we did this." So you hear a lot of this language that talks about groups and membership.
You get into the intelligence side. How often do you hear people go, "Yeah, I actually got my MBA from this person. Oh, I did my master's thesis on that." So you hear this intelligence stuff come out of people.
And the pity, you can identify a pity person pretty well. And those are the hardest people to communicate to. The pity person always, like, if I want to give you the ideal thing to say to each one of these people. The pity person wants to hear, "I can't believe all the stuff that you've been through." and you've got to this point, 'cause I don't think many people would have. Pity wants recognition of suffering.
And finally, we have the strength and power person. And this isn't always Biff from Back to the Future. So it's can be somebody who's a leader in a company. They want, but they want control. So significance is, do I make a difference? Strength and power is, do I have control over other people? Everybody from like the leader who kind of forces his way into the top to the guy with the ridiculous jacked-up pickup truck that has like the plastic testicles hanging off of the back of it.