A person’s style of communication is very important in business and life. Being the most personal element in effective business communication it is a very important building block for one to understand. To reach that level of awareness you must first determine your personality type and view yourself as others see you. Knowing how others perceive you will help you to fine-tune your style into a more confident, clear, and understandable speaker, thus helping you to make a point to your audience.
Understanding the type of communication you have is essential in everyday conversation because without the knowledge of how someone perceives you, you may not know what you are doing wrong. The first step in deciding how you communicate is to know what your personality type is, thus giving you a better understanding of what kind of person you are. “Discovering which style best fits you can be done in a number of ways including personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), psychological assessments, and self-assessments.
” The MBTI and other Jungian type tests were derived from a set of fundamentals created by Carl Jung, who explored humanity and consciousness. “Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung’s types and functions so revealing of people’s personalities that they decided to develop a paper-and-pencil test. It came to be called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and is one of the most popular, and most studied, tests around”.
“Since the days of Hippocrates, great thinkers have analyzed the forces at work in human interaction and have come up with one common thread: communication behavior follows four specific patterns. Hippocrates called these ‘the four temperaments,’ and Carl Jung described them as Intuitor[sic], Thinker, Feeler, and Sensor. ” The opposite of these four temperaments were later formulated into the eight factors determining your personality type, these are as follows; Extroversive vs. Introversive, Sensory vs.
Intuitive, Thinker vs. Feeler, and Judger vs. Perceiver. With the knowledge of your personality type in mind, you can determine the style of communication you currently possess. By looking for certain characteristics of how you present yourself to others you can determine if you are one of three styles; passive, aggressive or assertive. Clearly assertive is the style a business speaker should strive for, because as an assertive speaker “you consider the thoughts and feelings of others without discounting your own.
” I have taken several personality tests such as the MBTI and other Jungian type tests and I can say I agree with the results and I am an ISJT meaning I possess the following characteristics; introversive, sensory, thinker, and judging. Another website I took a personality test at described me as “ISTJ (Introverted sensing with thinking): These are dependable pillars of strength. “2 With that in mind I can make the conjecture that I am an assertive but sometimes aggressive communicator.
I say I am a combination of the two styles because we are not always the same style, it’s a matter of situation and we change with the audience and environment. One personality test described me as “cautious, conservative, and quiet; literal, realistic, and practical; careful and precise; logical, honest, and matter of fact; resistant to change and comfortable with routine; hard working and responsible. ” I have to say that most of these personality traits are correct despite the situation I find myself in.
I am more of an assertive style of communicator than an aggressive because I usually consider the feelings of others. I say usually, because “We have all met someone with whom we just could not communicate–a person who, for some reason, seems to bristle upon our approach, leaving communication as we know it completely out of the question. “3 And on occasion if pushed I can become very aggressive, it does not happen very often but when it does I tend to speak carelessly and without thinking before I talk.
Now that I know my personality type and my communication style I can do what must be done to adjust my style and fine-tune myself to do my best to overcome the obstacles that prevent me from being the best speaker I can be. The ultimate goal of any business person is to develop the fundamentals to get a message across to any type of audience, whether it is big or small. I am a major step to that goal by knowing what needs to be done to communicate in a manner that is clear and effective based on what ever audience I am faced with.
So to look back I’ve discussed that a person must understand the style of communication that he/she possess. In doing so the person will be able to comprehend how others see him/her. Having that knowledge of self-awareness a person can reasonably master one of the four key elements of effective business communication, the delivery element. With one of the four major elements perfected, the other pieces will come together, giving the person the overall clear, understandable, and effective communication capability that any business person could hope to achieve.