Calibration the mother of all Coaching-skills.
In my mini-series about the meta-model you could read about what we call a “Mind Read” in the NLP community, which is when we assume to know what someone else is thinking or the reason behind a behaviour, based on our own experiences. If you think about it that takes a fair bit of speculation. You can read more about this in the fourth part of the Series “It sure looks like Holmes”.
That being said, as an NLP Coach and Trainer I use non-verbal clues to calibrate the people I communicate with.
The non-verbal communication can easily be summed up by Albert Mehrabian´s 7% – 38% – 55% rule from the 1960´s. Still it is important to take this as a metaphor for non-verbal communications as the numbers have not been proven to be absolute and they were defined within the parameters of the experiments conducted by Mehrabian.
We can use them as guides or examples of just how little of the communication between humans is based on the words we use alone, which according to Mehrabian’s experiments only accounts for 7% of the message. The tone of the voice, volume, speed and rhythm accounts for 38% and our physiology for 55%, that is our facial expression, our skin, posture, muscle tension etc. Which may be surprising to many.
Just imagine how much of the message is lost when we text and email, where we do not even have the voice to guide us as we do on the telephone.
Calibration, also called the mother of all Coaching skills is when we take all of this information into account when we are talking to someone or even a group of people.
Is there congruency between what a person´s words are saying or does the non-verbal cues tells us something different? If so, we ask more questions until we get that congruency.
Do you know the state of the people close to you without hearing what they say, can you hear it in their hello as they walk through the door, what kind of day they have had? Well, NLP Coaches have been trained to do this with people they have just met and you can play with it to.
You can notice the tone of voice, the speed, or the breathing patterns and the pauses. You can look for colour change in their skin, or tension in the muscles in their face. You can observe their posture or their gestures.
I hope you are as happy as you would like to be and remember it is free to be kind.
Best wishes
Ivalo Kønig Okking
This post was originally published on March 13 2020