INsight/ What's Their Color?
Manila, 19 April 2017 — People often ask me during training "how do we know the favorite color of other people, their preferred language that will engage them into action?"
What they are asking about is the color of the language that ensures that what they say will go to the heart of their audience, rather than just to their head.
President Nelson Mandela mastered how to speak seven languages when he rebuilt his country into a rainbow nation after apartheid. Speaking these seven languages, marked by colors, allowed him to connect with important stakeholder in society and to bring them over to his side, to rebuild their country together. He showed how language is more than words.
When you speak the language of your audience, you connect deeply with them, and that builds trust, engages them in action, allowing you to lead change together. Your positive impact is multiplied many times, as became evident in Mandela's case. You can see this in the Communication Response Model.
Leaders who train with me to learn to Work In All Colors start by discovering their own unique combination of the colors, their own rainbow. How you engage with each of the seven colors (languages) is unique to you. It reflects how you are currently coping with complexity in your life conditions 'where you are now.'
Your unique rainbow of colors will show up in your individual results from the online assessment that you take at the start of the Work In All Colors training.
Coming back to the question about the language that will engage your audience into action...
The answer is that it is simple to do that when you learn about the colors, and after discover your own color pattern first. Step 1 is to learn which of the seven languages you accept and reject, how strongly, and what the reasons are for that. Armed with this self-awareness, you are ready to start learning how to use the languages to engage others when you speak, in Step 2.
With training, coaching and practice to work in all the colors, you will master how to select the most appropriate language according to what is needed for each audience and in each situation.
After the training, it is a wonderful day when you discover that many of the likes and dislikes you experienced when you communicated with people in your work and life were more about the color of the languages you and the other party were speaking, than about the actual content of what you talked about.
The Work In All Colors training opens many doors of opportunity for new collaboration, more trust, and co-creation of amazing results. It starts with discovering your own unique rainbow.
So the question that unlocks the most important answer is: what is your personal rainbow, your unique individual results you get from taking the online assessment. You need to learn about your colors first.