If there is one communicator really having it rough right now trying to stay politically informed it’s the auditory among us. My auditory husband gave Booman and other bloggers a huge compliment the other day by saying that if anybody or anything was changing the face of Iraq it was these internetters and their blogs. He said that Iraq can’t become another Vietnam on the Vietnam scale because the government couldn’t control the internet and all of us reading people keep finding stuff out and telling everybody else and blowing it for those who wish to dumb down the population or keep them distracted for years (he also took a copy of Iraq Uncovered to work the other day and it is being passed around…..crazy man!). We know that Iraq isn’t working right now and we want answers. Seems that troop levels are going to be brought down in Iraq also next year. As an Army spouse I almost can’t believe it because it is like answered prayers.
We will never know the full extent of what having access to information has done when it comes to Iraq or how many more Fallujahs “they” may have decided were okay to do, the only way we could ever know is if we had a parallel universe going through this Iraq charade without the benefit of the internet that we could observe.
My husband and my daughter are auditory communicators. These are some of the most powerful people we have in our lives at times! Picasso (visual) moved mountains in our souls by showing us and Bill Clinton (auditory) moved mountains in our minds by telling us. For auditory people the world is sound! Everything they hear is what their days and nights are made of and when I go to sleep and close my eyes that’s it. When my husband lays down and closes his eyes the dogs are barking and the crickets are chirping and we have never been able to live on a busy street because he already knows how miserable he would be so we don’t even try to go there. One of the hardest days he had in Iraq was a roadside explosion and “hearing” the guys on the ground on the radio begging for help and all he could do was fly overhead. For me the hardest thing about Iraq is the images and for him it is the sounds. It is easier to share the images, we don’t get much of the sounds of Iraq so it is hard for some auditory people to understand the horror that Iraq is. If you take a moment to verbally describe it to them though they get it.
Auditory people are comfy having you speak to them at their side, I guess the closer to the ear you get the better. Music is very important to auditory people usually. Their favorite songs usually say a lot about how they feel within. Songs that say or represent something that is offensive to them is like someone painting a room top to bottom black for me or painting an entire house chartreuse in the middle of a blind curve on a street (one of my neighbors really did do this to me once).
Kinesthetic people LUV computers and visual people really like them a lot because we read and see and know so much more if we have one (and hopefully it matches the appliances in the kitchen….the Dell black and gray goes with most anything). We have been able to stay up with things politically. Auditory people though listen to radio or listen to the T.V. and they get precious little and this super sucks so bad I can’t even begin to tell ya!
See (visual person writing), auditory people aren’t pushovers. They are the hardest people to sell something to. After I took this NLP class I never again went to buy a car without an auditory person. After spending 10 years buying the cars that “looked good” to me and paying dearly for it I grabbed my best friends auditory husband for my next car purchase and was never sorry. Auditory people ask all the questions and there isn’t a “bad” question to them. They want to know about all the options and the warranty and what did Consumer Reports say and what is the maintenance needed. Visual people make quick decisions and auditory people verbally get all of the facts together and make measured decisions. I have made a deal with myself to BE PATIENT when buying a car and let the auditory handle it. I have never been sorry since!
Auditory people have a well developed voice also. My daughter inherited my voice, people can’t tell us apart when we answer the phone. My daughter though took the same voice and did amazing things with it. She breathes deeper than I do and speaks from the diaphragm naturally and sings from the diaphragm. My voice sounds pretty good on somebody who knows how to use it. Think of the people you know who have a very distinctive well developed voice and that’s an auditory communicator. It is easy to hear their emotions in their voice also but oddly they infrequently yell or say anything really evil to anybody…….that usually goes to the visual people, and the kinesthetic people are the door slammers who walk out and SLAM the door. Because words are so important to auditory people they use them more carefully than visual people. Kinesthetic people are very feeling oriented so they don’t care for evil words either because they can generate “bad” feelings.
The real magic that auditory people possess is the ability to break a project down into measured steps and get from point A to point B in a measured way. Visuals tend to stress getting the thing done and kinesthetics start all sorts of things that are started.
An auditory person may not know how to spell a rarely used word but they sure as hell know how to pronounce the thing (guess who isn’t auditory at all…yup, Chimp is not auditory). When Abu Ghraib broke and my husband was at a school, if we ever spoke of it on the phone my pronunciation of it was always corrected by him with some Arabic form of it that they spoke in the region of Abu Ghraib.
Come with me if you will for a moment into the Land of the Auditory. These people have fabulous voices and can take projects from start to finish in a measured fashion that requires no freaking out and they are very hard to sell snake oil to. Bill Clinton and Martin Luther King are some of the charismatic auditory leaders that come to mind immediately for me (maybe JFK but he was so high in all of the communication modes I’m not sure which one was primary, what a developed voice though). Auditory people are powerful people in our society and think about the sound bite and the spin and realize what these powerful people we live with are hearing and what they aren’t hearing. Adopt an auditory person today and begin telling them what they aren’t hearing and be prepared because once you start they want all of the details. Often I tell my husband that I will look it up or check it out and get back to him because I’m visual. Not knowing all the details that an auditory person asks doesn’t make you wrong, it just makes you not auditory, but make sure to tell them that they collect all the info better than you do and they are just better at it but you will find it and be glad to make it available.
To feel appreciated an auditory person needs to hear it and the more the merrier. This can be a revelation for some of us who think that the whole world just needs a card or a hug. I am used to saying it now, practice makes perfect. My whole family though was a bunch of damn visuals growing up and I was way behind the learning curve on all of this. What some learned by exposure I had to learn in a school atmosphere.
P.S. That Galloway Dude….Auditory Communicator in a Big Way!
P.S.S. For stupid visuals. If a visual person isn’t looking at you they can’t hear you. Even if they are looking for their keys and tell you Uh Huh, don’t believe them, they didn’t hear. Visual people think that if other people can’t see them that they can’t hear them either. They think that if they leave the room talking on the phone that everybody can’t hear them in the other room…..that only works for other visual people fruitloops, auditory people HEAR EVERYTHING and they don’t have to be looking at you to hear everything and lowering your voice only makes your voice lower to them.
