Sensory acuity - what to look for
In inter-personal communication sensory acuity enables us to notice subtle physiological shifts in those we are communicating with which in turn give us an idea about how our communication is being received, to know if our communication is going in.
During inter-personal communication people constantly make very subtle shifts in their physiology from moment to moment which we often do not consciously notice since the verbal part of the communication takes the focus of our attention.
The non-verbal elements of inter-personal communication can often give us insights about the communication that are not provided by the words being spoken, which in turn guide us in how to modify our communication in order to get our desired outcome.
Many physiological changes occur and here we'll look at five major changes which are useful to notice:-
Skin colour - from moment to moment there are changes in a person's skin colour. The shift is usually from a whiter colour to a redder colour or what is commonly described as a blushing of the skin.
The easiest way to look for this is to imagine the person in black-and-white and look for changes from light to dark. This may sound odd but it's a useful way to monitor the shift from paler shades to redder shades by measuring it in terms of a shift from light to dark.
What we must avoid here is applying our own meaning to that colour shift based on that shift alone - we must stick to sensory based descriptions.
We may look at a person with a red face and assume that they are embarrassed and of course we could be completely wrong - the could equally be angry or be hot from exercising or the shift could be due to a shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic functioning.
The moment we ascribe meaning to a physiological shift we are guilty of mind reading. We must stick to sensory based descriptions in order to use our sensory inputs cleanly.