Weekly Training Booster #3: Improve Your Communication Skills

Join Andy Palmer and Darren A. Smith in the third episode of the Weekly Training Booster. This episode is about how to improve your communication skills using HBDI. Know someone that you just can't seem to communicate with effectively? I bet you are speaking a different 'language'.

You Can Read the How to Improve Your Communication Skills Episode Transcript Below and Watch the Video:

Darren A. Smith:

Hello, and welcome to the Weekly Training Booster. We're week three and our booster this week is Andy. Andy, how you doing?

Andy Palmer:

I'm good. Thank you. Yeah, I'm good. So we're talking about how to improve your communication skills.

Darren A. Smith:

We are. So how to improve your communication skills. I'm interviewing this week. I'm asking Andy because it's his specialist topic, and we're particularly talking about it around HBDI, a psychometric test, but let's come back to that. Andy, how to improve your communication skills. Where would you start?

Andy Palmer:

Good opening question. Where would I start? I think I would start with understanding the simplicity of communication. I think all too often people are far too motivated to complicate stuff and say too much when actually just sometimes that whole principle of less is more, getting to the point and being absolutely clear on the message you're trying to deliver.

Darren A. Smith:

Yep. Absolutely agree with that. You hear people influence and communicate by repetition. Ah, it drives me nuts. They keep telling you the same thing.

All right. So let's build into communication. You're an expert in HBDI. What the hell is that?

Click to watch the video

 

Andy Palmer:

All right. HBDI, so the HBDI is the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. It's a psychometric tests. You will have heard of many of the Myers-Briggs, Belbin. There's a whole host of them, all particularly good in their own individual way. For me, I favor the Herrmann profile, the HBDI profile because it's incredibly easy to understand. And once you've understood it, it's incredibly powerful and simple in how you then apply it.

So the understanding and the thinking behind it is that we have four quadrants of our brain. So it's a metaphoric model. It's an incredibly complicated pieces of kit that we've got upstairs. But actually where it starts to understand these, the differences between our left-hand and our right-hand hemispheres and then our upper and lower parts of our brain.

So we're talking about our limbic motor at the bottom, our cerebral motor at the top. And then the thinking behind the whole brain thinking of HBDI is that each of these quadrants are responsible for different thinking preferences. So it's about how we prefer to think, how we prefer to communicate and how we prefer to make decisions. It's why we as individuals have differences and it's why we can start to appreciate and understand what we have ourselves and then that of others.

Darren A. Smith:

Okay. All right. Got it. So it sounds a little bit like the L'Oreal advert. There's the sciencey bit over here. All right. So let's see now if we can get into, if I understand this HBDI thing, I've got four quadrants type of thinking preference, how does that help me improve my communication skills?

Andy Palmer:

Sure. Okay. So each of these quadrants, and we're not going to do it any justice within our 10 minute video here today, but actually the value comes through understanding what those different quadrants deliver. So a very, very top-line level. We've got our upper left quadrant, our blue quadrants. These are the people that are very factual and logical and want precise facts. So when we're either being communicated to or from a blue, it's going to be here and now. It's going to be matter of fact, it's going to be precise and very logical and very rational.

If we then come down into the lower left-hand side. This is our green quadrant.