Personality Can Be Heard. Literally

Let me listen to you and I'll tell you who you are

We are social beings and when we communicate, especially when we speak, we are sharing valuable information about the characteristics of our personality tendency, whether the listener can read them or not.

Our personality is the sum of two elements: temperament and character. The constant internal conversation between these two elements, usually very noisy, translates into our particular behavioral traits, which in turn are modulated by our beliefs, emotional states and the cultural or family contexts.

The interesting thing about this is that it is possible to identify the tendency of our temperament and character through the sound of our voice, literally. Every time we utter a sentence or even a word, the non-verbal codes of our voice reveal our social relationship patterns.

But well, before we know what means what, it's important to understand what these two elements of our personality consist of.

Temperament: what you came into this world with

Our temperament corresponds to the genetic part of our personality that triggers an automatic response to environmental stimuli and becomes much more evident in situations of danger, crisis or pressure. When you are faced with one of these situations and your reptilian brain in tune with the limbic brain decides to activate a protocol for survival, whether it is the attack of a hungry lion or the pressure of a presentation to the board of directors, your temperament takes over and depending on your tendency, you can react by quickly attacking the lion, ignore the situation, use humor to relieve the tension, paralyze, hide or run away. Your temperament is mainly inhabited by your emotions and is also the "home" of your intuition.

Character: is how you choose to walk through it (this world).

Your character, on the other hand, is what you forge throughout your life (much more intensely during adolescence) to adapt to the modern dangers of your environment: your parents, your relatives, your friends, a new job, a new city, the first romantic relationships, etc., and usually when the gap between your temperament and your character is very large, the biggest communication challenges come.

For example, a little girl with an energetic temperament learned during her first years of life to be reserved, quiet (forging her character to adapt to the environment) and when today she needs to say "no" or demonstrate her authority, her voice "cracks", she hyperventilates, stutters, etc. .... However, in a situation of extreme pressure, her temperament can explode from its shadow and take over the helm of communication without any control. So, just as we can recognize one or another temperament in the behavior a person expresses under pressure, it is also possible to recognize it through the sound of one's voice, from the greeting, without pressure or stress, and having a casual conversation of a few seconds.

How we sound

We learned to relate to others in order to cooperate and access resources thanks to empathy, language and narratives (principle of the Social Brain theory) and that is why all human beings recognize a biological code in the sound of the voice. It is enough to recall an occasion when you have probably been confronted with the famous "it's not what you say but how you say it..." to understand that there is something beyond the semantic content of the message that arouses an emotion in others.

Adjectives such as "sweet", "strong", "serious", "pleasant", etc., try to explain what listening to a voice produces in us emotionally and it is curious how the same voice awakens different emotions and opinions in different people. This happens because there is a relationship between the sound of the voice and different temperamental tendencies.

Thus, even without being aware of it, when we communicate we are not only understanding the words with which the speech has been constructed, we are not only implementing a commercial or business relationship strategy or any other type of professional conversation. We are also unconsciously (consciously, if you have received training) interpreting the emotional states and temperament of others through the sound of their voice, so that our limbic brain sends us signals in the form of intuition to decide whether we are on the right track and whether we are communicating effectively with the other person.

Moving from not knowing to understanding

There is not much that can be done to avoid this parallel and deep communication that occurs between different temperament tendencies through nonverbal communication, except to be aware (again, with voice and neurocommunication training) of the correlation between voice and personality in order to understand the motivation, challenges and needs of each tendency and strategically design our speech to generate an emotional comfort that facilitates achieving a common goal.

The first step to achieve this is to be aware of all the information you may be missing by not actively listening (with intellect, emotion and body) to others. Asking yourself the right questions such as "what did this person really mean...?", "what is their temperament tendency...?", "do we have the same perception towards X concept...?" It disposes your brain to be more attentive to give relevance to all the nonverbal information you are receiving from others in a conversation. From there, it is surprising how you begin to see, hear and feel the situation in more conscious ways and surely, with the help of your intuition, you will be able to handle it effectively and coherently.

They say that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Well, the voice is the echo of the neural connections that build your personality.

#yupa #neuroscience #leadership #personality