Determining Communication Styles

Essay by jnbcoxUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, July 2004

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Determining Communication Styles

A person's style of communication is very important in business and life. Being the most personal element in effective business communication it is a very important building block for one to understand. To reach that level of awareness you must first determine your personality type and view yourself as others see you. Knowing how others perceive you will help you to fine-tune your style into a more confident, clear, and understandable speaker, thus helping you to make a point to your audience.

Understanding the type of communication you have is essential in everyday conversation because without the knowledge of how someone perceives you, you may not know what you are doing wrong. The first step in deciding how you communicate is to know what your personality type is, thus giving you a better understanding of what kind of person you are. "Discovering which style best fits you can be done in a number of ways including personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), psychological assessments, and self-assessments."

The MBTI and other Jungian type tests were derived from a set of fundamentals created by Carl Jung, who explored humanity and consciousness. "Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung's types and functions so revealing of people's personalities that they decided to develop a paper-and-pencil test. It came to be called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and is one of the most popular, and most studied, tests around"

"Since the days of Hippocrates, great thinkers have analyzed the forces at work in human interaction and have come up with one common thread: communication behavior follows four specific patterns. Hippocrates called these 'the four temperaments,' and Carl Jung described them as Intuitor[sic], Thinker, Feeler, and Sensor." The opposite of these four temperaments were later formulated...