Have you ever walked away from a meeting thinking you have agreed on something, then what you haven’t agreed starts to happen? It is all about how we take our information in.

Some of us like facts, really enjoy facts and need them to hang on to. Then there are others who find facts restrict their thinking; the facts get in the way. They can see better ways of doing things. Some people like them for evidence, others don’t. Ask yourself a couple of questions, what do you do, do you rely on facts or do you think in a more inspirational way? Yes, you will do both but what do you do first.

A useful exercise in understanding yourself and why you may clash with others is to work out what your preference may be. Look at the picture you see in this blog and think about what you see first, colours, shapes, pictures or go straight to the artist or is it oil based or put a bigger picture to it? A useful exercise to see how different people around you are and what they see. No one way is the right way, and you don’t want everyone to be the same, organisations need the mix.

However, what you need to be aware of is how it can come across. I recently had some time with a very bright young lad, clearly an Oxbridge individual with the way he thought outside the box on everything, great to work with him. I suggested he would need to be careful because some people around him will not always follow his thinking and will find him very vague and hard to understand. He had no idea and was shocked when with a few simple exercises he realised how different people were.  He had a lightbulb moment when we were discussing this. He realised that this was why people did not always do what he thought they had agreed on. “How fascinating,” He said, that is why some people appear negative to him, he actually said this. Some of his colleagues are likely to be practical, like experience and probably very matter of fact. This is what may appear negative as they can’t see all the creative ideas working. The skill is having everyone working together and the practical people following up on the creative ideas, well the realistic ones, the ones the factual people can see working.

The key to understand from this blog is how different we take our information in and how frustrated we can be within our workplace where we see negativity, creativity, vagueness and direction. Remember people will see things very differently. Ask yourself, how do I take my information in, how am I seen?

Claire Moody is our head coach at Target Training and you can read more about her here.  She delivers training on coaching for managers courses, and you can read more about these courses here and see dates here.