What colour are you?
Fiery red personalities are extroverts and thinking types. These people are primarily interested in results. You never need to work out what a fiery red person thinks; they’ll let you know. They tell it like it is and don’t dress it up with lots of arcane rhetorical formulations. If they want to talk they simply say, “We need to talk, ring me in five minutes!”
Earth green personality types are introverted and feeling. They are the direct opposite of red types. Their primary goal is harmony and with the confrontational reds they can feel virtually impossible. If you want to know what a green thinks, don’t expect them to tell you spontaneously. Ask them instead. This person doesn’t demand space but is quite happy to be one of the crowd.
Sunshine yellow personalities are extroverted and feeling. Their primary goal is attention. They are the direct opposite of the blues referred to below, but they have some things in common with the greens and reds. They are extroverted like the reds and feeling like greens. They are sociable colleague who always want to talk, not just to tell you something but sometimes purely to hear their own voice. They don’t laugh because it’s funny, but also so that people will hear their laugh, and they can laugh that little bit extra when everybody else has finished laughing.
Cool blue personalities are introverted and thinking. They are the direct opposite of yellows but are introverted like the greens and thinking like the reds. The primary goal for the blues is to understand. They can ask lots of questions to achieve that goal and because of that they are seen as being critical. That is the eternal misfortune of the blues.
Getting people to listen to you if they are different colours
First and foremost it is a good idea to make use of this colour filter when you look at the people around you and their style of communication. If you don’t click with a person, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you or they are communicating badly, but just differently. But remember that to some degree you have access to all the colours inside you. If you as a yellow meet a blue, then you should think about toning down the yellow, and turning up blue instead. I usually do that when I’m talking to my husband and take longer pauses when he asks me something. He doesn’t want to hear my three different variants of an answer that I revise while I’m talking, he just wants to hear the final version. It doesn’t matter that it takes a little time before I get there, even though that delay would drive me crazy if I was a listener. But, essentially, you shouldn’t speak to people in the way you want to be spoken to. That is the basic rule. You who read this book and feel that you are blue or green, in other words the introverted personality types, remember that a large part of the world’s population are like you and actually think that your communication is appealing.
There is a great misunderstanding about only the yellow being good communicators; there are also many introvert communicators who have inspired with their low-key charisma. Gandhi is perhaps the best example. But Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.K .Rowling and Steven Speilberg are also good examples. These people thanks to their introverted nature, will to understand and ability to observe- have achieved a great deal, but what was (or is) their rhetoric like? Really excellent in its own way. Good rhetoric comprises both extroverted and introverted communication.
To be be inspiring is not synonymous with being a yellow personality. It is savour doing something more than whites expected of you. If a professor starts to talk about the journey of his life when the subject is statistics, it becomes inspiring because it is unexpected. A yellow person can inspire, by using strategic silence for once, that too will be unexpected and will make it more interesting. But the most important of all is that when you communicate with other colours and ruin up the level of one of them inside yourself, it should still remain fairly true to who you are as a person. After all, you want to be the best rhetorical version of yourself-not of somebody else.
To develop your rhetoric to its maximum, it is important that you study models that you can relate to in style and expression; it will then be easier for you to approach them. I am a yellow and I often look at personalities like the talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, but even if I have her as a rhetorical model it is not impossible for me to be inspired by a speech by Gandhi or some other introvert. On the contrary, many times extroverts can be driven crazy by other extroverts. They’re often drawn to their opposites choosing to marry an introvert, for example.
Remember that you can communicate with other colours as long as you bear in mind that there are things that can cause a head-on collision. So the next time you come to the conclusion that the chemistry’s not between you and somebody else, you can turn up or tone down the colour necessary to work better with the other person.
Bear this colour-thinking in mind as you read the book, and then you will be well on the way to finding your best rhetorical version in various situations.
Buy your copy here.
Comments are closed