Archives for posts with tag: Personality

Voices and Faces

March 6, 2019 //
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When you’re getting introductions to people over social media platforms like LinkedIn, it always helps to see a picture of the person. It helps you put a personality to the person.

When it’s the other way round – in other words when you speak to someone over the phone before you actually meet them, and you don’t know what they look like – you have to speculate on what the owner of that voice will look like.

Voices and faces are strange bedfellows in my experience. I often imagine what someone looks like and acts like from their voice, as it helps me make the connection in my head. I almost always get it completely wrong.

When you meet them, the face never seems to fit the voice you’ve listened to. Or, put another way, the face we put to the voice is not the face that belong with that voice.

Try doing it with a radio DJ, whose picture you’re not familiar with, obviously. If you don’t know what they look like, and ten people take a guess, I’m sure the guesses will vary wildly. Is that guess based on our own unique experiences? Probably.

It always reminds me how much can be wrong with the assumptions we make about people.

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Categories Communication, General

Athlete or Bathlete

December 25, 2017 //
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Are you an athlete or bathlete? Are you the straining, strenuous type, or do you luxuriate in rest and relaxation? Whether you’re thinking about an answer in terms of exercise, or how you approach your work, it’s the same question.

Some of us are type A, some of us are type B. Some of us are athletes some of the time, and bathletes the rest of the time. Maybe we’re all somewhere on the spectrum between the two, between the cheetah and the sloth.

I thought I had coined a new word in bathlete, but it turns out it already exists, except not the way I mean it. I’m not talking about a collapsing of the term ‘bad athlete’, more someone who is professionally good at relaxing, a bath or bathing expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being supremely good at the soothing of body and mind. In fact, it’s the perfect antidote to the intensity and effort of work or exercise. Work hard, play hard, as they used to say before it became slightly unfashionable.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Beware the GVV

November 18, 2015 //
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There is a certain type of person, a certain type of character, that it’s unhealthy to be around for too long. I call this person the Good Vibe Vortex, or GVV for short.

The GVV is not a positive person. Stuff happens to the GVV. Sometimes it’s of their own making, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they don’t even know they are a GVV, sometimes they do.

The GVV is hard work, they’re painful company. They suck away your positivity like a hoover, and you can feel your good vibes, your good energy, the great mood you were in, ebbing away. They are depleting your life force. It’s not simply what they say, there’s something about their whole aura that spells ‘d-o-w-n-e-r’.

This person is not always as obvious as the blue character in the film Inside Out but you get a feeling pretty quickly that they are someone who sees only – and therefore gets bogged down by – the sad, the hurdles, the difficulty. And lo and behold, the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs and stuff happens to them again, taking you with it if you’re not careful.

Yes, beware the GVV. Beware the invasion of the good vibe-snatchers…

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Categories General