4 Matt Communication 

There are lots of different ways you can deliver a message. Send a email, a text, a letter, a fax or carrier pigeon. Oh, and you can talk to a person……

What I want you to think about though is how you structure your message, regardless of how you are going to deliver it. 

I learnt about the 4 Matt style of communication when studying NLP, I began using it to design training programs, to flesh out a idea and to start building books I wanted to write. 

4 Matt focuses on four things; why, what, how and what if, in that order.

The order is important because people that need the why need it first. If a why person doesn’t get the why, they won’t hear the what. A what person might not need the why, but without the what they can’t hear the how. A how person might not care about the why or the what but need the how before they will get something. Finally the what if people are thinking about how else you might use the skills they are learning, the other ways something might be approached and any other questions they might have. 

So it’s kind of simple, if you want to teach some one something or communicate a new approach, deliver your idea the 4 Matt way. For example:

VAK

The reason why I want you to learn about VAK is so that you can connect with your customers better over the phone.

What VAK stands for is visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. These are people’s learning and communication style.  A visual person will use visual language and look for images. Auditory people will key into how things at said and kinaesthetic people will be more into how something feels. 

How you use this is you start to listen for the types of lanuguage people use, which category does it fall into and you start to deliver your message the way they like to talk. 

You might also wonder what will happen if you can’t notice the other persons language. What you can do in this case is loop your language. As in, use visual, auditory and kinaesthetic language in even amounts to make sure you cover each style. 

And that is 4 Matt communication in a nut shell. 

How I write it out looks like this:

  
Rock and Roll

Rob

PS. What’s the one thing you don’t do, that would cause the most positive change in your life?