Identifying Social Style

Running head: IDENTIFYING SOCIAL STYLE
Identifying Social Style
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1IDENTIFYING SOCIAL STYLE
There are many ways through which an individual can respond to someone regarding
a question or statement that they have made. Some of these ways of responding fall under
these categories: evaluating, interpreting, reassuring, questioning or paraphrasing (Gorawara-
Bhat et al., 2017). Style flex is known as the concept through which an individual temporarily
changes their preferred style of conducting themselves and opts for a more comfortable style
because of the person that they are communicating with at the time.
I first try to judge the kind of person that they are and the way they talk in the first
interaction so I can adjust myself according to their style of communicating. The process
takes on very improvised techniques because strategies to communicate with the other person
starts to develop on the spot during the conversation with the person, as I start to find out
more about the way that they communicate and what the best way will be for me to talk in so
that I can successfully get my message across. There are a few steps that are involved in me
assessing the need for style flexing when I am interacting with someone, and they are as
follows:
1. First words
When I first meet the individual, we exchange some pleasantries and start small talk
to basically get the ball rolling on a conversation to start, and be maintained. During these
small talks, I try to extract some basic information about the person by talking about their
clothes, their nationality, weather trends in the last few days. Not much of this requires a style
flex because they are very general topics.
2. Adapting
After we start progressing on to more specific topics, the other person’s
communication style will become more obvious and that is when I start using style flex to
adjust my communication techniques.