Having to work with a largely diverse group of people and travelling around the world, I have learned a lot about us as humans, especially being an extroverted person myself. I was always curious by what one could do to make a connection to another human being, especially if they have a different background, culture, country or creed.

Connecting to each other is a key to our growth holistically. When we give up trying to connect to one another, societal diseases start to emerge, such as misunderstanding, gossip and xenophobia which eventually turn into real physical problems and laws of discrimination in our world.

I strongly believe that somewhere in the core of every problem we have in our world, regardless of how it manifests itself, there’s some deep miscommunication that has been caused by the growing problem of not knowing how to communicate and connect to one another.

Some organizations try to mechanize our communication, and this takes the heart and soul and authenticity out of it. We have to remember that the very thing that makes us interested in one another is our humanity and when we try to computerize our communications without considering all the three aspects of ourselves, we end up with what is known today on the internet as the trolling phenomena where people will say things without considering the outcome because even though we call it a “connection online,” it’s completely stripped of all aspects of our humanity.

So, what are these aspects of humanity?

Physical Aspect

I started with this aspect because it’s the easiest aspect to observe and in some cases it’s a decision maker in our day to day lives, sometimes justly and some other times very unjustly.

The physical aspect of our humanity is the idea of what we can see, what we can move around, and what we can go to from one point to another.

Some of us are very physical human beings, like mechanics, construction workers and every single person you’ve ever known who says they’d rather do roofing in July than sit at a computer all day.

When we try to connect to a person who is predominantly physical, it’s important to understand that they want to see a picture through your discussion about physical things, moving from point A to point B, doing physical things that result in more physical things. An example of this is the way the physical act of construction leads to the physical entity of a building.

Even if the topic of discussion is about an aspect that is not physical, such as talking about taxes at the end of the year, it’s important that the physical aspect is represented when you’re trying to get the point across to a physical person. For instance, talk about moving funds to a certain bank account, rather than talk about how these funds were calculated and accounted for.

Intellectual Aspect

This aspect revolves more around thought, logic and rationalization of everything. It’s the idea of trying to make calculations and decisions before taking a physical action.

Intellectual people might panic if talked to about taking an action without thinking it through, and for the most part the spiritual aspect might be a side detail that is a nice-to-have, but not crucial in any achievement.  This is simply because a lot of intellectually predominant people don’t necessarily believe in the spiritual aspect of ourselves except what comes about through logic and action – those things that are observable.

When engaging in a discussion with an intellectual person, it’s very important to be very precise and simply on point. Do your best to quantify things based on their observable impact in the real world, otherwise their most predominant aspect will reject your discussion or lose any interest or neglect to give you any attention to what you have to say.

When speaking to an intellectual person about a spiritual topic, it’s paramount to stay grounded to observable, verifiable aspects of life that they can rationalize. For instance, if you want to talk about happiness, try to link that to success which is rooted in hard work that can be measured and calculated by setting up goals, following regular routines … etc.

Spiritual Aspect

The spiritual aspect is the core of our humanity, it’s the unobservable force that moves us into one direction or another, the feelings we experience on daily basis from love to fear, happiness to sadness or anger.

Spiritually dominated people are like the oil to the engine in your car, your car could have the biggest engine and the smartest tech, but if there is no oil, there’s no energy to move your car.

When talking to a spiritual person about a physical subject you must engage ideas such as hope, and happiness into your discussion. They are not so much interested in the technicalities of things, neither are they as much invested in physicality of what happens. They just want to feel happy, fulfilled and excited to engage into any aspect of their lives.

Each one of us has all three aspects within ourselves. We engage on daily basis in physical activities, things as simple as driving our cars or taking the trash out.

We also engage in intellectual activities, discussions, calculating our budgets and deciding which route we need to take to go to work to avoid traffic today.

We also engage in spiritual activities such as loving to go back home and see our kids, getting angry that our favorite basketball team isn’t performing as well, and we get scared when the lights go out and we hear a noise in our backyards.

The tough part is to be able to identify which aspect is predominantly the strongest aspect of the person you’re trying to communicate with and connect to. In some people it’s tougher than for others, simply because of the economics of our lives and because every aspect doesn’t have enough opportunity to engage itself in life as the others, so some people try to override their most predominant aspects and work jobs they really don’t like so they can live better … but they are not truly happy.

I learned recently that over 50% of the workforce in the United States hate their jobs. And while a part of that has to do with how far they wanted to take their passion and feed their strongest aspects, it also has something to do with the economics and diversification of our workforce from a humanity structural perspective. In any given team or within any given corporation, management should recognize the humanity structure of each employee and place them accordingly.

Being able to understand and communicate with one another is the first step into an optimum distribution of our strength across a smaller team, a startup, a bigger corporate or an entire country.

The perfect conversation with someone is a conversation that has just as much ratio of every aspect as the person you’re talking to, and while that is very difficult to achieve it is not impossible when we get to understand each other more.

That’s why it’s important for us to listen to each other more and understand our interests and most dominant aspects before we start talking to each other. It’s important to get to know each other better although personalities also vary when it comes to how fast we can detect what makes the other person more comfortable to talk about from these three aspects.

It’s also important to stay authentic to ourselves and express ourselves as clearly and as honestly as possible to help the other person understand who we are, and what aspect we are more drawn into that connects to us.

We engage in conversations every day, with our family, co-workers, and strangers at the coffee shop and everywhere else, and if we improve how we communicate with each other, we improve each others lives reciprocatively as a whole, which should eventually reflect positively on us, our families, friends, society and the rest of the world.