Page 27 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

P. 27

The inference ladder is a communication model that explains how
the mind moves upward from many facts to a few judgments—from
description to abstraction. At the wider bottom rung of the ladder, we have
observable data. We are immersed in a sea of data, and our nonconscious
mind manages all this through the
perception process. At the next
We seem to think that the rung of the ladder we select data,
easier something is to recall, add meanings to it (cultural and
personal), and produce lasting
the truer it must be.
patterns. We tap into these patterns
to deal with reality as best we can,
but our mind leaves out lots of the
new bits because they don’t ¿ t the old bits. When called upon to ¿ t one or
more of these patterns into current reality, our mind simply makes stuff
up. Thus the next rung of the ladder says our mind makes inferences about
what the current moment is like based on what we know from the past. We
do this in a rapid, automatic fashion.

In most conversation, these ¿rst rungs are handled automatically by the

cognitive unconscious part of the mind. At the next rung of the ladder, we
consciously draw conclusions about the external situation on the basis of
our invented internal reality. Not only to do we make up our conscious
minds, but we also respond to the surge of emotional energy delivered by
our cognitive unconscious as we reach a decision. Because we are conscious
of our beliefs, at the next rung we have to massage our conclusion to ¿ t our
beliefs. Finally, at the highest rung, we talk. We think we are acting in the
moment, but the reality is at the bottom of the ladder. What you act and think
on is a much higher level of emotionally energized abstraction, ¿ ve steps
above the reality of the now. Ŷ