The Intelligent Communication Approach
Everyone communicates, but not all communicate intelligently. Intelligent Communication is a simple yet comprehensive approach to interpersonal communication that helps people be quick to hear and slow to speak. This leads to becoming better communicators: achieving better rapport, influencing more persuasively, identifying deception more accurately understanding others and making yourself understood more clearly, teaching more effectively, and negotiating more successfully.
Intelligent Communication begins by helping us understand both ourselves and others. In some ways people are like icebergs: what we see is only a small portion of all that exists. There is so much more below the waterline. Similarly, there is much more below the surface of both ourselves and others that we cannot readily see when we communicate. We need to uncover what lies beneath by carefully considering what we perceive above the surface.

Intelligent Communication 3.0, the latest version of my model, seeks to help communicators do just that. Understand both what lies beneath us and those with whom we communicate. Intelligent Communication looks at all people by considering their body/behavior (what we can see) and their inner person (what we cannot see). Using a simplified structure based on some ancient philosophy, we label the inner person the heart. The heart is made up of our perception, our mind (thinking), our gut (feeling), and our will (choosing). Like the water line to an iceberg, there is a line that separates our body and our heart. That is life and at the far end are our goals, which impact both our behavior and the inner workings of our hearts.
This approach is designed to create better listening, understanding, and talking. Becoming a better communicator requires understanding yourself and others. Further, it requires becoming a better listener (Perception). Becoming a better listener leads to better understanding (Mind+Gut). Improved listening and understanding results in better choices (Will), which, in turn, leads to better communication. Good communicators get things done. They achieve their goals.
What Live Training Do I Offer?
- Intelligent Communication Fundamentals: This course provides an introduction to the Intelligent Communication 3.0 model/approach to interpersonal communication and teaches how to apply the approach specifically in both professional and personal contexts.
- Rapport Building: This course teaches academically sound techniques designed to develop rapport, which involves the creation of a sympathetic bond of trust. The establishment of trust is a precursor and essential element of effectively applying influence techniques.
- Personality Profiling: Everyone categorizes others with whom they communicate automatically. This course provides tools to accurately understand people in ways that will enhance abilities to apply the appropriate communication skills to meet specific objectives.
- Elicitation and Counter-elicitation: This course teaches an understanding of the psychological basis for elicitation and various tools to use to collect information from an unwitting source. It includes instruction on how to identify attempts to elicit information and counter-elicitation techniques.
- Influence and Persuasion: This training presents effective influence techniques based on both academic research and practical experience. The course includes a framework for persuasion that takes advantage of the Intelligent Communication approach and Intelligent Personality Typing.
- Narrative Analysis: This course provides instruction on multiple tools, derived from academic research and years of experience, for understanding and detecting deception in others, based on their written and oral communication. This course focuses on verbal indicators of deception.
- Negotiations: This course provides students with tools to enhance their abilities to negotiate in order to obtain a favorable outcome. It includes instruction on how to apply influence techniques in both distributive and interest-based approaches to negotiation.
- Questioning: This is a new course currently in development. Intelligent Questioning takes students back to the basics to understand the fundamentals of good questions and apply these fundamentals with other skills in the Intelligent Communication approach.
- Insider Threat Identification and Mitigation: This course shows students how to use Intelligent Communication tools to identify and mitigate insider threats on the Critical Path to Insider Risk. Versions of this course were taught at Black Hat 2017 and 2019.
Pick and choose from these modules to design your custom course, then contact me.