How to Communicate More Effectively with an Analytical Personality

Effective communication with an analytical personality requires you to structure your communication in a way that will trigger their engagement – deliver the facts, speak to both sides of your argument and allow time for them to process what you’ve said. These are the three keys to persuading a deep thinker to consider and align with your argument.

Analytical types like to dive deep on issues and get all the facts so that they can come to an informed opinion. These types of professionals like to think things over and organize all of the details in their mind before coming to a decision.

Being well-prepared and presenting a comprehensive picture of all of the relevant facts supporting your position is essential to swaying analytical types to embracing a given position. Deep thinkers appreciate clear, concise presentation, and they enjoy thinking critically about issues to reach a deeper joint understanding. In other words, they will not be influenced by opinion alone – you have to support your argument with objective facts.

 

Fostering Critical Thinking

Analytical personalities want issues laid out in transparent terms. Providing well thought-out answers to analytical types means discussing the various sides of every issue dispassionately and connecting relevant facts and figures along the way.

It’s okay to use topical examples with analytical types as long as those examples are supported by facts. Just don’t expect an analytic type to come to an instant conclusion – after presenting the facts, analytical personality types need enough time to ruminate and come to their own conclusions.

What analytical types naturally do forms the backbone of critical thinking. Critical thinking is all about making an objective analysis of an issue, taking in a wealth of fact-based information, and forming an unbiased judgement based on those facts.

As you can imagine, critical thinking takes time and it’s often difficult to completely remove our personal biases from the judgements we make every day.

 

Be Prepared to Explain Yourself

Other professionals should be prepared to provide examples and explain why they came to the position they did in order to hold any sway with analytical types. Be prepared to outline specific recommendations to analytical types and what would happen if those recommendations were (or were not) enacted.

Analytical types like to see both sides of an issue before making up their minds, so present these kinds of people with evidence supporting your position and counter-evidence that they might also want to consider.

It’s OK to infuse new ideas and challenging counter-evidence into the conversation with analytical types since this can also stimulate their critical thinking and lead them to not leave any stone unturned when coming to decisions.

 

Expect Skepticism from Analytical Types

Some people might be put off by the natural skepticism that analytical personality types use to cut to the heart of an issue, but this definitely isn’t meant to cause offense. Analytical types live to dive deep, get into the facts surrounding an issue, and ask questions that challenge conventional wisdom.

Providing well thought-out answers to analytical types depends largely on understanding this innate skepticism and providing fact-based evidence, compelling counter-evidence, and examples that deepen the point that you’re trying to get across. All of this taken together allows analytical types the opportunity to see both the big picture and the smaller details that comprise it.

Analytical types need time and space to fully consider the issues you’ve presented to them – to employ critical thinking and come to their own conclusions.