Learning styles affect you at home, at work and in all your relationships.

Did you know that learning styles can make the difference between being able to communicate and get along well with your friends, your family members, your co-workers or even your sweetheart?

What Are Learning Styles?

Learning styles are simply a preference in how you process information. At their core they determine how you talk, how you dress, how you make decisions and how you relate to the people in your life. Understanding what the learning styles are, what yours are in particular and what the characteristics of each are will make a huge impact on your life and ability to relate to others as well as how you do in the workplace and school.

Visual Learning Styles and Their Characteristics

People with visual learning styles think in pictures. This means when they are listening to a lecture or even to a friend speaking to them, they are making pictures in their mind of what the other person is saying.

Ultimately. a person with a visual learning style will speak quickly and to the point and don’t like to waste much time listening to a lot of unnecessary chatter. It’s actually too much work for them. Think of this next time you are talking to a high visual person.

When people with visual learning styles read a book they make mental movies in their mind of everything they read which makes recall easier and faster. Visual learners often do very well on written tests because visual learning styles match how written tests are designed.

learning styles When you meet a high visual learner, you will notice that he or she is generally very well dressed, neat and organized and has a clear timeline of things in their mind. They will say things like, “I see, I get the picture or let’s focus on this.” Their words tend to be picture or even camera oriented.

A visual learner does not usually understand how a person with a kinesthetic learning style can be so untidy in their room, their car or on their desk.

Unless the people with visual learning styles and kinesthetic learning styles understand each other’s traits and are willing to accept them, a relationship between these two people can be problematic – whether it is in the family, in school, at work or with a romantic partner.

Auditory Learning Style Characteristics

People with auditory learning styles love to learn by listening. They can tell stories with the best of them, and remember what you said years after you said it. The auditory learner makes a great speaker.

When auditory learners study, they tend to say the words aloud in their mind and do the same thing during recall on a written test. Unfortunately, this tends to slow them down and they would be well served to add some of the visual learner’s mental movies when they read to make recall faster during a test.

auditory learning style Auditory learners are pretty much in the middle as to manner of dress, whether they are neat or not, and their timelines in their mind tend to be in words. Generally when they recall an experience it is remembering the words they heard.

A person with an auditory learning style will often make the visual learner want to run the other direction. They tend to talk so much that the visual learner does not like to make that many pictures in their mind all at once, and it can lead to conflict in the family, in the workplace and even in relationships with friends and sweethearts.

Again, when the auditory learner understands the other two learning styles they can make slight adaptations in order to get along better.

Kinesthetic Learning Style Characteristics

People with kinesthetic learning styles are tactile by nature. They often make great athletes because they tend to love to move.

In a school setting kinesthetic learning styles are often mistaken for kids with ADHD or learning disabilities, when in fact their natural learning style is to learn by doing or acting out things in plays. Schools tend to cater to those with visual learning styles who are also natural seat-sitters, generally still and turn in very neat work.

Dr. Stephen Guffanti, in his book called Does Your Child Really Have ADHD, talks about how kids with kinesthetic learning styles are frequently penalized in a school setting that is generally organized for visual learners.

In terms of relationships, kinethetic learners don’t often know how to respect individual space boundaries of the other learning styles, so that can cause problems if not addressed up front. People with kinesthetic learning styles are often messy in their appearance, and their homes and cars don’t reflect the kind of organization a visual learner finds natural.

If a person is a kinesthetic learner and has a visual teacher, there will be problems until they both learn to understand the other’s natural preferences and each will need to be a bit more flexible.

Learning Styles In Family, Work, Love and Friendships

As we talked about above, learning styles affect every part of your life and the good news is that learning about the other two styles will go a long ways towards more peaceful communication and relationships.

Once people with different learning styles understand each other’s characteristics and have specific conversations about the other processes information, life becomes just that much easier for all people with different learning styles.

No one has only one learning style but people do tend to favor one over the the other two learning styles.

Pat Wyman is America’s Most Trusted Learning Expert and best selling author. She is the Founder of HowToLearn.com and has been teaching and writing about learning styles and their benefits for well over 20 years.

In her learning styles programs she shows people with different learning styles how to succeed at home, at work, in school and in romantic relationships.

Her book, Instant Learning for Amazing Grades shows parents and teachers how to get higher grades in 14 days using learning styles.