Personal insight is a prerequisite to mastering new communication skills

Before we can master new skills, we need to understand who we are, see ourselves as others see us, and have an objective view of our performance. The faster we can get to insight, the sooner we can start the learning.

Achieving real insight into our own communication behaviours and skills is startlingly difficult

  • Communication is unique in that we are “inside ourselves” when we communicate, unable to see ourselves as others see us

  • Communication skills are deeply embedded in us from an early age, so much a part of us that they are essentially invisible to us

  • Few people have the skills to give feedback that is taken constructively

  • Few of us have the awareness to accept and internalise feedback

  • We dramatically mis-evaluate our own performance, even on fundamental, simple communication metrics

  • When asked to estimate their talk time during coaching sessions, coaches using Ovida on average under-estimate by 27%

We’re more receptive to demonstrably objective feedback from a machine than feedback from a fallible fellow-human

We all generate internal narratives to make sense of our place in the world. When those narratives are challenged by feedback, our first reaction is often to build a new narrative - one that gives us a plausible reason to reject the feedback as subjective or flawed.

It’s been demonstrated in numerous studies that we are remarkably more open to demonstrably objective feedback from an inanimate machine than we are from another human, particularly if that feedback is carefully crafted to be non-judgemental.

Traditional techniques like reflection are limited by our deeply fallible memories

  • Studies have proven how surprisingly fallible our memories are

  • this is magnified when it comes to our own communication, where we struggle to accurately recall what we said, nevermind how we said, or the non-verbal signals we communicated

Skilled trainers leverage Ovida’s unique communication skills metrics to shorten time to insight

  • Ovida’s objective and non-judgemental communication skills metrics are carefully crafted to raise self-awareness

  • Expert feedback that is supported by the right metrics reduces time-to-insight by 3x