We previously published the first in our Native Perspectives series, entitled “What Is Your Native Perspective?”, in which we offered some simple exercises to help you figure out which of the four perspectives you tend to orient to the most. If you haven’t figured out your native perspective yet, we suggest that you try doing that practice first before you move on to this one.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone, but left feeling frustrated and unheard, as if the other person was in a completely different world? Well, there is a good chance that they were — at least in the ways they perceive and interpret what’s important to them.

This practice will help you become more fluent with the four native perspectives people orient from — the four fundamental ways of being, perceiving, and doing — both in yourself and in others. This will allow you to become much more comfortable, more skillful, and more effective in your communication and relationships.

These four native perspectives are:

• Inner experience (Upper-Left Quadrant)
• Action (Upper-Right Quadrant)
• Relationships (Lower-Left Quadrant)
• Systems (Lower-Right Quadrant)

This practice offers a powerful diagnostic tool that integrates two different components of the Integral model — quadrants and typologies — which will help you learn the four primary ways of relating to the world (experience, action, relationships, and systems) and identify which of these four fundamental perspectives is more or less “native” to you, while teaching you to correctly translate the perspective of the person you are interacting with and more skillfully communicate with them.

Feel free to use the Journaling app in the lower-left corner of your screen to reflect on this practice.