THE USE OF ADJECTIVES
The final linguistic tendency we need to identify is which adjectives our clients are using. Inevitably, in any conversation, we will use adjectives to describe things. If you know how to use elicitation, you can open the valve a little more, allowing more adjectives to come out.
We use adjectives to modify nouns. Someone may describe an aspect of a recent vacation as ‘amazing’, while another might describe a party they went to as ‘incredible’.
These are important words. They aren’t just important for us to hear in conversations, though. When we hear someone use an adjective, we need to go through a simple process in our mind:
We identify the context by simply determining whether the adjective was used to describe something the person liked or didn’t like. If they were describing dealing with another company, they didn’t like at all and used the word ‘awful’, we would put that into our mind in the negative adjective column. If they were speaking of when they first met their significant other and described the evening as ‘unbelievable’, we would add that to this person’s positive column.
In your mind, just imagine the words going into a two-column list as you speak with someone.
With pronouns, sensory preference, and adjectives, it might seem a little overwhelming at first. I recommend only learning to spot one of these at a time. Next time you hear someone speak, let your mind do its magic, placing highlights onto those words. You might bold them in your mind as you hear someone speak. The way you’re going to use the adjectives is really powerful, and we’ll cover that in just a moment.
Consider the following paragraph:
You asked someone what they liked their previous job, and you receive this response.
“Well, I really enjoyed most of it. The people we worked with there were fantastic. They had an amazing system for us all to collaborate on projects that was perfect, in my opinion. Everyone loved it. The management, though seemed to be lacking. They would come up with these horrible new ideas every week and try to get us all to implement them. I couldn’t see why. It looked like they were just ignorant of our input. They would have these bright ideas every week that no one really enjoyed.”
What adjectives did you notice?
Were you able to identify the positive and negative adjectives?
What about this person’s pronouns?
Did you also notice the sensory words they used?
Let’s look at it one more time with the important parts of the statement underlined.
“Well, I really enjoyed most of it. The people we worked with there were fantastic. They had an amazing system for us all to collaborate on projects that was perfect, in my opinion. Everyone loved it. The management, though seemed to be lacking. They would come up with these horrible new ideas every week and try to get us all to implement them. I couldn’t see why. It looked like they were just ignorant of our input. They would have these bright ideas every week that no one really enjoyed.”
You might immediately see this person as a team-focused pronoun user. You’re right!
If you identified they are also a visual communicator, you’re spot-on!
They also expressed a few descriptive words when they referred to things they liked and things they didn’t like. In this example, let’s look at the list.
Positive adjectives:
Negative adjectives:
Now that you’re able to identify these three linguistic techniques, what are called ‘linguistic harvesting’ in 6MX, you’re able to do something called ‘hearing between the lines’. There’s a massive amount of data hidden in language that most people will never hear. When you can identify how someone speaks in a surgical way, things change fast.
In interrogations, I noticed a drawn-out interrogation where the language of the suspect and the interrogator were mismatched. It went like this:
Pronouns: Interrogator uses Self-focused, suspect uses Team-focused pronouns
Sensory words: Interrogator uses visual descriptions, suspect used only feeling words
Adjectives: Interrogator used suspect’s negative adjectives to try and convince them to confess
This is an issue. A big one. When the confession came around, the interrogator, in his frustration, accidentally changed his phrasing around to match the suspect’s. Something as simple as the language alone changed the entire outcome. I couldn’t believe it. In fact, I refused to believe something so seemingly insignificant could make such a drastic difference in the outcome of an interrogation.
For years, my obsession in developing interrogation techniques was to talk people into doing things (like confessing to crimes or providing intelligence against their own country) that were probably not in their best interest. I never realized these techniques were universally applicable until 2013, when I delivered a speech at a small chamber of commerce meeting in Cleveland, Texas, and a salesperson asked me to provide him with all my research. A week later, the man confessed that he owned a dozen car dealerships in the area and would like to implement this into a sales system.
SUMMARY
Adjectives reveal the innerworkings of the brain in front of you. Not only can you see when things are being concealed or hidden, but you can hear exactly how the brain you’re dealing with works and what that brain needs in order to be influenced.
We’ve covered a lot, in the next chapter, I’m going to show you how compliance and influence begin to form together as you develop a behavioral profile. How does compliance work? Let’s check it out…