THE BEHAVIOR COMPASS
The behavioral compass is a circular form that will enable you to fill out a behavioral profile during your training. I have some clients who use them in person and fill them out in the interrogation room in the presence of a suspect. Other clients, who wish to remain a bit more covert in conversations, will fill this compass out in their head and fill in a paper one a bit later in the conversation. There are even online models that generate random behavioral traits on a behavior compass for training.
The behavioral compass looks like this:
You can download one for yourself by visiting: www.chasehughes.com/6mxbookresources
Each technique you’ve learned in the 6MX process is represented by abbreviations around the circle. Let’s start by examining the top right abbreviation, ‘DEC’. This area represents the Decision Map Model. At around the 12 o’clock position, you’ll see the beginning of each of the abbreviations:
DE - Deviance
NO - NOVELTY
SO - Social
CO - Conformity
IN - Investment
NE - Necessity
As you identify where someone is on the Decision Map, all you would need to do is simply circle the abbreviation that matches them.
Moving further down the right side of the circle, you’ll see HND. This identifies handedness. In this instance, we are only circling R or L to indicate whether the person is right or left hand dominant. Remember, we are only identifying this to observe that dominant shoulder for retreating (backward) movement - indicating strong disagreement. Circle the appropriate abbreviation in your compass.
Below this section, you’ll see SNS. This is the Sensory-Preference section. You’ll see abbreviations here for the sensory communication preferences:
KIN - Kinesthetic
AUD - Audio
VIS - Visual
When you identify someone’s sensory preference, it would be circled here. This lets you know that in the future, you will know how to shape your language to match the person’s preferred sensory perception language.
Moving along the bottom to the next abbreviation, you’ll see PRN. This is where you would circle the pronoun preference of the person you’re profiling:
SE - Self
TE - Team
OT - Others
When you hear someone’s pronoun preference or you’ve identified it online, you would simply circle the person’s preference. If you were preparing for a meeting with this person, for example, it might be helpful here to list all the pronouns you’ll use in conversation to get your mind ready to speak in their specific language. This is something I still do to this day.
Just above the PRN section, you’ll see LOC. This section is where you will indicate what you observed about this person’s locus of control:
I - Internal locus of control
E - External locus of control
Knowing this, you’ll know exactly how to word certain phrases in the conversation to make the person unconsciously agree with you.
The next grey appreciation you will see around the circle is NDS. This is where we profile the person on The Human Needs Map. The abbreviations follow the Needs Map:
SI - Significance
AP - Approval (Recognition)
AC - Acceptance
IN - Intelligence
PI - Pity
ST - Strength
It helps, if you’re beginning, to make a small note about the person’s fears here next to the Needs you’ve circled before a conversation starts. This makes your conversation and discussion a lot more focused. Identifying fears not only helps you to remember them for future conversations but allows you a window into this person’s personality no one else can possibly enjoy. Empathy becomes much easier to grasp.
To make it much easier to locate, I’ve included another copy of all the fears here in the book:
On the inside of the compass, you’ll see the familiar quadrant and the GHT arrows. As you identify someone’s Gestural Hemispheric Tendency, you simply circle the direction they move or look in order to access positive information. If they looked to your right, circle the right arrow, it makes it a lot easier in conversations instead of having to continuously reverse left/right sidedness.
This quadrant can be filled with whatever behavioral indicators you’d like while you’re learning. Eventually, you can add all of them into the quadrant if you’d like and develop a full behavioral profile on a single sheet of paper.
SUMMARY
Within six minutes, you should be able to fill out the entire quadrant in a conversation. Initially, it will take some time and may take fifteen minutes to fill this out. The next chapter will show you real-world scenarios where the Compass is applied and give you a chance to experiment with your own decisions about influence and persuasion. Let’s take a look.