What Your Verbs Give Away

Consider a project update delivered entirely as a slide deck, with clean diagrams and a tidy timeline. One person in the room says they can see exactly where this is going. Another says it sounds fine on paper but they cannot get a feel for what Monday will look like. A third says they cannot quite grasp how the pieces fit together. The information was identical for all three, yet each description leans on a different sense, and the verbs are where that shows. This is a hypothetical, though many of us have sat in that meeting.

That is the subject of this week's Mid-Week Mojo, and in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) the idea is called representational systems.

The idea in plain language

In NLP, representational systems are the senses we use to represent experience to ourselves. The main three are the visual, the auditory and the kinesthetic, which covers touch and bodily feeling. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who founded NLP, described the idea in the late 1970s, including in their 1979 book Frogs into Princes. Their observation was that everyday language is full of sensory words. Visual talk runs on see, look, clear and focus. Auditory talk runs on hear, sounds, tune and rings a bell. Kinesthetic talk runs on feel, grasp, handle and get a grip.

The working model is that the sensory words someone favors in a given moment hint at which sense is leading their thinking. Echoing those words may make a message easier to take in. A mechanical analogy helps here. Consider a system with three input ports, one for images, one for sound and one for sensation. A message sent through the open port goes in cleanly. The same message sent through a different port still arrives, but it has to be converted first, and conversion costs attention. Echoing the sensory words someone uses is a way of sending the data in the format the open port expects.

What the research does and does not support

We should be careful here, because NLP attracts a great deal of overclaiming and I will not borrow the authority of science for it. I have not seen a citable body of evidence that each of us has one fixed leading sense, or that the verbs we use reliably reveal it. A 2010 review by Tomasz Witkowski in the Polish Psychological Bulletin went through decades of NLP research and found little empirical support for its central claims, representational systems included. The related claim that eye movements signal which sense a person is using has fared no better in that review, and a 2012 set of experiments led by Richard Wiseman, published in PLoS ONE, tested the sister NLP claim that eye movements reveal when someone is lying and found no support for it. A well-studied cousin is the learning styles idea. A 2008 review by Harold Pashler and colleagues found no adequate evidence that matching teaching to a preferred style improves learning.

So the stronger versions of this idea are not established. What survives is a modest and testable habit of noticing the sensory words people use and offering an important message in more than one sense. That is a communication experiment worth running, and it is not a map of anyone's mind. It does not diagnose a person and it is not a substitute for therapy. If what you carry is heavy, a licensed professional is the right next step.

For Leaders

Your team takes its cue from the way you deliver a message. A leader who always explains change in a single format is quietly choosing who gets it easily and who has to translate. Before an important announcement, build it three ways: what the finished work will look like, what we will say to each other along the way, and what it will feel like to carry day to day. Then watch which version draws the follow-up question, because that is the version your team needed. It costs one extra paragraph and it tells you something about the people you lead that a single delivery never would.

For Individual Contributors

The same idea works inward, on your own state. When a worry keeps looping, notice which sense it lives in. It may be a replaying scene, a critical voice or a tightness in the chest. Then change one thing about it, such as shrinking the picture or lowering the volume, and see whether it loosens its hold. Treat this as an experiment on your own attention and keep only what helps. When you explain your work upward, try the same three-way test on your update before you send it.

The rep

The next time something important needs explaining, say it once as a picture, once as a sound and once as a feeling, and notice which version gets the question. Write down the verbs you reached for first, because that list is a small portrait of how you habitually explain things.

Live your life uncensored.

Reference: Bandler, R., & Grinder, J. (1979). Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Press.

Reference: Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Reference: Wiseman, R., Watt, C., ten Brinke, L., Porter, S., Couper, S.-L., & Rankin, C. (2012). The eyes don't have it: Lie detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e40259.

Reference: Witkowski, T. (2010). Thirty-five years of research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP research data base. State of the art or pseudoscientific decoration? Polish Psychological Bulletin, 41(2), 58-66.