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These days, most of my coaching and training in the field of NLP is focused on the area of sales and sales management. It covers most of the Eastern States of Australia as well as many cities in South East Asia. I am often asked about the various attributes or qualities that a person needs to succeed in a career and generally in life. I have found that the language that successful people use is often the first indicator of their accomplishments. When we take the time truly listen to what people are trying to communicate it is surprising what we can learn.

Negative Talk

The words that we use in our communications are clear indicators of how we process information and the way in which we represent our world. For example, when a salesman says “I DON’T want to fail”, they are clearly focused on NOT Failing.

The only problem with this is that human neurology (and as far as we know so far all species) are unable to process negatives in communication received. I often find people who doubt this notion so lets try it right here. Please read the following statement:

“Don’t think of a pink elephant”

Now, think about what came into your mind as you read that statement. Most people thought of a pink elephant, and then tried not to. Once we find that we did in fact think of the pink elephant, often we then try to negate this by thinking of a black one or some other form of the object.

My point here is this, YOU CAN’T NOT DO SOMETHING. So, when someone is stating their intention in a negative way, that is what they are more likely to get. Exactly what they didn’t want.

Let’s look at our original statement again. What our salesperson really wanted was to SUCCEED. So, we then remind them that they need to focus on what they really want. I simply ask the person, “So, you don’t want to fail, so WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?”. That has the effect of re-focusing them on success rather than failure.

Here are some more language patterns that will be most useful in detoxing your language.

Why - V- How

When we ask someone WHY they did something, we really are not interested in the excuses that their reply is sure to contain. What we really want is “what processes led them to do what they did”. So by asking “How did you come to do what you did” you’ll get the process.

From a different perspective (perceptual positions) on this same notion, when we ask WHY we create a need in the other person to go to the 1st perceptual position or inside themselves in order to respond. This usually eliminates their ability to see a bigger picture.

So by asking HOW we assist the person in reaching the 3rd perceptual position or seeing the big picture. From this perspective they often immediately see alternatives.

We also need to remember that when someone gives you an excuse in answer to a why question, the only way you can deal with it is “invalidate” it. That creates a potential confrontation. When we get an answer to a how question, we get the process. If the process isn’t working we can fix it. There is always an opportunity to replace WHY with HOW. I have taught this concept in many different languages and it is always possible to make that linguistic change.

No BUT About It

The great philosopher Fritz Pearls described BUT as a killer word. It kills the notion that comes before it and what comes after it survives. Try saying this one:

“It’s a great product BUT it’s so expensive”

What remains is the notion of the product being expensive. Any idea that the product is great is killed by the word BUT. But is a dividing word rather than a joining word. There are three ways to deal with this Killer word.

This is a great tool to use in selling or negotiating. Remember, BUT may be a killer word but you can use it to your advantage.

Nouns or Verbs

We all learned at school that nouns are names of things that we can touch. Verbs are doing words. The problem with this simplification is that we often tend to use a verb in naming or identifying a person. Have you ever heard someone describe a person like this:

“John’s crazy for operating that way”

“What John is doing seems crazy to me”

The difference here is two fold:

1. We are talking about John’s behavior, not John himself. This will encourage John to look at what he’s doing rather than take the comment personally.

2. It identifies the comment as an opinion about an operating style from another person rather than a label for John. Again, John can now observe his operating style from the perspective of another person without taking it as a label.

These simple yet profound linguistic tools are but a very small portion of the body of knowledge that we call NLP and Neuro Semantics. People often ask me “Is it that simple?” Well, actually, yes it is. These are normal everyday patterns that are used by very successful people. NLP and Neuro Semantics as a science has simply identified them as part of the coding that successful people use. You can do that too.

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