How Your Pronoun Use Reflects Your Investment at Work and Even Your Health
Want to find out how invested an employee is in a job? Ask him how his day went and count his pronoun usage? Want to have a good idea how likely someone is to survive in the months following his heart attack? Ask him how he’s dealing with things and count his pronouns. The sorts of pronoun the person uses and the frequency of them can give you ALL SORTS of useful information.
James W. Pennebaker has written a book called The Secret Life of Pronouns, and it’s intriguing stuff. (That last line has a joke referenced towards Pennebaker, the author, who I doubt will ever read this post, but if he does, he might get it). There’s so much interesting stuff in this book, I may do more than one post on it. We’ll see. The book, overall, is about the process of language, rather than the content, and how much of ourselves we reveal, unwittingly, simply by doing that most human of activities, talking. Even when all we do is talk about something as minor as how our day went, we expose our secret attitudes, beliefs, upbringing, and health.
How do you think THESE people will describe their day?
Ask people about their day at work. Ignore all the boring content of what they say, such as what they had for lunch and how messy their desk is and how annoying the secretary is (or is not!). Instead, pay attention to that lowly function word, the pronoun. If they use the pronoun “I” and “my” a lot, they have a reasonable investment in their job. Things are ok when someone talks about “my office.” When someone talks about “our office” and uses the tiny little pronoun “we” a lot when talking about work, they are much more invested in their work and the corporate atmosphere. They’ll work harder and probably call in sick a lot less. Thus, companies want to be the sort of organization that sports a big “We-ness.” The nastiest place to work is somewhere that the employees drop into third person: “the company” and “they” pronouns indicate a bad atmosphere, though I’d probably bet “Those people at the company” would be worse.
Pennebaker cites that airline crews that standardly use “we” have fewer accidents (Pay Attention, Airline Passengers Of The World!), and heart patients who, when talking about their health, use “we” a lot are much more likely to survive on the long term. In other words, usage of that tiny little word can indicate the likelihood you’ll survive the flight cross country to visit Grandma or your next health crisis! Thus, these words are important to pay attention to.
I’ve known some of this concept and used it in my own practice for years, though I never had the stats to back it. I had a fellow come in who was talking about his life and he mentioned going somewhere with “the girlfriend.” I asked him, “So, how long have you and she been having problems?” and he looked startled (and suspicious!) and said, “What makes you think we’re having problems? I never said that.” “Actually, you did,” I said. “When a man refers to his girlfriend or wife as “the girlfriend” or “the wife,” there’s someone going on to distance her from him. Turned out, he and she had been arguing quite a bit and he was wondering if it was worth staying with her. He had not told anyone of this and thought he was keeping it a secret from everyone, yet, because he couldn’t pay attention to ALL his communication, it wasn’t really a secret at all!
Pennebaker is careful to say that he does not think changing your pronoun usage will change your internal state. He’s quite emphatic that you need to do other work to reshape your attitudes and priorities and that, if you do that, your language usage will change on its own, naturally. This is, of course, where getting some external advice/coaching can be useful. A company that has no “we-ness,” one filled with employees who talk about “they” and “the company” should bring in a consultant and be prepared to make some powerful changes, or they will be stuck with high turnover rates, high sick rates, and probably a lot lower productivity. A man who catches himself referring to his wife as “the wife” or who has no sense of a group of people being truly with him while he struggles with a health problem should get some coaching on how to improve his relationships. Not doing so could potentially have nasty consequences.
Oh, and if you’re getting onto an airplane and you hear the stewardess mention “That man in the cockpit,” turn around, walk off, and cash in your ticket. You might just save your life!
This is great info. I’m excited about the implications of modeling language and how the revealed mindsets can be used to improve productivity, culture, and loyalty.
We are not totally convinced that languaging from first-person plural *wouldn’t* seed a shift in consciousness that could show up in cognition and behavior — possibly altering state (although we may begin to believe we are the Queen of England or pregnant. ::grin::)
Great post. Thanks
Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CMC, SCAC, MCC
- cofounder of the ADD Coaching field -
(blogging at ADDandSoMuchMore and ADDerWorld – dot com!)
“It takes a village to educate a world!”
You’re absolutely right, of course. It’s certainly possible that changing your language might, indeed, initiate change in the person’s attitude. Smiling when you don’t feel happy has been shown (via brain scans) to alter the mood of the brain, so it’s not a far stretch to think that changing our pronoun usage might signal our unconscious to begin altering our internal state as well, provided we’re doing it for the purpose of change and not simply to keep pronoun counters out there in the world from tracking our attitude.
Ah yes – toadying to those pronoun counters! Not likely to change much if “self-protection” is the goal, but even then (as you pointed out about the smiling), whenever you change you language, it changes neural-net. (ahem – preaching to the choir on THIS site, eh?)
I am reminded of the body language manipulators immediately following Body Language, the book – wrong come-from/wrong result (not to mention tough to keep up for very long if what you are doing is trying to appear one way when you are actually another!) btw – I’m not including affinity mirroring here – different, as you know.
EVEN with the “body language imposters,” however, there are some studies somewhere about posture and self-esteem that indicate that we can effect mental processes through physical postures.
Exciting time to be working with the neuro-stuff!
Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CMC, SCAC, MCC
- cofounder of the ADD Coaching field -
(blogging at ADDandSoMuchMore and ADDerWorld – dot com!)
“It takes a village to transform a world!”
Madelyn, love your writing style. Maybe there will be guest posts from you in the future?
Thanks. Maybe we could TRADE guest posts?
I would LOVE an NLP article (several, actually) written by those whose practices were clearly positioned within that paradigm. I would already have an NLP *category* but I’m not really qualified to write much for it.
I am a long-time linguistics junkie from the “study-it-ALL” school. My friends and colleagues Thom & Louise Hartmann (trained with Bandler himself, back in the day) have already caught me in an oops or two that I don’t want to make in a format that might follow me forever.
Another potential stumbling block: my lens is always focused on relevance to the EFD community (executive functioning dysregulations and disorders), and 25 years of research clearly positions me with those whose points of view are that EFDs are neurobiological, not psychological. You and I know that there is a great deal of rewiring that can be done nonetheless, but more than a few in my crowd have been severely beaten up by the “doesn’t exist” and “just a belief” folks, so the need to tread lightly is keen.
I have recently reached out to include TBI (injuries that affect EFs in particular – which is most, simply because of the way our brains ride in our skulls). I have learned that they are the least supported, most misunderstood of the bunch — desperate for information, but wary of “advice” that betrays a lack of understanding of what they deal with and how mightily they struggle.
STILL, there are many ways that mind can influence brain — and the recent popularity of Rock, Schwartz, Siegel, etc. tells me that the timing has never been better for neuro-linguistic approaches, if you’re game.
THAT will teach you to ask about a guest post! (and, I’d be honored — tell me what you need).
Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CMC, SCAC, MCC
- cofounder of the ADD Coaching field -
(blogging at ADDandSoMuchMore and ADDerWorld – dot com!)
“It takes a village to educate a world!”
I’d love to trade guest posts.
Give me an idea about an NLP article you’d like and either I or David will write it for you.
I’m very locked on to EFD and have received a great deal of training in this field. I currently work with TBI consumers for the State of Texas and have also served many with TBI and EFDs in Florida and Wisconsin. I think it would be interesting to do some sort of post on how NLP can help these folks. Perhaps we could even do a webinar together in the future. I’m all about synergy.
You’re ON babycakes!
If you can do the webinar tech, I’m game. I do TeleClasses, not webinars, because there are only so many balls I can juggle and deliver any kind of quality product.
For NOW, however, I’m off to bed. I’m BEAT!
xx,
mgh
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