Improving language, improving life

© 2008, Coert Visser

Effective use of language can be surprisingly powerful. Not only can effective language help to improve cooperation with other people, it also can help you develop a more productive outlook on life. The purpose of this article is to help you make your language more constructive and effective. Many of the suggestions in this article are based on recent findings in psychological research and on techniques which have been developed by solution-focused practitioners and researchers.

1. Improve your questions
Asking questions is an important characteristic of the solution-focused approach. Rather than telling clients how to think and what to do, a solution-focused therapist, coach or consultant asks questions which help the client develop goals and find solutions. Examples of useful questions are scaling questions (de Shazer, 1986), desired situation questions, exception seeking questions (Molnar & De Shazer, 1987), what’s better’ questions (de Shazer, 1986) and coping questions (Lipchik, 1988). Asking, rather than telling, potentially has the effect of activating the other person. This does not only work in the context of helping (like in therapy, coaching and consulting) but also in management and organizational development. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said in an interview: “We run the company by questions, not by answers” (Caplan, 2006). Marilee Adams (2004), author of Change your questions, change your life, said: "Great results begin with great questions.

2. Improve language fitIn solution-focused coaching, an important aspect in communicating with the client is to use the language of the client. Paul Watzlawick discovered that, in helping clients, working with the concepts of the client is much more powerful that using professional jargon (Watzlawick, Weakland & Fisch, 1974). When you, as a coach, replace a word of the client by a professional term, this usually works contrarily because the client may feel correct of misunderstood. Solution-focused coaches join their clients as much as possible by using their language, both in their summaries and in their questions. This skill of solution-focused coaches is called language matching. It requires the coach to listen attentively and has several advantages. A first advantage is that the coachee notices that the coach is very attentive which helps to make him feel taken seriously. A second advantage is that the coachee notices that the coach understands and accepts what he has brought forward. This gives the coachee a feeling of security and trust. A third advantage is that language matching helps the conversation to proceed fluently. This is because the coachee does not have to correct the coach and no time is lost on discussing the precise definitions of terms. Steve de Shazer, co-developer of the solution-focused approach, was very skillful in matching his language with that of his clients. Often, in his questions, he used several words taken from the last sentence of the client.

Dutch researchers Van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert and Van Knippenberg wrote the article 'Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation' (2003). This article provides interesting empirical support for the value of language matching. Here is a summary of the article: "Two experiments investigated the idea that mimicry leads to pro-social behavior. It was hypothesized that mimicking the verbal behavior of customers would increase the size of tips. In Experiment 1, a waitress either mimicked half her customers by literally repeating their order or did not mimic her customers. It was found that she received significantly larger tips when she mimicked her customers than when she did not. In Experiment 2, in addition to a mimicry- and non-mimicry condition, a baseline condition was included in which the average tip was assessed prior to the experiment. The results indicated that, compared to the baseline, mimicry leads to larger tips. These results demonstrate that mimicry can be advantageous for the imitator because it can make people more generous."

This sheds an interesting light on the importance of using the words of the client. An important aspect of the advantage of using the clients' words is that it helps the client to like the coach much more. It improves the relationship between the two. And this, as has been shown before, is an important factor of the effectiveness of coaching and therapy.

3. Improve language wisdom
Is there any truth to the stereotype that elderly people tend to be grumpier than young people? Do people become more negative and complain more as they grow older?

James Pennebaker and his colleagues have been doing studies in which they have tried to learn about mental health by counting the use of certain categories of words by people. Research by James Pennebaker and Lori Stone (2003) showed how the use of language develops when we get older. Do we use more or less negative terms and positive terms as we get older? Pennebaker and Stone analyzed texts of people at different ages. They counted the use of positive and negative terms. In addition to this they analyzed the extent to which people used future-tense and past-tense verbs at different ages. Did they find that people talked more in negative terms and use more past-tense verbs? On the contrary! This is what they found: "With increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity." Reading this, you may think that this is due to the prosperity of our modern times in which older people are better taken care of than in past centuries... but no! Pennebaker and Stone also analyzed texts by authors like Shakespeare, Eliot and Yeats that they had written at different ages. They found exactly the same conclusions: the older, the more positive and future-oriented. So, the older we get, the more solution-focused our language seems to get.... Not bad!

Dutch psychologist Sitskoorn (2008) writes more about the positivity of older people. She explains that as people grow older they usually get more skillful at positive emotion regulation. This means that, as we get older, we tend to focus more on positive information and ignore negative information (with the exception of information about threats). Because older people are, on average, better at positive emotion regulation they feel offended less easily, their negative moods last briefer, they will be less inclined to yell or call people names, they remember positive things more easily and are less impressed by negative events. Not everything gets worse with aging. Some things do get more and better.

Here is a quote from a New York Times article on the research by Pennebaker and his colleagues (Wapner, 2008): "Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study. Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things.”

So this knowledge could be used for diagnostical purposes. But could it work the other way around, too? In other words, can we improve our mental health (and that of our students, children, etc.) by deliberately decreasing some and increasing other words in our (/their) language? Good mental health seems to be associated with a limited use of first-person pronouns, and with a relatively high use of causal words (because, cause, effect).

4. Improve your NoWe are confronted with so much information and so many suggestions and demands that we simply cannot function well without being able to say No. But saying No is hard. If we do it ineffectively, other people may feel offended or rejected or they may view your No as arrogant or uncooperative. So developing the skill of saying No constructively and gracefully is very worthwhile. William Ury, author of The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes, describes how this can be done. He presents the simple sequence of YES!-NO-YES? The first step is to root your No in an underlying yes. What is you good reason to say No now. What positive value, interest, intention is behind that No. Ury claims that if you first express your underlying yes, your No will be understood and accepted much easier. After your YES and No have been delivered, you may come up with a YES? , which is an invitation to an alternative solution.

5. Improve healing languageGreek philosopher Aeschylus once said: "Words are the physicians of a mind diseased". And this is true. Several types of language use can have downright healing effects. For instance, take the technique of normalizing. Normalizing is used to depathologize people’s concerns and present them instead as normal life difficulties. It helps people to calm down about their problem. It helps them realize they're not abnormal for having this problem. Another example of such a technique is reframing. Reframing is a technique which places what has happened or what has been said in a positive light (for instance assuming a positive intention or pointing at a positive effect). Yet another technique is mutualizing. Ziegler and Hiller (2001) give an example of mutualizing in a mediation case: "If one parent says: 'I want the child living with me full time because that's what's best for my daughter. And the other says: ''I want our daughter living with me half time and half time with you because that would be best for her.' Then I would say, 'It's pretty clear to me that both of you want to develop a plan that will be best for your daughter--you disagree at this point about what plan would be best but you share the common goal of making the best plan for her. Can we all agree about that?" Instead of emphasizing the different positions and goals the solution-focused practitioner mutualizes the preferred future.

Finally, there is the technique of Creating an expectation of positive change. Steve de Shazer (1985) claimed that change was inevitable and he more and more began to use interventions that were based on this assumption. By asking questions that implied that change was certainly going to happen, the therapist contributed to the client’s trust that the change was actually going to happen. An example of such a question is: “How will you know things will be better?’ This formulation implies that change is going to happen more than this formulation: “How would you know things would be better?” The latter formulation is more conditional, it leaves open whether the change is going to happen or not.

6. Improve your compliments
Compliments can be great tools. Complimenting can be useful. An adequate compliment provides us with the type of feedback that can help us become aware of which of our behaviors are effective. Furthermore, a compliment can make you realize that there is someone who is paying attention to you and who feels involved with what you do. This is why complimenting effectively can be useful in different contexts like parenting, education, management and co-operation. If you want to compliment, be sincere and specific and focus your compliment on something you know is important to the other person. Focus your compliment of behavior instead of on presumed fixed traits (like intelligence) of the person. Use affirmative questions so that the other person gets activated and will reflect on his or her own behavior.

More and more, it becomes clear that improving your language is an excellent way of improving the quality of your life.


References
Adams, M. (2004). Change your questions, change your life – 7 powerful tools for life and work. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA.

Baaren, R.B. van, Holland, R.W., Steenaert, B. & Knippenberg, A. van (2003). Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation. Psychological Science 15 (1) , 71–74.

Caplan, J. (2006). Google’s Chief Looks Ahead. www.time.com.

de Shazer, 1986. An indirect approach to brief therapy. In S. de Shazer & R. Kral (Eds) Indirect Approaches in Therapy.

de Shazer, S. & Molnar, A. (1984) Four useful interventions in brief family therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, v10 n3 297-304.

de Shazer, S. (1985). Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York, NY: W W Norton & Company.

Lipchik, E. (1988). Purposeful sequences for beginning the solution-focused interview. In: Lipchik, E. (ed) Interviewing. Aspen, Rockville.

Pennebaker, J. & Stone, L.D. (2003). Words of Wisdom: Language Use Over the Life Span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 2, 291–301

Sitzkoorn, M. (2008). Lang leven de hersenen. Uitgeverij Bert Bakker.

Ury, W. (2007). The Power of a Positive No. Save The Deal Save The Relationship and Still Say No. Bantam

Wapner, J. (2008). He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns). New York Times, October 13.

Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. New York: Norton.

Zeigler, P. & Hiller, T. (2001). Recreating Partnership: A Solution-Oriented, Collaborative Approach to Couples Therapy. W. W. Norton & Company.