Language and Behavioural Profiling

The Benefits of the LAB Profile

The Features of the LAB Profile

How the LAB Profile can help you

Academic Background to the LAB Profile

The Benefits of the LAB Profile

The Language and Behavioural Profile is an advanced communication tool which provides unique insights into the below-conscious motivational patterns we have in various contexts. It identifies what is required for an individual to be motivated in a given context. When this information is made available it becomes possible to make informed changes that can produce remarkable results. As well as giving powerful insights to the person being profiled it enables you to Understand, Predict and Influence others with integrity.

Many organisations are already using this tool in a number of ways:

• To shorten the sales cycle and increase customer satisfaction
• To design powerful marketing and advertising campaigns
• To hire the right people:
  • who are motivated and suited to performing in their specific roles
  • lowering attrition rates and thus reducing the cost of recruitment
• To minimise the pain of implementing organisational change
• To understand the personality clashes that occur in regular meetings (both internally and with customers) and then use this understanding to reach successful outcomes quickly and effectively
• To identify why some people seem so difficult to deal with - and how to overcome that
• To dramatically improve results in negotiation and litigation
• To simplify career counselling and professional coaching
• To create high-performance teams by managing people’s strengths, rather than suffering from their weaknesses

The Features of the LAB Profile

What is the LAB Profile and how is it able to produce all of these benefits?

• The LAB Profile is a linguistic tool. By simply listening to the way a person is speaking, LAB allows you to identify how a person is motivated and what kind of information they can handle.
• In 20 minutes you can get more information about a person than one usually gets from 20 years of marriage!
• LAB enables you how to UNDERSTAND, PREDICT and INFLUENCE the behaviour of others.

How the LAB Profile can help you:

The LAB Profile will help you to:-

• Recognise and understand how everyone is unique and why some barriers to communication exist with some people – you know those people for whom it always seems you are “talking a different language”, or indeed “banging your head against a brick wall!”
• Gain rapport (especially with those “difficult” people/customers) by acknowledging them in their view of the world. You will learn that you don’t have to agree with their view, but it’s helpful to recognise it, respect it and be flexible in the language you then use to communicate with them.
• Acquire tools, techniques and skills that will allow you to recognise the linguistic preferences of other people. You will then learn how to respond using the language that is most appealing to them (rather than continuing to use the language that suits you). This will allow you to communicate more effectively and get the results you desire.

For more on the LAB-based online questionnaire click here

Academic Background to the LAB Profile

In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky completed his Ph.D. thesis Transformational Grammar. In it he explained that there are three processes by which people make sense of the world; Deletions, Distortions and Generalisations. These processes help us to create reality as we perceive it – because that’s all reality ever is – our perception.

Our perceptions are limited by the amount of information we can hold in our awareness at one moment in time. The American psychologist George Miller wrote a paper in 1956 that stated that we can only handle “seven, plus or minus two” bits of information at any one time and that we delete the rest. It is interesting to note what different people delete or retain – this is one of the factors that make us all so unique. What is it that you filter in or filter out of your awareness in any given context?

For example: Someone walks over to you right now and gives you a kiss on the lips. This leads to a very interesting and complex series of processes that mainly occur beyond your conscious awareness:

1. You have the experience of being kissed.
2. You have a number of sensations as you feel the contact of their lips upon yours, you may hear the sound or their breathing, smell their perfume or aftershave, taste their lips, see them or some other image in your mind's eye if you have closed your eyes, hormones will be released and you will generate an emotional response.
3. You make meaning from those sensations.
4. You automatically find words to describe and understand the pictures, sounds, feelings, taste and smells.
5. Finally you make meaning from those words.

By the time you have created a meaning for the words you choose, you have exercised a number of generalisations, distortions and deletions. You will have generalised what a kiss means, comparing it with other kisses you have had, and the appropriateness of kissing in this particular context. You will have deleted many of the sensations you experienced because you will be aligning them to the meaning you have given the kiss. You will also have distorted what you experienced to align with the meaning. This could be anything from the pleasurable feelings of being loved or aroused, or feelings of anger and disgust at your personal space being invaded.

Should you want to describe the experience to another person you would use only the words that you chose based on what you filtered in or out of the actual experience. It is estimated that you would only be giving about 2-7% of the details. Your listeners will then have to make up the rest based on their own filters and experience. Or if they are a skilled communicator they may be able to question some of your deletions, distortions and generalisations.

The way we filter information by generalising, distorting and deleting gives us our map of the world, our way of choosing to experience life. Most of us do not see it as a choice because the processes mentioned above happen in the blink of an eye and take place at a below-conscious level.

The only way we can tell what someone’s map of the world is like is by listening to the words they use to describe their experience. There is a wealth of information for the discerning listener in the form of the words people use. How someone says something is just as important to understanding them as what they say.

In the early 1970s the linguist John Grinder and computer programmer Richard Bandler were studying some of the most effective communicators of the time and they developed a number of models to elicit ‘the difference that makes the difference’ in an experts' behaviour, language and thinking. One of these models was based on Chomsky’s work and was developed further by Leslie Cameron-Bandler into about 60 patterns of deletions, distortions and generalisations that show up in a person’s language and behaviour. She called them Meta Programmes.

Meta Programmes

Meta programmes are the filters we use to interact with the world as we experience it. They influence the information we receive, how we manipulate that information, how we express ourselves and how we behave in a given situation – all beyond our conscious awareness.

Rodger Bailey was a student of Leslie’s and he simplified and adapted her work for use in business settings. He developed the Language and Behavioural Profile (LAB Profile) which can rapidly elicit how a person will respond in a given context. It is not a personality profile. The LAB Profile is context specific and provides an understanding of what people are communicating about their perception of reality when they talk. A skilled profiler can identify the patterns of language and behaviour from the manner of speaking that a person uses i.e. from how they say it, not necessarily from what they say.

In her excellent book ‘Words That Change Minds’ Shelle Rose Charvet gives a very thorough and user-friendly explanation of all the key patterns in the LAB Profile and the techniques used to elicit the patterns.

A unique perspective

There are 14 traits in the LAB Profile; six Motivation traits and eight working traits. The Motivation traits show how people trigger their motivation and behaviour in a given context. The Working traits identify what sustains their motivation. There is nothing good or bad about a particular trait – it is a matter of understanding which is the most appropriate in a particular context.

In any given context there are usually only a few traits which make the difference between behaviour that is very effective and behaviour that does not provide the desired results or strains communication and relationships.

For example if we were to contrast the common behaviour of high performing Business Advisers from the ‘consultants’ mould with the behaviour of Business Advisers who are good at diagnosing a business’s issues we can see a number patterns emerge.