Three Key Emotional Triggers (Pt 2): Three Manifestations

Even though we’ve identified three fundamental emotional triggers in people, we need to identify how they manifest themselves in interactions and conversations. This will help us assess personalities and make better decisions involving people.

The three manifestations I seek to observe are behavior, thought and emotion. So, how do the three emotional triggers (simply expressed as security, growth and uniqueness) appear in people’s behaviors, thoughts and emotions? First, let me describe these manifestations.

• Behavior includes all of peoples’ actions including what they buy, wear, eat, build, enjoy and much more. Behavior produces the tangible things surrounding people that we can observe.

• Thought includes all of peoples’ writings, conversations, presentations, reports and talks. It includes any of these regarding their behaviors too.

• Emotion includes people’s expressions of their behavior and thought. It’s how they feel about them. It’s the style or personality that they inject into what they do and think.

Second, let me take an example. Someone buys music. That’s the behavior. Telling us why they bought it will be the thought. Expression as to how they feel about buying it will be the emotion. All will help us identify the emotional trigger causing the purchase.

Older music could mean security, newer growth and popular uniqueness. Their thoughts could reinforce this or cause further exploration. Saying they bought it because it completes a collection implies security, because it’s new implies growth and because it’s good implies uniqueness. Saying the music has a powerful feeling implies security, a freshness to it implies growth and a way of speaking to them uniqueness.

Together, behavior, thought and emotion form an observation. As we collect more observations, we’ll get a direction as to personality (see right figure). Next, we will learn keywords that help associate behaviors, thoughts and emotions to the right triggers.