How Your Personality Is Revealed By Your Choice of Words

<p>25 years ago, my 8th grade soccer coach walked up and said, &ldquo;Can I talk to you for a second?&rdquo;</p> <p>We went back to his office and he went on to explain that he didn&rsquo;t have a spot for me on the team. I was new to soccer and this was a competitive school &mdash; so it shouldn&rsquo;t have been surprising. But I was crushed. I was the new kid and soccer was all the craze and a way of making friends.</p> <p>At the time and in my own immaturity, I thought he&rsquo;d been cruel and unfair. But decades later, I still think to myself, &ldquo;Man. Coach Maloney was one good dude.&rdquo;</p> <p>Why? Because he was so kind in the moment. He was empathetic and explained his reasoning in a fair way. The team was already too bloated and it created problems when you have too many players. I remember he grimaced as he said, &ldquo;This is the hardest part of my job and I hate doing it.&rdquo; He encouraged me to come back next year (I did and, fortunately, made the team).</p> <p>It wasn&rsquo;t until I went out into the world, dealt with a few jerks, bad breakups, and a bad boss or two that I saw what a jerk is&nbsp;<em>actually</em>&nbsp;like.</p> <p>People often take language for granted and treat it as a back and forth at face value. Yet you can learn a ton about people by the words they choose. It can reveal their motivations, goals, character, mood, and more. The big idea is that &mdash; there are endless ways to say the same thing. How someone chooses to say it, says much about them.</p> <p><a href="https://seanjkernan.medium.com/how-your-personality-is-revealed-by-your-choice-of-words-a05c42043a64"><strong>Learn More</strong></a></p>