Patterns of Linguistic Influence Part 2: The Trans-Derivational Search
You’ve said something halfway through a call, some throwaway line you didn’t rehearse, and watched three people lean forward at once. Then you spent the rest of the presentation trying to figure out what you did right, because the script you actually prepared didn’t land nearly as hard.
That’s not charisma showing up at random. It’s a specific mechanism in how people process language, and it’s teachable. As someone who’s pitched a room, a call, or a video and watched some people nod along while others quietly check out, you already know a presentation doesn’t fail from a lack of information. Dave Wood spends this stretch of the Mass Influence Formula breaking down the exact language patterns that make a room feel like you’re speaking to each person individually, even when you’re talking to five hundred people at once.
Why did one sentence convince 200 people you were talking straight to them?
Here’s the mechanic underneath almost everything in this lesson. Any time you say something that could mean more than one thing, the listener’s mind has to go looking for the meaning on its own. Dave calls that search a trans-derivational search, and it fires automatically, every time, whether you planned it or not.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “It means any time you say something that could be interpreted in multiple ways, people have to seek internally to find the meaning of what you’re saying.” The listener isn’t hearing your meaning. They’re building their own, out of whatever’s already loaded in their head, and handing it back to you as if you’d read their mind.
He tells the story of a talk he gave in Austin, Texas, right around the point he’d gotten genuinely good at this skill. The entire talk, he says, was built almost entirely out of ambiguity, without a single direct instruction to the room.
I had at least 200 people come up to me and tell me, man, you were talking just to me.
Nobody in that room got a specific instruction. What they got was a string of statements loose enough that each person filled in their own most relevant meaning, using their own life. One person heard permission to forgive a parent. Someone else heard something else entirely. The ambiguity didn’t confuse the room. It personalized the room, two hundred different ways, out of a single script.
What is a mind read, and why does one already work on you every day?
Dave breaks this family of patterns down one at a time, and he teaches both sides of each: how to build it into your own presentations, and how to spot it and challenge it when it’s aimed at you.
The first is the mind read. As Dave Wood puts it, “Anytime you state that you know the thoughts or feelings of another person without stating how you came up with that, it’s a mind read, right?” Nobody in the room can actually read minds, his words, but people do this constantly in ordinary conversation, and it works because it’s specific enough to feel true and vague enough to fit almost anyone. He gives the example straight from the stage: “the fact that you’re sitting in the chair means that you are considering these things and wondering, how can I apply them in my business?” Nothing was proven there. The listener was just handed a description close enough to their situation that they supplied the rest.
The honest caveat matters as much as the pattern itself. You don’t actually know what anyone in the room is thinking. What you’re doing is offering a guess specific enough that it feels like insight, and letting the listener’s own mind do the confirming.
Why does leaving the judge out of a sentence make people argue themselves into agreeing with you?
The second pattern is what Dave calls a lost performative, and he says his own father used it constantly without realizing it. As Dave Wood puts it, “this is a values judgment where the person who created the judgment is left out of the sentence, right?” Say “It’s a good thing to pursue your dreams, right?” and there’s an invisible question sitting underneath it: according to who? Nobody answered that. Nobody was ever named as the source of the judgment.
That’s the point. Once you leave the judge out, the listener’s own mind goes looking for reasons the statement is true, because there’s no name attached to argue with. You can’t push back on an anonymous value the way you can push back on someone’s stated opinion, so instead of resisting it, most people start building their own case for it. Dave stacks a lost performative right before a decision point: “The right thing to do is to make a decision that you’re going to accomplish your dreams no matter what it takes.” Said that way, the room isn’t evaluating the claim anymore. It’s justifying it.
Why do because and if-then sentences change what a room believes before anyone notices?
The rest of this stretch of patterns works the same way, by pairing something the listener is already doing with an outcome you want them to associate with it. Cause and effect ties one action directly to another, the way paying attention gets tied to already starting to change. Implied causative does it as an if-then: if you make a decision to get started quickly, then you’ll be able to walk other people through that same decision faster too. Complex equivalence collapses two separate things into one, treating them as the same thing. A universal quantifier stretches a claim across every instance at once, the kind of line that promises “you come to a meeting, you’re going to learn something that’s going to be transformational” and sounds like a guarantee without technically being one.
Dave calls cause and effect and complex equivalence the easiest of these patterns to use well, because your own brain already runs on them constantly. Every story you tell already implies a cause. The only shift is doing it on purpose, tying the cause you name back to the decision you actually want the room to make, instead of leaving that connection to chance.
There’s a close cousin worth knowing before you leave this lesson: the nominalization, a process turned into a frozen noun. Someone who says “I have relationship problems” has quietly nominalized an entire relationship into a static object with an issue attached to it. As Dave Wood puts it, “Relationship equals the process of relating, right?” which means the real, answerable question is never what’s wrong with the relationship. It’s what part of it, and what you’re actually having a hard time doing. He runs the same move on “I have ADD”: the honest question isn’t the diagnosis, it’s what, specifically, is hard to pay attention to right now.
Here’s what these patterns add up to once you can hear all of them in a single presentation:
- Mind read: stating what someone is thinking or feeling without saying how you know, so they supply the confirmation themselves.
- Lost performative: a judgment with the judge left out, so the listener argues themselves into agreeing with it.
- Cause and effect: tying one action directly to an outcome, so the listener accepts the link without examining it.
- Implied causative: an if-then statement that makes a future decision feel like it already follows from a present one.
- Complex equivalence: treating two separate things as if they mean the same thing.
- Universal quantifier: stretching a claim across every instance at once, so it reads as guaranteed.
None of this works because a room is gullible. It works because these are patterns people already use in ordinary speech, all day, without noticing. Dave’s point isn’t that you’re inventing a trick. It’s that you’re finally doing on purpose what the best communicators in this industry, the ones outselling everyone else in the room, have already been doing by accident. He says the same shift happened to him: once he learned to hear these patterns instead of just absorbing them, the very next meeting he did, he recruited 80% of the room almost without even trying.
The full lesson goes further than what’s above: the remaining ambiguity patterns Dave hasn’t covered yet, how to fold all of them into a single presentation without sounding scripted, and how to keep training your ear to hear them in the top earners you already listen to. The entire course, this lesson included, is available for $99 through the Mass Influence Formula course.
Get the course, listen for these six patterns in the next presentation you watch, and start building them into the next one you give.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Now we're into ambiguity patterns, okay? Is what I call these ones. And now there's specific ambiguity patterns, and these are the only ones. Now keep in mind, when I'm getting into these ambiguities, I'm not talking about the ones that change from language to language yet. I'm just talking about patterns that produce ambiguity.
Here's what ambiguity means. It means any time you say something that could be interpreted in multiple ways, people have to seek internally to find the meaning of what you're saying. Okay? Any time that happens, people are going to search inside, okay, to find a meaning of what you're communicating. The purpose of all of these patterns is to do that.
Because have any of you ever been in a speech where I've been speaking, and it feels like I talked for three hours, and it feels like I'm talking only to you? Right? Yeah? And a lot of you just haven't been to enough of them or won't raise your hand, right? I gave a speech.
I remember it was Austin, Texas. And I was really getting really good at this stuff then, a year and a half ago or something. I've known this for a long time, but it's getting good. And I gave this speech on Friday or Saturday night, and I had at least 200 people come up to me and tell me, man, you were talking just to me. I mean, you were talking, and you were right.
I need to forgive my dad. And I didn't tell people to do anything in the whole speech. Actually, the whole thing was filled with nothing but ambiguity. It was filled with ambiguities that caused people to do what's called a trans-derivational search. So what happens is, with people's minds, is there's this function of the mind where to make sense of something that's not perfectly clear, your mind does an internal search called a trans-derivational search.
Right? Now, there's a lot of ways this plays out. Hold on. I've got to drink some water or something. My mouth is getting dry from all of the talking about nonsense.
Okay. All right. So what a trans-derivational search is, and this is actually a real word. I'm not making it up, although I'm thinking about just starting to make words up, because I like it better. You know, it's like Shakespeare, but with worse grammar.
But in any case, a trans-derivational search happens any time you communicate something without a perfectly clear meaning. It happens every time you share a metaphor, right? Which metaphor is, again, one of the most powerful belief change tools. There's also just a great tool for communicating messages. I talked about that in my last training, too.
But any time you share a metaphor or something that's ambiguous, people search for their own. They search for their own meaning, and they do it from the way they see the world inside. For example, Jesus says, What the hell does that mean, you know? Well, who are the meek, you know? And I've heard like a hundred explanations where people are trying to argue that's something specific, right?
But I would argue that Jesus is saying, So every time you read it, you're wondering if you're meek or not, you know? And the reality is, is that every time you read it, depending on who you are, you're going to come up with a different meaning and a different explanation that's relevant, you know? You want to read something cool, read the Sermon on the Mount and read through that whole thing, and no matter who you are, that will relate to you because it's, it's very ambiguous. It causes you to search for your own meaning that leads in the direction where he wants you to go in the conversation. Does that make sense?
Right? So that's the purpose of, you know, having structured ambiguities, and there's a whole bunch of them, right, that you can use. One of them I like, and what I'm going to do actually with these patterns is I'm going to teach you both how to create them and how to break them down and challenge them because both are useful, right? Because you're either going to be creating deletions, distortions, and generalizations, right? Or they're going to be coming at you, and if they're coming at you and you don't want to accept them, you can challenge them and break them down, right?
And also kind of dissolve them in other people because people distort things in a way that's not good all the time. Remember, these are just modifications of how people talk normally, right? Because people do these things anyways. This is how people communicate, and it's why it works. It's because this is how your brain is built for whatever reason.
Your brain is like this, and that means that if you master these things, you're working within the framework of how people make decisions. So you may as well do that now and become a master of these concepts, and that's how you become a real Jedi, you know? I don't know about these light sabers and stuff Justin Varengia has. He convinces you that he's a Jedi, and then he just goes like this and you fall over, right? Like those Chi masters.
You know, I love this stuff, you know? Like I go and watch these YouTube videos and stuff and these guys, and it's so funny watching it because it actually looks like they have magical powers. If you see them before, somebody just punches them in the face, who doesn't believe their nonsense, right? But these guys will go there and they're like this, and these people are just flying around everywhere, and it looks completely crazy, like they're moving them around with their mind, but then they try to do it on somebody that thinks it's bullshit, right? And the person just kind of like looks at them like this, while they're like, they're doing like this, and the person isn't in the trance, so it doesn't work, right?
But you've got ambiguities, and not all of these are specific ambiguities, but I'm just going to go through them. You have mind read, number one. A mind read, and what's that? It's reading people's minds with magical power. Anytime you state that you know the thoughts or feelings of another person without stating how you came up with that, it's a mind read, right?
And you don't know the thoughts and feelings of another human being, because as far as I know, nobody that I've ever met can read minds. I've had a lot of people say they can, but then they just say this crazy stuff about what you're thinking. You know what I mean? Okay, you're thinking about, and they just make something up. You know what I mean?
And so as far as I can tell, nobody I've ever met can read minds. Maybe you can, and you're saying, oh, you just wait, Dave. I'll show you. That's fine. You can come show me that you can read my mind later if you want.
But the reality is, is that people do this all the time. I know what you're thinking, right? No, they don't. But the fact that you're sitting in the chair means that you are considering these things and wondering, how can I apply them in my business? That would be utilizing a mind read, right?
Now, to break the mind read down is you just, you know, challenge it, right? I'll talk about challenging them later. Let me do them first, because this is fun to do in steps. So a mind read, a mind read, right, once again, pretending to know the thoughts or feelings of another human being, right, or projecting thoughts and feelings onto another person without stating how you came to that information. Does that make sense to everybody in here?
Right? Communication patterns. So you've got a mind read. You've got loss performative here, right? And this is one that, like, I mean, my dad used to do this all the time.
But people do this a lot. And this is a values judgment where the person who created the judgment is left out of the sentence, right? You know, it's a good thing. It's a good thing to pursue your dreams, right? If you could ask the question, according to who, and there's no answer, it's a loss performative, right?
But that's a values judgment where the person making the judgment is left out of the sentence. You know, the right thing to do, the right thing to do is to have a mind read. The right thing to do is to make a decision that you're going to accomplish your dreams no matter what it takes. Because people who love their family are willing to do whatever it takes to provide the life they want for their kids and their family, their spouse, right? Values judgment, right?
But I don't really tell you how I arrived at that information. Like, who says, you know, that's the right thing to do? Well, I just said it, but I didn't say who said it. Does that make sense? Because when you do that, when you create a values judgment, you leave out the values judgment, what does it do?
It causes people to seek for reasons why that's right. That's what it does, right? And if you listen to this, if you listen to this, it's going to have a really interesting effect as you listen and pay attention, right? Because it's a good thing. It's a good thing to master the way you communicate because you can't not communicate.
You have to do it anyways. So as long as you're going to do it, why not do it in a more powerful way? Why not do it in a more powerful and compelling way? Why not communicate in a way that causes people to reach down inside to make new decisions about their future because you're the kind of person, you're the kind of person that cares enough about your team to make a decision to be a real leader, aren't you? All right?
See? Hard to reject this. So anyways, you've got that. Now, other forms we've got. We've got cause and effect again, right?
They'll pop down in the, in here, right? Because it doesn't have to be, cause and effect does not have to be presuppositional, right? You're not, you don't have to presuppose anything. You could just say one thing causes another, you know? The fact that you're paying attention to my voice means, means that you're already starting to get this stuff.
You're already starting to pick it up. And you're just going to start talking differently when you communicate because by paying attention, what you're really doing is allowing your unconscious mind, your subconscious mind, to change the way you communicate, to adapt to the people you're speaking to, to get them to make decisions that will move them along the path where they can more powerfully live their dreams. Because that's what we do. And the way that we do it is through the artful mastery of language. And this stuff is easy to master.
In fact, you'll be amazed at how you're going to be constructing your presentations more quickly and more easily. Because you're becoming aware right now. That you're doing this anyways, only right now after leaving this presentation. Automatically, without even thinking about it, you're going to start talking about a more powerful future and the powerful reference experiences that come from your past and doing things in a structured way that leads the people you're communicating with to make decisions that completely change their life beyond the capacity of your imagination. Because you can either do it like this.
Or you can always wonder what the secret is. And I'm going to tell you, we have a better way. And you know that already. And here's why you know. It's because you're sitting in the chair and that just means you're the kind of person who has the capacity to get it right now.
But even if you don't, you'll be amazed at how you start speaking differently without even thinking about it the moment we finish the day. It'll just start happening for you. So... Implied causative. Like, who's legitimately like you're like, holy crap.
A handful of you, right? Well, you've got to break this stuff down into a science where we're all guessing at everything. You know what I mean? Like, if you're guessing at things, it becomes difficult to replicate it. Does that make sense?
Right? So I break sales down into a formula, it becomes easy to learn it. Now, here's the key, guys. Right? These are just skills to make sure you understand what you're doing.
Most people in direct sales and network marketing that are succeeding, literally, they don't even know why. Most people in power network making money don't know why. They're just kind of like doing it. Like this. You know what I mean?
That's why we tell you to read and stuff, because the problem is... Now, the benefit is if you don't know why, that means your system's good. Right? The problem is if the system stops working, your income goes down and you can't fix it. So you're not going to be able to do it.
You're going to be able to do it. You're going to be able to do it. Right? So these things enable you to recognize it and to get good at it over a period of time, because what we really want is we want mastery. Because when you can create a skill, when you can master a concept, you can take it with you for the rest of your life, and you can always be in a situation in your future to where you're in control.
And if you can imagine yourself having the capacity to do that, imagine five years from now whatever happens or you're doing something, and you just have the ability five years from today to literally... Without even... Without even forcing yourself to figure out a plan to do it, you have the ability to just construct teams and organizations and followings like that. See, that's what you have the power to do when you decide, I'm going to master these strategies because, because you can, and it's easy. Right?
So anyways, so implied causative, right? This is like if-then statements. If then. If you make a decision to get started quickly, what's going to happen is then you're going to actually be able to walk other people through making a decision more quickly as well because other people are going to do what you do. They're going to kind of replicate it automatically because you're also going to have a problem getting people to do things that you're not willing to do yourself.
So if you listen to this, you pay attention, you allow these patterns to absorb in, what's going to happen is you're going to start communicating differently without even being aware of how you're doing it. It's going to work like magic. Right? That's what happens. And the reason I know that is because a while ago I was sitting in a chair listening to somebody explain these things less well than I am right now, and I just got it and started speaking differently, and I was amazed at how when I left that presentation, the very next meeting I did, I recruited 80% of the room almost without even trying.
Because even if you try to resist learning to speak differently, you can try to resist and find that you can't because the reality is you're doing this anyways and your brain is starting to restructure itself to communicate in a new and powerful way, and the reason why is because you're in the room, and that means you're powerful because you're here for a reason. Right? Applied causative is like if-then, right? If you, then you, stuff like that. Yeah.
You've got implied causative, and then you've got complex equivalence that's not necessarily presuppositional. That's the same thing. One thing equals, you know, another thing. Right? Complex equivalence.
And these two, these two, cause and effect, complex equivalence, are the most useful and easy to get language patterns because your brain does it so fast, and you do it with everything anyways, that if you're just aware, every story that you ever tell should have a meaning that tied to it. Right? If you have some sort of conclusion that's tied to it, that the story caused this to happen. Right? You made a decision, and therefore here's what happened, right?
You decided to take action, and you decided to get all in, and that's why you're able to build your business so quickly, because the act of making a decision caused you to be able to do things in a faster and more powerful way. Right? Cause and effect, if you tie an effect to every-if you tie a cause to every effect, you always-you always tie the cause back to the cause. You always tie the cause back to the process of decisions you want people to walk through. Does it make sense?
Right. So you got complex equivalence, then you've got universal quantifier, right, quantifier. What's a universal quantifier? It's every time you're like, say something like, all of the things that you're learning today can make you into a more powerful person. Right?
Even if you're not aware of why. The fact that I said all of them. I said all of the things. It's like, really? All of it?
Like, even when you said fuck earlier? You know? Right? It's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Right? Every, every time, every time, right, you come to a meeting, you're going to learn something that's going to be transformational. Now, that might be true, but it's also a universal quantifier, right, and I believe actually that is true. Right? When you say all, every time.
When you say all of the things that you're learning today can be instantly utilized, right, without being manipulative, to create results more quickly and powerfully. Because the truth is, right, people who don't want to buy what you want them to buy aren't going to buy it anyways. All that we're doing is teaching you how to communicate in a way with the people that do want to make a decision to buy, we're teaching you how to do that in a way that causes them to... To be able to accept it in a way that makes sense to their model of the world. Because when you allow people to seek inside for memories of when they made a decision to buy things and memories of when they were successful and they start remembering a time when their life was good, and then you project it out into the future and you talk about where we're going together and the vision that we're constructing as a team, what happens is people inside make a choice and they say, I'm going to do this.
That's it. Period. And that's how you sell. Right? So, universal quantifier all the time, every time, stuff like that, right?
You notice how when I just start talking how it has the effect on you, but that's actually structured language? You guys notice that? Right? Some of you are probably weirded out by it, but that's the way I talk all the time, you know what I mean? That make sense?
Everybody in here? Right? And there's an excessiveness you can use in this stuff to where it's like, you know, granted I am giving examples here. But the reality is, is that you can be excessive, and when it's excessive is when it looks like you're trying to do it to manipulate people, right? But if you don't look like that, it has no such perception, it doesn't matter how often you do it.
Because people talk like this anyways, don't they? Right? All right. Then you've got, then you've got, hold on a second here, I actually had like a little deletion happen in my brain. I'm going to skip over this one here, and I'm going to go to nominalizations.
And the reason is actually, is I can't remember how to define that one at the moment. That's the one that's here, we'll come back to in a bit. So nominalizations, right, nominalizations are like process words frozen in time. Right? If you think about it like this, it's any noun that can't fit in like a wheelbarrow or something.
Right? So when people say I have relationship problems, right, relationship, the word, is actually a process word, right? So relationship, let me explain what this is. Relationship equals the process of relating, right? So when somebody says like I have relationship issues, they're nominalizing their entire relationship, right, to have issues.
When the truth is, their whole relationship doesn't. Right? Their whole relationship doesn't have issues. A part of it does. So the question would be, what part of your relationship has issues?
Right? Or what are you having a problem relating to? Right? Does that make sense? Does that make sense?
But also, nominalizations, you can use those in reverse, right? And people say things like, people say like this things all the time, like nominalizations and stuff. Like I have ADD, like assigning an object to your whole brain, but really, what are you having a hard time paying attention to? Because it certainly isn't the sound of my voice, right? So process word frozen in time, but in nominalization, what happens is that, you know, you can use words and kind of assign meanings to things.
The new learnings, the new learnings that you're getting as you're sitting here listening to this, the new learnings that you're getting are one of the most transformational series of learnings that you're ever going to have. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. That's what you're going to have in your life. Right? Now, I wasn't specific about what learnings you're getting. The new discoveries that you're making as you're listening and the new things that you're going to, you're going to have kind of snap on, you know, on in the inside today as you watch this presentation are going to blow your mind.
In fact, if you pay attention as you focus on the words that are coming out of my mouth, as you pay attention to this video, here's what's going, here's what's going to happen is you're going to make new discoveries that are going to allow you to learn more about things. to do things that were never possible until right now, right? Now, because learnings isn't specific, discoveries isn't specific, it's a process word that's frozen in time, what it does is it causes you to search for the learnings you're getting, right? The new discoveries you've already made today have already made you more powerful, right? And the more you become aware of how what people are saying is affecting you, the more easily recruiting and selling is going to come to you, and it will almost be like you can't even remember a time when you couldn't recruit automatically.
You may even forget that you ever didn't know how to do this stuff because it will come to you so naturally after you learn, how to influence people to make a decision right now. All right? And novelizations, process words frozen in time, a noun that can't be fit in a wheelbarrow, you know, things of the nature, right? And then we've got, I think I actually need to take a break here because, like, I need to drink some coffee or something. So here's what we're going to do.
We've got to think about one more section, okay? So I'm going to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and my brain is, like, starting to delete things. And so let's grab some coffee, take 15 minutes. I'm actually early for this break, but that makes up for the one that I was late on the last time. And then we're going to come back.
I'm going to show you the rest of the patterns, show you how to fit them into a model, and then I'm going to show you how to bring it back into everything that you're doing and every process that we're building together as we're building big-ass teams together. So this will be fun. Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. Thank you. Income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income.
Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document. If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.
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