Before I tell you about the assessment, I need to tell you about one of the labels inside of it, Words of Affirmation.
That’s what Gary Chapman called it in The 5 Love Languages, the book that introduced millions of people to the idea that we give and receive love in fundamentally different ways. And when I took the assessment for the first time in 2004, during my marriage, that’s what came back as my primary language.
Words of Affirmation.
I read those two words and thought: Oh... so you think I like being flattered?
That’s the problem with the label. Not the framework; the label.
Words of Affirmation sounds like flattery. Just like another label in the Love Languages, Gifts, sounds like materialism. The names create impressions that have almost nothing to do with what the languages actually mean, and those impressions send people in the wrong direction before they’ve even opened the book.
I wasn’t misreading anything. The label was misleading me.
That’s why I’ve always felt this one needs a rebrand.
Not Words of Affirmation. Just Words.
Or better yet – Communication. Because what this language is actually about has nothing to do with flattery and everything to do with how words land, how they carry weight, and how deeply they shape the way a person feels seen, or doesn’t.
What It Actually Means
Here’s what I understood once I read the book properly:
A person whose primary language is Words doesn’t want to be told they’re wonderful.
They want to be communicated with; honestly, intentionally, specifically.
They want the words to mean something. They want to know that the person speaking took the time to actually think about what they’re saying before they said it.
And the flip side of that is equally important: negative words land harder on a Words person than on someone whose primary language is something else.
Not because they’re fragile, but because words carry actual weight for them. A careless comment, a dismissive tone, a throwaway criticism – these don’t bounce off. They stick. They echo.
I can sniff out inauthenticity in language faster than almost anything else. Lip service, empty affirmations, performative praise – I feel it immediately, and it lands worse than silence would have. Because if you’re going to use words with me, I need them to be real.
That’s not sensitivity for its own sake. That’s just how this language works.
The Irony That Is Not Lost On Me
I need to pause here and acknowledge something.
Words are my primary language – the way I feel most seen, most valued, most connected to the people around me. Words, chosen carefully and said with intention, are how I make sense of the world and how I try to make others feel understood within it.
And as I wrote about in Part 1 of this series – my own name wasn’t even fully mine for most of my life.
Blanche on the birth certificate. Lysa in practice. Spelled differently depending on who was doing the spelling. The paperwork never quite matching the person. The most fundamental word attached to my identity – my own name – existing in a state of ambiguity for decades.
The irony is not lost on me. It never has been.
The Story of Jim II
Here’s something that surprised me when I first discovered the Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace framework: I’d already been using it for years without knowing it existed.
I spent twelve years in radio, and for much of that time I worked for a family-owned station. The president, Jim II, was someone I both admired and found genuinely difficult to read. His father, the owner Jim Sr., would come in occasionally to check on things. And I started noticing something in those visits: Jim II seemed to carry a particular weight when his father was around. A striving quality. Like the approval of that one person mattered in a way that other approval didn’t.
I didn’t have the language framework yet. But I started paying attention. Watching how words landed on Jim II differently depending on who said them. Noticing when something his father said lit him up or deflated him. Trying to understand – intuitively, before I had any vocabulary for it – what this person’s language was, so I could work with him more effectively.
That instinct, reading people through the lens of how words affect them, was already there. It had always been there. The assessment didn’t create it. It just named what I’d been doing all along.
Thirteen Years Later
I first took the Love Languages assessment in 2004. In 2013, I found The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace – the version Chapman co-authored with Paul White specifically for professional contexts. And in July 2017, I got certified in it.
Thirteen years from first encounter to certification. That’s not a straight line — that’s a circling back, a deepening, a gradual recognition that this particular framework had more to offer than I’d initially understood.
The workplace version matters to me for a specific reason: the language of appreciation operates differently in professional contexts than in personal ones.
What makes someone feel valued by a partner isn’t necessarily what makes them feel valued by a colleague or a leader. The framework adapts, and understanding those adaptations is essential to the work I do with teams through The Valued Workforce®.
Because a team where people don’t feel genuinely appreciated is a fractured team. And the fracture often isn’t about money or titles or workload. It’s about words or the absence of them. The recognition that never came. The feedback that was only given when something went wrong. The leader who assumed that showing up and doing the work was thanks enough.
It isn’t. Not for everyone. And knowing which language a person speaks changes everything about how you lead them.
The Certification Disappointment
I want to be honest about this because honesty is the whole point of this series.
The certification process was disappointing.
For something I believed in so deeply – a framework I’d been thinking about for over a decade – the certification felt thin.
Read the book, take a quiz, and you’re certified.
As someone who has spent years producing courses and thinking carefully about how learning actually happens, I kept thinking: I would have done this so differently.
The depth wasn’t there in the training. The nuance wasn’t honored.
But that’s a criticism of the process, not the framework. The framework itself is genuinely valuable – in personal relationships, in professional ones, in the way I use it when I’m working with clients who can’t figure out why their team feels disconnected even though they’re doing everything right on paper.
Sometimes, everything right on paper misses the language entirely.
What I Want You To Take From This
If you’ve taken the Love Languages assessment and got Words of Affirmation, please don’t stop at the label.
Go read the book. Read past the name. Understand that what you’re describing isn’t a need for flattery or constant praise. You’re describing a deep attunement to language – to word choice, to tone, to the difference between words that are real and words that are performed.
And if you lead people – if you’re building a team, managing a group, running an organization – understanding the appreciation languages of the people around you is not a soft skill. It’s a structural one. The cost of getting it wrong isn’t morale. It’s the slow accumulation of people who feel unseen, which eventually becomes people who leave, or people who stay but stop caring.
Words matter. They always have.
Just don’t call it affirmation.
