Some tips on spotting tones.

SOME TIPS ON SPOTTING TONES
You will get the most benefit from the tone scale by using it on every person you meet: business associates, neighbors, store clerks, club members, relatives and friends. You begin by determining whether the person is high or low. After that, spotting exact tone is easier (and often unnecessary). The data in this chapter should help.
HOW DO YOU FEEL AFTER YOU ARE WITH HIM?
For at least a short time after exposure to a down-scale person, the world looks a bit grimmer and the future less exciting. The contagious good humor of an up-tone person leaves you happier and more optimistic.
Also, there’s your instinctive sense the moment you meet a person for the first time. As the young people say, you’ll get "good vibes" or "bad vibes." If you have established a fair batting average with your intuition, trust it. If your average isn’t so good, you are probably most often taken in by beautiful Apathy, kind Sympathy or sweet Covert Hostility.
HOW WELL IS HE SURVIVING?
Survival relates to both physical and mental wellbeing. If a person is losing, if he can’t support himself, if he’s inadequately clothed, fed or housed, he’s in the lower ranges of the emotions. Nearer the top, the person owns the basic necessities of living (or more). He’s winning and planning a better future.
Possession of money alone is not always an accurate index of a person’s survival. We sometimes see a down-scale person with a great deal of money who is unable to accomplish as much as a high-tone individual with much less.
HOW WELL IS HE UNDERSTOOD?
The chap in the lower emotions frequently complains that people don’t understand him. If you listen to him, you’ll know why. He may say too little. He may chatter on in a daffy monolog constantly interrupting himself and flitting off on new tangents as he tries to say everything at once. If he’s in a hyper-intellectual bag, he’ll use such big words and obscure references that a hardened egghead can’t understand him.
A topscale person is able to make himself understood. He’s courageous enough to communicate clearly and simply.
So, for a quick tone assessment, don’t concern yourself with how much he says or how many ten-dollar words he uses; the only question is: does his message ever arrive?
WHAT DOES HE TALK ABOUT?
The higher level person enjoys hearing and passing on good news, ideas, inspiring concepts and solutions. Lower types prefer talking about (and listening to) bad news, sensationalism death destruction, scandal and problems Many people are concerned about pollution problems today but while the downscale people are merely spreading advance death notices the high tone ones are offering solutions.
TALK BALANCE
Upscale people enjoy talking but they are equally able and willing to listen So when we see someone whose mouth runs like a perpetual motion machine or someone who’s bottled up like a time capsule, we can be sure he is in the bottom ranks.
PROBLEMS
Under 2.0 a person takes pride in convincing others that his problems can’t be solved. He says he has to get downtown but his car is in the garage for repairs. You suggest a taxi and he replies, "Oh, you can’t get a taxi this time of day." A neighbor perhaps? "I don’t know anyone well enough to ask." Hitchhike? "But people won’t pick up hitchhikers anymore." By this time, you’ll probably quit trying to solve his dilemma. The real problem isn’t transportation anyway; it’s tone.
A person near the top enjoys getting problems solved so he can get on with his major goals.
THE COMMUNICATION LAG
Ron Hubbard discovered another excellent indication of tone level: the communication lag (usually referred to as comm lag). This is the length of time that elapses after a person is asked a question and before he answers. If you ask an upscale person an answerable question, such as "How many doors are in this room?" he will look and give you an instant answer. Someone on the downside, however, will hesitate for a short or a long time (depending on how low-tone he is). He may wonder what you’re driving at, or try to figure out if this is a trick question. He may launch into a long dissertation about the definition of a door and maybe those windows could be considered doors and how does he know you don’t have a hidden door under the rug; but he doesn’t answer the question. A long communication lag indicates a chaotic mind, one that cannot handle the simple cycle of a question and an answer.
A person in Apathy or Grief may never answer a question (unless you repeat it several times). Some college boys brought a friend to see me one day. Several weeks earlier this boy had taken one LSD trip too many; he never came back. He was in deep, foggy Apathy. When I suggested a cup of coffee, he followed me to the kitchen. I asked if he took cream or sugar; he stared off vacantly for several minutes until I repeated the question. Finally, looking at me as if I were a total stranger, he mumbled, "I don’t know. .
A person’s environment becomes less and less real as he descends the tone scale. What he hears, sees, smells, tastes or feels is less real in the low bands. To this young man, a cup of coffee was unreal, and so was the cream and sugar.
The communication lag is an excellent tool for a personnel man or anyone who is interviewing men and women for hire. If you ask someone for his name, address or phone number, he may reply quickly because he is programmed by habit to give automatic answers to these questions. Ask him something like: "How many feet do most people have?" and you will learn his communication lag.
Some low-tone individuals will give you a barrel of philosophical hogwash without answering the question. The 1.1 will comm lag while he searches for a hidden meaning behind your question (he’ll be trying to figure out what you want to hear). A person may jabber, or be silent; he may repeat or try to clarify your question. Near answers, guesses and indecision don’t count. The length of time between asking the question the first time and receiving a correct answer is the comm lag.
An individual’s ability to plunge into elaborate thinking processes is no clue to his tone. He must be here—now—to observe accurately. So the comm lag tells you how far a person is out of present time.
A person or business will take a certain length of time to execute an order. This is also a comm lag. When a secretary takes three hours to find a letter in her files, she’s pretty far gone. If you order office equipment that doesn’t arrive for six months, you are dealing with a low-tone organization. You can predict the survival potential of a business by its comm lag.
ACCIDENTS
When someone frequently cuts, bruises and smashes his body, gets things in his eyes, bashes the fenders of his car, or acquires an excessive number of traffic tickets, he’s low-tone, regardless of how well he explains his tribulations. The lower the tone, the more accident prone he is.
The person on the upper side leads a "charmed life," experiencing few accidents and injuries. This isn’t just luck. He’s more here; he reacts faster and thereby avoids accidents.
DOING A JOB
Someone high on the tone scale structure accomplishes a great deal in a short time, while the low person takes a long time to do a small job. However, there are the downscale short-cutters who rush through something and really make a hash of it.
Willingness to do a job is another indication of tone. The upscale individual is willing to take on any job, big or small, if it fits in with his general goals. A downscale person finds all sorts of ways to avoid getting involved. Many jobs are beneath his dignity (unless he’s way down in the mop-the-floor-with-me tones). It’s below 2.0 that we find the chap who wastes his life away because he’s too good for all the jobs around.
"I KNEW IT ALL THE TIME" SYNDROME
In the bottom zones we find people who refuse to be surprised. This is most common between 1.1 and 2.0. You tell him something amazing and he says, "I already knew that," "I expected as much," or "I can’t say I’m surprised."
He "agrees late." Unwilling to be taken by surprise, or thrown off balance, he pretends he knew it all the time. He’s second cousin to the man who says "I told you so," and twin brother to the one who makes a mistake and pretends he meant to do it that way all along.
The highscale person is willing to be surprised and he’s willing to make and admit mistakes.
MOBILITY
The most important thing to know about emotions is that individuals change all over the scale if they are sane. The sane man gets mad when the supplier fails to deliver on time; but he gets over it. He gets scared if a drunken driver careens out in front of him; but he gets unscared when the danger is past. He experiences the appropriate emotion for the occasion; but the higher he is on the scale, the more quickly he recovers. Most of the time, of course, he’s cheerful and confident.
The low-tone person gets shaken up more easily and takes longer to recover. He may stay upset for days or weeks. He may never recover, in which case he settles into a chronic lower tone. GENERALITIES
An individual in the lower tones uses generalities to justify his position on something: "Nobody goes there anymore," "Everybody thinks . . ." "People always . .
The upscale person is more specific. If he uses generalities for convenience, they will be backed up with statistics.
ETHICS
If you’re having a social lunch with a friend and he suggests you put the lunch on your expense account because "nobody will know the difference anyway," he’s below 2.5 on the scale.
At Boredom a person will do what he can get away with. Lower down, ethics go all the way from mild cheating to flagrant criminality. A person engaged in any illegal or unethical activities is always below 2.0.
The high-tone person plays it straight—even when nobody’s looking.
POSSESSIONS
Notice how the person grooms himself. Is he clean and neat or is he dirty and unkempt? He’ll take care of his environment the same way he takes care of his body.
In the upper tones a person puts order into an environment. His property will be neat, clean and in good repair. The low-scale individual creates chaos; his possessions will be dirty, broken, unworkable (and sometimes unfindable).
If you create an attractive home or office, the down-tone individual who comes into it will destroy the beauty one way or another. He dirties it, breaks the curtain rod and leaves it drooping, clutters the space with junk, smashes a window and neglects to fix it. He turns your beauty into shambles.
His "acceptance level" is low. This is reflected in the cars he drives, the hotels he uses, the clothes he wears. Living in a cluttered, shabby environment indicates that he cannot accept a clean, attractive area. When a man leaves a beautiful, happy girl to run off with a low-tone prostitute, his acceptance level is below that of the beautiful girl. If he receives handsome clothes but wears rags, if he remains on a poorly paying job, his acceptance level is low.
Some downscale people are trained to be clean and to collect decent belongings; but they care for their property very seriously, constantly worrying and fussing about it. The upscale person takes good care of possessions; but he’s splendidly lighthearted about them.