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Dear Persuader,
In an email a few days ago, I said, "It would almost be funny, if it didn't have such a catastrophic impact. Never before has the skill of persuasion been more necessary. In a world that has quickly gone from consumerism to thrift - if you don't persuade, you don't sell. Yet at the very same time, there's been an explosion of persuasion advice - all with different opinions, different approaches and different theories, leaving potential persuaders in a quagmire of sorts... because it's never been more necessary and it's never been more confusing."
Then today while perusing facebook I see a glaring example of just this sort of thing.
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Here is a quote from a provider of persuasion advice (whom I do really like and respect):
"I am most passionate in win-win scenario's as I have always worked on this basis, everyone has to gain but more importantly to enjoy every moment of the process. Have you ever found yourself being sold to or seduced for that matter only to find out how you enticed and increased the speed of the sale? As you become aware of the numerous techniques I can show you why its important to recognise the ethics in creating sustainable relationships for all involved."
Look again at this line:
"As you become aware of the numerous techniques I can show you why its important to recognise the ethics in creating sustainable relationships for all involved."
Does it sound convoluted to you? Would you want to write like that to your prospective customers or your friends or family? I'll explain what he is trying to do in a moment and why it doesn't work, but first...
Yesterday was the big day for our teleconference where I threw down the gauntlet for myself and promised to eliminate any confusion, dispel any doubts, expose any and all lies, and put you on a path to powerful (and ethical) persuasion absolutely free.
You have no idea how excited I was to do this call with you, but alas the "God of technology" ruled against me. Try as I might, I could not connect to the call. So, we rescheduled the call for tonight at 8:00 PM Eastern. If you have not yet asked your question, go ahead and do so now and you can still get on this call and the bill is on us. I do intend to sell this once done but this is your chance to get this information gratis.
The call in issue is resolved and barring some other catastrophe, the call will go on as scheduled. 
Just go here to ask your question:
http://www.maxpersuasion.com/teleseminar
Ok, back to what our guy tried to do in our example above.
And before I give you my analysis, let me just say that this is a good person. I know he means well. This could have been an oversight or simply not understanding how it impacts people in writing as opposed to speaking. Moreover, I just learned he is planning to be on our call tonight (of course he's welcome) and I hope he takes this in the spirit it is offered.
The first thing he did was clumsily use an implied cause and effect language pattern (As X, Y). "As you become aware of the numerous techniques I can show you..." Note this is just stuck in the copy and sticks out like a sore thumb. It is not elegant, nor is it persuasive.
This is the antithesis of good persuasion.
Here's the thing... many of the several hundred questions I got centered around concerns of how to sound normal and not manipulative. And I'm going to talk about that in our call tonight. You will want to hear what I have to say on this.
Let me show you how he could have used that pattern to create a good result, one that would have not turned off the majority of those who read it.
He could have said, As you become aware of the numerous techniques that can help you ethically move your clients to enjoy agreeing with you, you'll watch your income shoot upward.
Do you see the difference? It's implied that the person who wrote it can help you. You don't need to hit the reader over the head.
Ok, one more pattern for you.
He wrote:
"As you become aware of the numerous techniques I can show you why its important to recognise the ethics in creating sustainable relationships for all involved."
If you look at the sentence as a whole, he is attempting to use another more advanced pattern called sentence structure ambiguity. In essence this is combining two sentences. Here they are:
"As you become aware of the numerous techniques I can show you..."
and:
"...I can show you why its important to recognise the ethics in creating sustainable relationships for all involved."
It uses the words "I can show you" as the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.
This pattern doesn't work well in writing! It looks "tricky", confuses the reader, lowers response by encouraging them to click off the page and worst of all diminishes rapport.
Probably not what you want to do.
But unfortunately this is what you, dear reader are forced to sort through these days.
There is of course an easy answer.
Ok, my intention today is to show you how to take something that misses the mark somewhat and turn it around to make it work better. You'll be amazed what you can do when you know how.
Let's end anything that is holding you back from getting people to choose you.
Join me tonight. Just click here to ask your question.
http://www.maxpersuasion.com/teleseminar
Talk soon,
Kenrick
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Dear Persuader,
In today's blog post I have a fascinating case study to share with you about the persuasive power of enemies.
The Columbus Dispatch in Warsaw Ohio reported on a story so funny that I could barely contain myself as I read it.
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I'll present the gist of it here for you along with my analysis. There are profound lessons in persuasion to be learned here.
For the past four years churchgoers from a local church gather approximately 7 miles from the church near a strip club. They videotape customers coming in and out of the club and post them online. They use bullhorns and signs to try and dissuade customers from frequenting the strip club. And of course they invite everyone, including the dancers to “come to church”.
This last weekend the dancers decided to take the church up on their invitation. They showed up for church. Only thing is, they came wearing see-through shorts and sporting super soakers.
They sat on the front lawn of the church and grilled hamburgers, corn on the cob and in general had a good time. They waved at the passersby while waving their own signs.
Signs like: “Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing.” And–“Revelations 22:11: He that is unjust, let him be unjust still.
If this isn't funny enough, there's more.
The strip club owner sued the church in federal court several years ago claiming a violation of his constitutional rights, but he lost. So now he feels turnabout is fair play. If they can come to his club, he can come to their church.
Several members of the church came and offered to pray for a couple of the dancers to which the dancers graciously accepted. One of the dancers said she was grateful for the prayers and went on to explain that after all the majority of the dancers were also religious.
One of the dancers, a 30-year-old married mother of six explained that she has worked there the last 10 years and does so to keep her home together and give her children what they need.
This story presents some powerful lessons in persuasion.
So tell me, who will win? The church or the strippers?
Here's the answer… Neither One. However, both will probably help the other in powerful ways.
Do you believe the church will ever accept the strippers? The problem is, that they really can't – even if they wanted to. Why? Because they've made the strippers the enemy… the devil incarnate.
The church, by creating this enemy and by publicly making a show of trying to shut them down has locked themselves into a position of having to defeat the strip club or accept defeat… something they can't do.
Their choice of enemy has helped define who they are.
I asked the question above, 'who will win?' But a better question to ask would be, 'who will benefit?' And in this case, the very business that the church would like to run out, will probably grow in size and power because of the free publicity the church is ensuring they get.
The church may also grow in size due to the publicity. But probably not. The way in which they'll benefit is having their membership grow even more committed to ousting this evil business.
We can only hope that the church will not cross the line and commit violence in the pursuit of their ideals.
This is a great case study in the use of enemies. Your use of persuasion can be made infinitely more powerful if you have an enemy. All companies and organizations can have enemies (real or imagined). However, your choice of enemy helps define you – so choose wisely.
If the church had done this type of analysis, do you think they would have chosen this particular enemy? All I can say is, they might have but they would have been much better off being a bit more general with this instead of so specific. In this case they might actually be helping the very group they wish to hurt.
Enemies can be clearly definable or can be ideas. For example, look at the “war on terror” or the “war on drugs”. In these instances the enemies are terror and drugs. These are both extremely intangible. These “wars” have done nothing but line the government's pockets with money. Well that's not true, they've given the drug cartels the capability of giant profits, thus ensuring that they continue.
These wars have also caused ongoing fear and unrest in the population at large. Are they worth it? Only you can decide.
So in your selection of an enemy, choose wisely. It's best if your enemy actually stirs up the emotion in the group you want to persuade. But common sense dictates that you use discretion in your choice.
I hope this case study has been eye-opening. And it would be great if you shared with everyone your thoughts on the use of enemies.
And why not post other examples of organizations and enemies as they come to mind. It could be quite eye-opening.
I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Kenrick
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"The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." ~NELSON MANDELA
Dear Persuader,
I noticed a sticker on the back of a truck recently. “No Fear” it said. I thought it a bit arrogant and silly. Our core drives of fight and flight are predicated upon the fact that there ARE in fact things out there in the world to fear.
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If we’re walking down a dark alley at night and hear footsteps or screaming, we need our fear to jump start that adrenalin. If we’re out in the woods camping and something starts to growl deeply at us, we’re going to want that fear to kick in.
And how about a near miss while driving? I once had an experience while on my motorcycle that got that jolt of electricity and that ‘hell, it’s good to be alive’ feeling afterward. These are physical fears. Fear of being mugged, mauled, hurt, hit. . . but what about fears that prevent you from doing things?
These are really the things we should concentrate on having “no fear” about. It’s not about hang gliding or dare deviling, but about taking the real risks in life that cause growth to happen.
Emotional fear is most definitely something that can hold people back. It can stop us from using our persuasion abilities in a tough spot, it can prevent us from following up on sales calls or reaching out to prospects. It can prevent us from reaching out and connecting to a significant other for fear of getting hurt.
Pushing through this fear will give you more levels of bravery and fearlessness. It takes you past something which once was difficult into a new paradigm of potential.
Most fears are beliefs which you think are true. Not which are true, but which you think are true. They can stem from an emotional paralysis leaving you feeling as if you have no choice in the experience of the fear itself.
Fear is a feeling. It is not a state of events.
I once saw an exhibit of “outsider art” where one of the projects was created by a developmentally disabled man by the name of Michael Bernard Loggins. It eventually became a book called “Fears of Your Life”.
This is an incredible exploration of the things we (humans) have the capacity to be afraid of from the tangible to the utterly absurd.
My advice to you is to create your own book of fears or at the very least, a top ten or top twenty list. Assess yourself honestly in this. . . maybe it’s a fear of clowns, that’s okay, maybe it’s public speaking, that’s a big one.
I’ve known many people who had potential but were afraid to succeed. This one is not in my realm of comprehension because I strive for success, but it’s very real and stunts the growth of many people.
Now that you’ve got your list, it’s time to identify which are rational, i.e. stemming from a real threat, and fears which are irrational, i.e. clowns.
This is really about facing your fears and your blockages to growth.
To overcome them, try the EFT method of tapping them out (if they seem to be stunting your progress) or meditate on them and realize where they may be holding you back and how very possible it is for you to conquer them.
To your continued success!
Kenrick
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I like the way Abraham Lincoln said it best, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
Now, I don’t know how many of you have actual enemies, arch nemeses, rivals, foes or adversaries. These descriptions seem pretty extreme, but sometimes in business, rivalries happen. They key is not to let them define us or impede us because unlike movie villains, most people are really just looking for friendlies.
Everywhere people go, they are looking for a friendly face. They are looking for someone to acknowledge them. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re going, or what you’re doing, people look for this acknowledgement.
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In our world, people are all the time sending out the signal looking for friendlies. All the time they are searching for people who are going to be nice to them.
And the world ignores them.
Know this going in: as persuaders, you’re going to get ignored. You’re going to “put yourself out there” and people will flat out disregard you, as if you don’t even exist. People will ignore your signals of ‘hello’ and that’s okay. They don’t know any better. Forgive them. You know better and you’ll know how to influence them in a heart beat the second you lay eyes on them.
How is it that what people really want is to be acknowledged and yet, they end up not paying attention to other people? Well, we’re conditioned. We’ve set up our boundaries. Protected ourselves from rejection by rejecting first. Sheltered ourselves from disappointment by avoiding engagement. And sometimes, for those of us who live in larger cities, we’ve attempted to eliminate some of the impact from energy siphons and “crazies” and have instead opted to look at our shoes or appear otherwise occupied instead of giving a little nod or smile.
And despite all of this, despite the fact that you WILL be rejected, let us commit to stop ignoring people and to cutting back on our own rudeness.
This rudeness, while not confined to the US, is not as prevalent if you go to other countries. Other cultures are quite different in terms of their unconscious hellos and a general openness to greeting people.
Several years ago I visited a Latin American country where I was woefully ignorant of their particular way of greeting. And I say woefully, because I had not only misinterpreted, but I had judged in the process.
After getting off the airplane, I noticed the greeting first in the airport. A man tipped his head back and pushed his lips out. Instead of immediately realizing that this was in fact a greeting, I took it that the man was trying to hit on me. Here, if you purse your lips at someone, it’s an indication of, ‘Yeah, hey, I’d like to kiss you.’
And so I was off put and became increasingly disturbed as the day went on because wherever I’d go, I’d encounter this same treatment. Had I all of the sudden become a very desirable commodity in the gay community? No. Was I giving off a vibe that this was a part of my personality? Again, no. I was not. And yet, here I was confronted over and over again with men suggesting, in my mind, that they wanted to kiss.
Huh? Well, as quick as I like to believe I am. . . Eventually, I noticed a fellow member of the group I was with doing the same thing, and this man was most definitely not interested in other men. Once I saw this, like a lightning bolt, as if the blindfold of my limited cultural frame had been taken off, I began noticing EVERYONE doing this.
Of course, once I realized this, I immediately began to mirror the behavior and all of the sudden, my discomfort became acceptance in this culture that was new to me.
Practice your “unconscious hello” everywhere you go and be sure and tell us all your successes with using it on the blog below.
Kenrick
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“That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Dear Persuader,
I had a dream about shoes last night. Shoes have always been sort of an issue for me because I have large feet and it hasn’t always been easy to find ones that fit me (especially before the internet existed and before I had the means to have custom made shoes). This dream was about a quest for the perfect pair and it began with the frustration of never being comfortable, having blisters, feeling exhausted at the end of the day, having to loosen the laces after a few hours, really being miserable on a daily basis because my feet hurt like the dickens.
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And then finally I experienced the excitement of finding a pair that fit perfectly and comfortably. Like Cinderella and the glass slipper, I went through ups and downs in this dream and it put me in mind of the Hero’s Journey and how anything we struggle with can be put to good use in the stories we bring into our persuasion.
It boils down to inspiration and relevance. What does your topic have to do with your business? What does it have to do with where you are today? Do you feel passionate about it? Is it topical and interesting?
My dream was very detailed. The shoes I eventually found molded perfectly to my feet and it felt like I was walking on air after I put them on my feet. There was no tightness or pressure.
I started out by telling you how much pain and frustration was involved and moved into the pleasure and satisfaction of finally finding a good fit. This outcome became more important because I started out by telling you about how uncomfortable my feet were at the beginning of the journey.
With your stories, your journeys from darkness to light, from poverty to affluence, from sorrow to happiness, from instability to security, you can give your prospects and clients glimpses into who you are and where you’ve come from to create the person you are now. A very useful side effect of this is that these glimpses into your inner workings create deeper rapport and an almost instant trust (if crafted well).
Did you become a financial advisor because your father died at a young age leaving your mother to struggle to support your family? Did you get into real estate because you grew up with a friend whose family lived in a small apartment? Did you make mistakes you’re not proud of but which taught you valuable lessons about honesty and integrity? Fill your stories with emotion and personal revelations and all those things which did not kill you, but made you stronger and more powerful and I can guarantee you that not only will they connect you deeper to your prospects, but they will connect you deeper with yourself.
Come up with a few stories and polish them. They can be one minute long, two minutes, five minutes, and they can be touching or humorous. The key is to link them back to you, your product, and your service.
Be sure to post your thoughts and comments... even your journey on the blog below.
Here's to the hero in all of us.
Kenrick
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Dear Persuader,
“Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” ~Robert Graves
Logic versus instinct. Reason versus intuition. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to choose one way of thinking over the other because both are absolutely necessary in order to be good persuaders of ourselves and others.
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However, in the West, specifically the educational system in the U.S., our schooling has focused 99 percent of its time developing the logical, reasoning aspect of the student/citizen. I believe this is a huge mistake. It’s like cutting off one of our senses (actually, it’s not ‘like’ cutting off one of our senses, it is cutting off one of our senses). And the self actualized person necessarily begins on a journey of developing the other side of our natures.
True, some people are more predisposed to the intuitive -- artists, musicians, writers, philosophers -- and it comes very naturally to them. Others of us have to make a very conscious decision to nurture instinct and intuition.
So how do the intuitionally challenged begin to flex this muscle? First step is to begin to check in to our bodies. I know that sounds a little odd, but many of the “sighs” of instinct and intuition are very body oriented. Think of how some people describe it, “I just felt it in my gut,” or “I had a lump in my throat”. The physical manifestation of instinct can feel sharp and intense, or it can be a slow burn that spreads. Part of the reason it’s hard to pin down is because people experience it differently.
The key is: pay attention. And once you begin to hear it, you must begin to trust that small voice inside of you.
What does this have to do with persuasion? Well, think about it. How do people make decisions to buy? It’s not logic, I can tell you that. People buy based on their feelings and then they back it up with logic. If we understand how our own feelings, intuitions and instincts work, we’re in a better position to understand how our prospects and clients are processing their decisions to buy or not buy.
So what to do when you begin to feel it and begin paying attention? Well, start going with what it’s telling you. If the path you’re on is dark and feels unsafe and the hairs on the back of your neck are standing on end, quickly get to safety. If the person you’re hoping to make a deal with strikes you as untrustworthy, don’t push forward just because you want to make the deal but trust yourself to know the situation lacks integrity.
Albert Einstein, a very logical and highly intelligent guy by most everybody’s standards once said, “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” As you work to develop yours, you’ll begin to understand the truth in this statement.
To your success!
Kenrick
PS... Don't forget to post your comments to the blog below.
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Dear Persuader,
I want you to think about the process of persuasion a little differently today. I want you to think of it as a spark, a spark that creates fire, okay?
If you’ve ever used a magnifying glass and started a fire with a little piece of paper or wood, you know that you have to focus it. You’ve got to have that so finely focused that it ignites from the heat. If your focus is too broad, you may get that paper warm but it's certainly not going to ignite.
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You need to focus the client so strongly on what they want that all of the sudden it’s going to burst into flames. And, one of the things that will burst it into flames, that will take it to that next level so fast and so powerful is that level of rapport you can bring to the table, that spark of interest that you can get them to feel as a result of what you’re doing.
I want to speak about that spark of interest for a moment. I want to speak about it in a way that you probably haven’t heard me talk about before. I’m not going to talk about using their predicates and I’m not going to talk about using their tone of voice... I’m not going to talk about any of that.
What I want to talk about is you thinking about this in terms of a spark of interest, a spark of personality, a spark of rapport. And I want you to put that image in your mind and if you put that image in your mind then here’s how it would look as I see it.
You start off by gauging the level of interest that the client has, you immediately apply your magnifying glass to begin to magnify that level of interest.
Now, who’s magnifying it? You or them?
They are. You’re providing the questions that cause them to go inside and focus more on where the spark hits, and that spark is a magnetic personality that makes the person feel good about what you’re doing and makes them turnaround and come your way.
It’s a spark that happens through belief. You need to believe so much in what you do and in who you are and in what your products are, that you simply focus on that belief in light of what they’re there to do and magically you’ll feel that spark happen. I say magically... you can break this into a million different strategies but I’m telling you, if you’ll put this one in your head and run with it for a little bit, you’re going to see that you start creating dramatic results and fanning big flames of desire, and that’s exactly what we want to do.
So focus on that magic. There’s magic in imagining that you have a spark that will bridge the gap from their few questions to a burning desire and all you have to do is create the heat. And the heat’s created by focusing them in on what it is that they want and need along with your spark of personality that can get them to start to see the value and the benefit that you’re bringing to the table.
And it happens more in your mind than anywhere else. In your belief that you’re creating that spark, it exists... and now the flames of desire. I want you to put in your mind and I want you to see with every client, and I want you to be able to tell me afterward, if I were to ask you, when did that spark hit?
You should be able to say, "Well, it hit when I said...", or "When he or she said...". You can tell, you can feel it, you can hear it, you can see it, and if the sale didn’t happen, you’d probably respond by saying, "I never did feel that spark, Kenrick, it just didn’t seem to happen."
If that takes place, I want you to begin to analyze why. Was it because they didn’t have a real need or a real desire? And be very careful not to jump to the conclusion of yes, because my next question is, were you able to sufficiently focus them through your magnifying glass and create the heat that comes when they think about their values and their beliefs as it relates to their questions and what they’re needing from your company?
For you advanced persuaders, I want you to focus on the image. For those of you that are lesser advanced, I want you to focus on the strategy and the image and you may have to do it part by part which is absolutely fine. Go at it part by part.
So, the first part is the interest and the interest comes by focusing them through the magnifying glass of their desire, which is another way of saying, their criteria and their values.
The rapport I want you to think of as a spark, a spark that happens as a result of you focusing in on just how madly in love you are with your products and your services, with your company’s values, with the way you are able to interpret and deliver those values and services, that get people to want to be with you.
In other words, you’re coming in with the magnifying glass of criteria, you’re focusing it through the questions that you’re asking, and then you’re making that magic leap through that nebulous something that you and your company possess and you need to focus on that nebulous something and feel it in your heart and feel it transfer to the client.
If you’ll use that strategy, I guarantee you that you’ll start to see things through different eyes in a short period of time. You’ll start to imagine things happening differently and you’ll be able to focus on what your clients are doing in a very different way.
Kenrick
P.S. Don't forget to post your comments on the blog below.
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Dear Persuader,
By now, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while or if you’ve taken a seminar, been involved in my coaching club or gone through one of my self study courses, you know that the basis for persuasion is the ability to build rapport and the basis for rapport building requires questioning your prospect or client with the magic questions “What’s important about. . . ?”
Well, here’s another way you can ask the ‘what’s important about’ question. This way is to create a fantasy in the mind of your listeners and in doing so giving them permission and the opportunity to answer either silently or out loud to you. This works phenomenally in a group setting (and works phenomenally one on one, so whichever way).
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Here’s an example. Say you’re speaking in front of a group, you might say, “You are walking along a road by the beach and out near the water, you see something that catches your eye. You look at it and you walk over to it. As you get to it, it’s just out of the water so slightly and you kind of dig it out of the sand a little bit and sure enough, it looks like an Aladdin’s lamp. You think to yourself, wow, could it really be? You rub the lamp and out pops the genie, with a magic wand in his hand and he says, ‘If I could grant you any wish you wanted as it relates to your business, what would it be?’ How would you answer this question?”
Let your group think about this for a moment. Say, “I want you to answer that question in your mind right now silently, and I’ll give you a minute just to do that.”
The beautiful thing about imagining and fantasy is that each and every person in the room has a very richly textured, complex idea of what they are viewing, which is highly personalized. You’ve just accessed the criteria of an entire room full of people. How cool is that?
Using a magical environment such as a genie in a bottle on a beach also has the benefit of pulling people out of their shells and lulling them to a place of receptiveness to the rest of what you’re going to say.
Why does this work? Well, here’s a little bit of theory behind it. School teaches us that vertical thinking is the be all end. They start with an overview of a subject, like the base of a pyramid, and then build up from there until we get very specific. Horizontal thinking teaches us how to gain a wider view about things, encompassing more and more, becoming so expansive that we can hardly believe how much there is.
When we get really vertical, we become logical, systematic, and we have a right-wrong, good-bad, black-white mentality. When we start going too horizontal we get too metaphysical, too out in the zone, and too much into meditation or something, and we don’t take any action.
However, if we start horizontally and we do a big scan of what’s going on and then we get down to the vertical, we win, really, really big, because we can implement the right things
If you want to stay with your fantasy for another question or two you could say, “Now suppose the genie says, ‘Before I grant this wish, what’s important about that?’”
You’ll get people to really open up and come up with answers that really move them instead of just a politically correct answer which you could care less about and accessing both their horizontal and vertical views of the world.
Give it a try and post your stories on the blog below.
Kenrick
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Dear Persuader,
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.” - Victor Frankl
Every time I hear someone talk about “thinking outside the box” I chuckle. Like any cliché or catchphrase, thinking outside the box has been so overused as to become downright irritating.
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From business coaches and management consultants to the realms of education, sports, sales and self help... think about how many times you’ve heard someone say in order to succeed or break through to higher levels of achievement, we have to step outside of the boxes that society has dictated we exist in.
Well, what is this box and why is it such a hindrance? And isn’t this just another way to say we need to be creative with the frames that we use to view the world?
I agree in theory with this concept in that persuasion requires a fluid creativity and flexibility that is not easily contained by restrictions and limitations. Business has been reduced to a rigid constant in many respects. Trying to distill something as broad as business, and something as complex as sales, into easily digestible bites has been something old fashioned sales and marketing trainers have long tried to do.
Every situation is particular, each client or prospect has a very specific key or trigger which our creative sleuthing requires us to uncover. Remaining static is not an option in this quest. We have to have agile, almost yogic minds, able to bend the way our prospect bends, and twist the way our clients twist.
We’re not all cookie cutters. Unfortunately old-fashioned sales training has attempted to turn people into just that. It’s the same thing over and over. Instead, and through the process of learning persuasion, we don’t have boxes to begin with. We have frames, which like a pair of glasses can be changed according to what we’re wearing or whether it’s sunny out. The frames we use are far more powerful in determining our prospect or client’s needs and desires as we work with them.
When we choose how we view the world instead of allowing outside forces to choose for us, we have a magnificent capacity to influence and sell like never before.
Our capacity to frame improves with practice (similar to all things from learning a language, to learning an instrument, to learning yoga or starting an exercise regime). We absolutely do improve the more we try something. There’s no getting around that. The key is to do it. And do it again.
Writing out exercises and repeating language patterns within our given fields, coming up with lists of objections that we commonly get and then reframing the objections before they even come up in conversations with our prospects and clients, studying the thirty six Chinese stratagems as a way to further our internal understanding of what it means to be persuasive. . . these are easy steps to really installing in yourself the ability to persuade powerfully.
Kenrick
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Dear Persuader,
A student of mine once posted a comment about my use of the relationship between teacher and student in an example of presupposition. They suggested, with a wink and a smiley face, that maybe I was being a little sneaky in using the example in a persuasive way.
It’s kind of interesting in life how when people know that I’m an expert in persuasion; they assume I’m using my persuasions skills on them all the time. That’s been something that I’ve struggled with my whole life. People actually say, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can really trust him, because, after all, he’s one of the top persuasion experts.’
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This always kind of upset me until finally I just kind of got used to it. I just realized, people are going to think whatever they’re going to think.
I really am just genuinely myself. And I’ve had to struggle to remain un-jaded. Not always having ulterior motives is part of operating with a lot of integrity.
But what is an ulterior motive? An ulterior motive lies beyond what is evident, revealed, or avowed. That could be a negative thing, especially if the motive is being concealed intentionally so as to deceive. But there can be ulterior motives that aren’t sneaky.
When an ulterior motive is supportive, I have no problem with that. An ulterior motive, in a sense, is behind the scenes. If I were to use skills to help people to stay involved with me, provided that I’m really giving them value, I find no problem with that whatsoever.
For my suspicious student, I would suggest that people find I’m providing value regardless of me attempting to install it or not. And you’ll find the same is true for you.
It is kind of a humorous topic so I thought I would show you a little bit about the inside workings of my mind, how I’ve dealt with some of those kind of things and how it affects me.
Early in my career, I too would find myself asking those who I was studying with, if they were using persuasion on me because I wanted to see where their minds would really go.
It doesn’t mean I’m actively attempting to do it, though I know full well that my intention is to not only provide information but entertainment. Not only information and entertainment, but longevity for my clients and me to be work together.
That’s going to come out. These are my intentions. And my intention is to help and help and help some more. As long as that is recognized then I feel really satisfied and I think this is something you might want to examine in your own life because it will be something that comes up from time to time and it’s nice to have thought it through so that you know where you stand on it.
Be sure and post your thoughts and comments on the blog.
Kenrick
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EMail
August 18th, 2010 (3 weeks ago) at 2:20 pm Quote
You've hit on a very important point - there is a difference between persuasion done verbally vs through writing. Two very distinct areas of the brain are stimulated and used to process the information and so he may have used that same sentence structure verbally with a positive effect...and to our trained eyes it jumps off the page and screams at us.
Live with Intention,
DrBillToth.com/blog
August 21st, 2010 (2 weeks ago) at 11:57 am Quote
What I was really saying is that it jumps off the page to non-trained eyes just as much but in a different way. To the non-trained it destroy rapport. To the trained it looks like showing off. So you lose on both accounts.
The other thing I was saying is that way to many think they have "trained eyes" but would be much better off assuming more of a learners mindset, not a teachers.
August 22nd, 2010 (2 weeks ago) at 10:45 pm Quote
Excellent article Kenrick. Your explanations are so clear, thoughtful and respectful. I really enjoy how you think and how you teach persuasion skills.
August 24th, 2010 (2 weeks ago) at 9:52 pm Quote
Thanks for the great teaching Kenrick!
I think it may have been a little smoother for him to say something like,
"As you become aware that people can use these ethical techniques today to create sustained and lasting relationships, this subject matter may begin to make much more sense to you..."