Hi Persuader,

I AM YOUR ATTITUDE!

I AM YOUR MASTER.
I can make you rise or fall.
I can make you a success or failure.
I can work for or against you.
I control your feelings and actions.
I can make your heart sing with happiness.
I can make you wretched, dejected, or morbid.
I can make you angry and resentful.
I can make you lonely, discouraged or depressed.
I can make you sick, listless.
I can be a shackle, heavy and burdensome.
I can be a prism's hue, dancing bright and colorful.
I can be nurtured and grown to be beautiful.
I can never be removed, only replaced.
I AM YOUR ATTITUDE! (author unknown)

We all have our "moments". . . moments of doubt, moments of feeling blue, moments of road rage. The wide spectrum of human emotions is within us all-from bliss and joy to feelings of sorrow and misery. The key is to remember that emotions are choices.

We are not victims. We choose to have and to hold the thoughts and emotions we experience every day. And with that choice comes a responsibility. When someone cuts us off in traffic or is wildly inconsiderate, we can either give them the horn (or the finger) and follow them at an uncomfortably close range, or we can let it go and not allow it to stick.

This, admittedly, can be very difficult. It's a crowded world. There are people who have no manners, who couldn't care any less that you have been inconvenienced by their rudeness. And yet, that's the way things will remain whether you choose to get angry and filled with rage, or whether you let it slip right off you like water slips off a duck.

Of course, there are moments when confrontation is necessary, but is it really necessary or worth it to confront over everything? Someone "steals" your parking spot. . . do you make a huge deal out of it, or do you continue on and find your own parking spot? I've had moments. . .moments of anger, but have come to realize that these moments are way less productive for me than a simple readjustment or enlarging of the frame through which I am looking at the situation.

One readjustment I recently heard about is this: say you've gotten yourself into one of these moments, an angry or enraged or sad moment, and you are sitting there stewing in it but don't want to let it linger. As incongruous as this might feel, smile. Put a big fat grin on your face. Let those dimples come out.

In doing this, you are very consciously choosing to not stew. And you are also tricking yourself into feeling better. You are becoming the master of your attitude.

Think of the people that are inconsiderate or rude, not as people who are trying to screw up your day, but as people who are testing your resolve to have a good attitude.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

Hi,

For quite some time friends of mine kept suggesting I get on Twitter. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why I would want to do that.

It seemed like another medium that would suck away my time and I just didn't get it.

Finally after enough pressure, I decided to at least check it out - it's free. And all of a sudden the light went on.

Twitter is a great way to connect, stay informed, follow industry leaders, make friends - all in 140 characters or less.

If you don't yet know about Twitter, here's a great article by Lynn Terry that will quickly give you the basics. Check it out.

If you are already on Twitter, let's connect. You can find me on Twitter here - just click on follow.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Twitter, how long you've been using it, how you use it etc.

Oh, and check this out - just under the words Share and Enjoy belowj, you'll see the 5th icon (last one on the right) is a faint blue "T". If you hover over it, it says "Twit this". Now you can easily share articles you like with your Twitter friends. Try it.

Persuasively,

Kenrick Cleveland
@TalkMagic

Hi Persuader,

Previously in Let’s Get Emotional, I described the ‘whys’ of appealing to our clients and prospects on an emotional level. Now I’m going to give you some ‘hows’.

We all want to believe that we’re doing the right thing. We all want to believe that it makes the most amount of sense for our clients to act on what we tell them because we can back something up with logic does not mean the client will part with their money. In fact, backing it up with logic is largely irrelevant.

If you get emotionally involved with your product or service and you believe in it your odds of passing that enthusiasm and feeling onto your prospects and clients is greatly increased.

Say you’re a financial advisor and you nearly twisted somebody’s arm to buy life insurance one day, and they did, and a few years later one of them dies and the life insurance pays off and saves the family. The spouse calls you, in tears, crying, telling you that the loss of their loved one -- they don’t know how they’re going to get over it, but at least they don’t have to worry about money. They tell you, ‘I want you to know, I didn’t like you very much. I told my husband I thought you were pushy when you were on us to buy insurance but I want to tell you, I was the one who was wrong and I’m so grateful that you did what it took to get us to make that happen. I don’t know how I’ll get over my husband’s loss, but financially I’m going to be okay.’

When you get involved emotionally with your product, you will most definitely pass that on to your customers, to your potential customers, to your current customers, to everybody, and they will know that they’re dealing with someone who really believes. That goes so far to help you sell powerfully.

On the other hand, think about what it would sound like if you were to logically argue the actuarial tables about the client being this age and by that age, odds are they’re going to die, and if they don’t have insurance up to this point, it’s a mistake. I’ll tell you, this is much, much less likely to work for you.

I heard a story about a Japanese insurance firm who hired widows to sell life insurance. It’s a somewhat manipulative tactic as I see it, but think about how ingenious that is. These women are calling secure non-widowed housewives and laying their story about -- they too were once secure and had a husband and now they’re reduced to having to sell insurance to make ends meet. (Incidentally, I happen to believe that selling insurance is as noble a profession as any other and have no perception of this being something someone does when they are ‘reduced’ to do it. I am passing on the story to illustrate how one firm managed to really manipulate the heck out of emotional selling.)

Real estate agents, financial advisors, sales people of every sort -- post some examples of the emotions your clients experience in the course of your interactions with them have impacted your business and think about how you can incorporate into your selling these stories for maximum persuasion.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

Hi Persuader,

Here's a bold statement, but one I'm willing to stand behind: forget about appealing to your prospect or client logically. In sales, appealing to logic comes a (way) distant second to appealing to their emotions.

To illustrate this, I'm going to tell you a story about some college kids who learned this and put it to the test.

The students all got together and agreed before class started that if the professor moved to the right of the classroom, to the student's right as they were facing the classroom, the students would sit up and pay close attention. They would be very quiet, smile, and nod approvingly at the professor. But if the professor moved to the left of the classroom, the farther left he went, the students would cut up, act out, throw things, look away from the professor and act disinterested.

Class began. They followed through with their plan and it didn't take but about a half an hour and the professor was pegged into the right side of the room, standing there for the entire rest of the class with the students absolutely gobbling up everything he said, excitedly listening, nodding, smiling and showing their approval of all that he was doing.

The next day, they decided that they would do the exact same thing but just reverse it. So class began and what they did is as the professor would move to the right, which he started right off towards the right of the room, they immediately would cut up and act up and act disinterested and as the professor would go to the left of the room, they would act interested and they would do what they should. It took not too long and the professor was pegged over into the left of the room.

Throughout the whole process, the professor had no idea what was going on. The professor didn't know that they were doing this and had no way of knowing that they were doing this. He was massively affected by what they did.

Why? Well, we like it when people approve of us, we love to be smiled at, we love encouragement, we love to know we're having a good impact on people, we love it when people have interest in what we're saying and doing. These are all fundamentally emotional reactions.

How would you like to be able to affect people in that same way and get them doing things and responding to you in ways that up to now has been happenstance?

The thing to remember first and foremost is that people are led to decisions based on their emotions. Emotions bring people to decisions, logic cements or potentially breaks that decision. The logical aspect is actually is very minor. Obviously, for each person it's slightly different, but if I were to just grossly generalize, making decisions based on emotion may be as high as 80, 85 percent while logic is only a very small 15, 20 percent to back it up.

A person who makes their living persuading but can't use emotions well will most likely never make much money, at least the cards are stacked strongly against them. And similarly, a person who can make strong logical arguments but is not adept at utilizing emotion also has the cards strongly stacked against them.

So how do we do this? Well, stay tuned for an upcoming post for more information about getting to your prospect's and client's emotions.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland