Hi Persuader,

Okay, so not only is there this economic crisis percolating, but there's an election coming up pretty darn soon. (I wonder if these two things have anything at all to do with each other. )

In the spirit of the season, I'd like to talk about the politician's most favorite past time: spin. No, I'm not talking about spinning classes you take at the gym. Those are incredibly difficult and the seats are painfully hard, if you ask me. I'm talking about the process of spinning a story (a political debate, a campaign speech, what have you) to put it in the best light for your side. The idea behind spinning is that everybody wants to put their slant on an issue.

I'm going to go back to the salad days just for an example here. I'm going back to a State of the Union address from many years ago -- I won't name names, but I'll say that the president at the time was talking about what to do with a surplus in the budget. (Wow, that was a long time ago!)

So in this address, he said that for the first time in history, we had an excess in our budget. His plan for the surplus was to "be responsible with the surplus" and not just dump it back into people's pockets to be spent. He wanted to put it towards Social Security and do the "responsible" thing by investing in American companies and in the American stock market.

Well, what happens after any political event? Well, depending on which network you're watching either one or both sides make comments and attempt to persuade you to think how they think (as opposed to you thinking for yourself). This presupposes that there are only two sides which I absolutely do not agree with.

After hearing the speech, we then get to hear the "opposing" side put their two cents in. When this surplus existed, we had a democrat as a president and the republican talking heads got up and said something to the effect of, 'The president says he wants to be responsible and he says that you can't be responsible. Do you mean to tell me the great citizens of this United States can't be responsible with their money? The president wants to control you. He wants to control how you spend your money and where you spend it.'

The basics of this are the frame of responsibility and what they do then is they try to knock that frame out and say, control freak, government interference.

Then the democrats come back with their own spin. And if you were going to spin it the other way, you would analyze the emotionally charged words the republican spinner used. How do they knock out control freak/government interference and put back 'for the people'?

They come back with their argument. One that may work is, well, you could certainly call that being controlling and trying to take control of the money, but by the same token, the citizens of the United States, while great and sovereign, have demonstrated that they're more willing to spend their money on other things besides long term savings. We've got an obligation as a government to deal with these people as they get older. '

The "two sides" can go on like that until they turn blue in the face. Who wins? Well, whoever is able to implant in your mind the highest frame and hold it there. And that's really what this is all about.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

"Hope is the expectation that something outside of ourselves, something or someone external, is going to come to our rescue and we will live happily ever after." -- Dr. Robert Anthony

Hi Persuader,

Seven hundred billion (plus) dollars. How did they end up selling it? Well, there was fear. There was scarcity. There was impending doom. And it lead to panic and more fear and more doom. They said if it didn't happen, surely we'd be ruined. They called it a bailout and when the public outcry was so strong that the house refused to pass it, they switched it to a rescue plan.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto told journalists who had been using the term (as were we all) "bailout" to describe the $700 billion package. "It's really unfortunate shorthand for a very complicated issue." The White House prefers the word "rescue."

Those in charge believed that they would be in a better situation if this were known as a "rescue" rather than a "bailout." Bailout sounds terrible. Rescue is safe. It gives you a warm feeling -- like coming to while on the operating table.

And then Senator McCain got on the framing bandwagon and said, "Well I think what happened is we didn't convince enough Republicans and Democrats…that this was a rescue package and not a bailout." Convincing and persuasion was in order because face value wasn't good enough.

I watched a bit of the CSPAN, the CNN, the FOX and the MSNBC while this was going down, as much as I could handle, and mainly from the perspective of, who's being more persuasive in this deal. (CSPAN wins because they have no pundits at all.)

Problem is, this is so complicated that you have to be an economist or financial advisor or banking expert to understand it. It's enough to make the common man's eyes gloss over except for the fact that the taxpayer wasn't having it because it was coming out of their pocket.

And now that there's been a "rescue" (not that we the people have been rescued, but that big banks and such have been rescued), it seems like it's not gotten any easier to understand.

The frame stuck, however, that this had to happen. The frame was that if it didn't happen, the world would crumble starting with "Main Street". The frame was that there was no way for the market to correct itself. The frame was that socializing the banks (in my opinion this is a form of socialism), was the only way for us not to head into a tailspin.

The real problem isn't in the framing of this. The real problem isn't the persuasiveness or lack thereof of the parties involved. The problem with this plan is not that it has been improperly spun. The real problem is that it won't fix the crisis.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

Hi Persuader,

Here's a little fear factor just in time for Halloween and Dios de Los Muertos aka Day of the Dead (which is not a scary celebration, but a celebration of deceased loved ones).

A conversation with one of my students got me thinking about the use of 'fear' in sales. Really, what we were discussing had to do more with cold, hard reality than fear, per se.

I'll put this in the context of real estate just as an example. The cold, hard reality is that what was worth $1.5 million a year ago, may now only sell for $800 thousand. And the hard, cold reality is, this may possibly decrease even more in the coming year or two.

My student asked me, "Would you really emphasize the bleak outlook? Won't that scare the crap out of your potential client?

I told him, emphatically, "Yes and yes."

Why must you emphasize the hard, cold reality instead of attempting to focus on the sunny side of life? First off, you have to talk real to them or they're going to look at you like you're some guy from outer space. Selling yourself as the solution to their problem of selling their house isn't going to happen if you can't sell their house (seems obvious, right?). Reframing yourself as the solution to their problem through persuading them that if they need to sell, and sell now, then they're going to have to face up to that hard, cold reality. They're not going to get what they thought they were going to get based on last year's numbers.

If you sugar coat just to get a listing they don't need you because you can't understand the reality that they're faced with today. There isn't a person in the country, and probably the world over, that feels confident in anything and if you try to act otherwise, you're making a mistake.

This is how to sell in tough times. This is how to do it. This is worth its weight in gold. You need to have the attitude that you are a pro and they are so incredibly fortunate to be able to talk to you and that you can help them, but they've also got to face reality.

So get clear with them. Why did they invite you there? Why now?

And yes, I'm going to scare the stuffing out of them. I'm going to balance that with, yes, it's scary, but it can be done. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm simply saying, we've got to be smart here, really smart.

Fear works both ways, and so a word of caution here. When you're afraid, you're unconsciously passing on to your fear prospects. You are the rock. You can't be afraid and moreover, you can't be afraid to tell it like it is. You have to just come out swinging.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

Hi Persuader,

I'm sure I've used this quote before while writing a blog post, but it's an incredible quote and it is worth repeating.

"While I'm sure that you're familiar with the notion that the map is not the territory, I'm wondering if you have fully realized that as human beings, we will forever experience only the map and not the territory. We but alter maps. That is, we change people's subjective experience of the world, not the world itself." -- Leslie Cameron Bandler

Let's think about that for a moment. If we don't experience the territory, but we only experience the map, then what are we?

We are walking map makers, cartographers of our own lives and in a sense, we are map makers for the people we persuade. That's an awesome and powerful place to come from.

The issue is this: when we look at anything and everything, we can only see it through our own filters. All we have is our own filters. We don't see anything directly. We see the world and each specific interaction we have through our biases, our filters, our values and our beliefs. We see them through who we are as a person. The only way that we can do anything is to see through our filters and to that end, everything we experience through sight, through hearing, through touch, through taste, through smell -- absolutely everything -- builds our maps more.

Children build maps at high speed because at that point in development, we are a blank canvas. Everything we are navigating is new. The older we get, the more detailed our maps become and to a certain extent the less we change them which can leave us stuck in a rut.

Now this is good news and bad news. It's bad news if you don't know that you or your prospect or client is in a rut and don't know how to persuade your way out of it. It's good news for anybody who knows this because you can un-stick them if you want to do it.

This is a large part of what got me into this field, the idea that I wanted to be able to smoothly get people from where they are to where I wanted them to go. I didn't want to be afraid anymore that I couldn't do it, or I didn't want them to hear no and not know why I got it or almost worse, hearing yes, and not understanding why I got it.

This isn't a simple thing to learn how to do. There's no way I can sum it up in a blog post or e-mail. It's true, some things worth having don't come easily. But with realization comes opportunity. You are your own map maker and can choose to start making that map more expansive and inclusive of so many things including say, learning how to persuade your way through the current rocky economic terrain we're finding ourselves in at this point in history.

To learn more, drop Kim an e-mail at kim@maxpersuasion.com.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland